Started using quickbooks online for one of my companies, and was surprised to find out that it will connect to and sync up with paypal.
Why surprised? Because this has been a huge headache with the quickbooks product for many years. It will connect with nearly every bank that has an online presence (ie, all of them!) and sync up you transactions. But not paypal. I always assumed it was due to some kind of conflict of interest, ie paypal is used for collecting payments from customers, and intuit really would prefer you sign up with their own electronic billing service instead. So despite being the most popular accounting software out there, they’ve historically refused to play well with the most popular payment processor out there. Any poor soul trying to accomplish this would either have to do manual imports, or rely on a third party plugin to gain this functionality.
So once I figured out that the online version of quickbooks now supports paypal, I figured they finally fixed this and support it across all the quickbooks product lines. I fire up my quickbooks 2012 copy and go try to add paypal. Nope. not supported. I haven’t checked the 2013 version (so tired of having to upgrade every single year), but I’m guessing it still doesnt either, since the online version I’m told has supported paypal since march of 2011… plenty of time for the feature to have been included in the 2012 version of the offline product.
Quickbooks has always been a love-hate thing with me (I truly do love to hate it), and I just noticed mention today of a potential competitor called Outright (at outright.com). Considering trying it out and see how it compares. It already has one feature that gives it a huge advantage- the fact that it is NOT quickbooks. Unfortunately, if it is an good, I’m sure it will be acquired shortly by Intuit just like Mint.com was. Argh.