Quickbooks Upgrade Woes For Law Firms

While there are many applications for time tracking and accounting for law firms, some law firms insist on working with Quickbooks. Quickbooks is a great piece of software, I’m just not convinced that it’s the best for law firm time tracking, accounting and billing, PClaw really covers it all pretty well. But for the firms who wish to continue using Quickbooks, there are a few things you need to be aware of. Mainly, upgrading can be quite messy. Intuit makes you upgrade Quickbooks every 3 years otherwise they no longer support the product and your stuck hiring a Quickbooks certified consultant @ $210/hr for any issues you may have. We just had a client upgrade their firm of 11 by themselves. They wanted to save on support labor that we would provide and they thought that their bookkeeper was up for the challenge. Normally I would support this process as we try to save clients money any way we can. I would only support this if the office was smaller than 5. Quickbooks had the bookkeeper remoting them onto each workstation to perform the Quickbooks client install and then whenever there was a problem with the install, the bookkeeper was unsure how to fix the issue simply because she is not IT. The end result was that Quickbooks level 2 support corrupted a portion of Windows on 3 workstations making IT have to come in and format all machines for Quickbooks to install and work properly. In the end it cost the client more to fix the issues that Quickbooks caused then have us do it right the first time.

Word to the wise, have your IT people upgrade Quickbooks for you if your office is larger than 5 people. If you don’t have IT, get some, or alternatively find a Quickbooks certified consultant to get the job done for you. Learn from our client who was penny wise and dollar foolish, and always remember, you get what you pay for with IT.