Upgrade Experience - Quickbooks

Upgrade Experience - Quickbooks

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Not a question, just an experience which might help other AW readers. Recently there was a one-day sale offering one license of QuickBooks Pro 2012 for £99.00 inc VAT. You may have seen an 'alert' about this on this website. Having been a 2008 user for a few years I decided this was an appropriate time to upgrade. Assuming it works OK for say 4 years the ex VAT price should be something of a bargain (no £19/ month to pay for the equivalent cloud solutions).

Having backed everything up the upgrade involved, as usual, inserting the CD and running Setup. I was a little surprised that the update un-installed the original QB 2008 product but since I had everything secured I continued. The upgrade went through various phases of data conversion and integrity checking followed by the actual software installation and took about 45 minutes in total on my admitedly high-spec PC. This was an upgrade of a file that had 9 years of transactions but was only 45Mb, so 'small' in comparison to many user's files. Clearly the time taken in each case will be related to the actual number of transactions and size of the file being converted. The upgrade routine offers a guide as to the amount of time that will be taken.

No data integrity issues were identified and QB 2012 loaded looking pretty much the same as 2008 albiet with a few new features, such as online VAT filing, which i am still exploring. After the upgrade completed the automatic update feature spotted that the software on the CD was two patch verions out of date and downloaded a 400mb (!) patch which brought the QB software bang up to date.

So, to summarise, a straightforward upgrade.

Captain

Replies (7)

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By carnmores
30th Jun 2012 19:36

well glad you are happy!

i think there is an option to load 2012 in a separate directory to 2008 that you may have missed?

support for 2008 has been discontinued as of this week

2012 is multi currency while 2008 was obviously not

take care with the VAT routines especially if you are moving fom cash to accrual accounting  or vice versa

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By Captainblack
30th Jun 2012 19:52

Further comment
I don't want/need multi-currency though it's nice to know it's available.
My VAT is 'accrual basis' and there is little prospect of us switching to / needing cash basis so that's OK. Maybe I missed the option to install separately, rather than 'upgrade', but it worked out ok and i had everything backed-up in any case.

Captain

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By Ken Howard
01st Jul 2012 09:01

Have you run a VAT return report yet?

The killer with previous upgrades has been the VAT reporting.  Do a VAT report for the current period and see if it looks right and whether it balances against the VAT nominals.  Also watch the net inputs and net outputs.  IF it all looks OK, then you've probably cracked it and have a successful upgrade.  The 2008 was the version that caused all the problems in the past as it was effectively a re-write rather than an upgrade - if 2012 uses the same basics then it's probably OK for an upgrade from 2008 or later.

The main problem in the past was older versions of QB - the 2008 version came along and the data conversion was fundamentally flawed meaning the VAT reports were completely wrong in a lot of cases (among other operational problems).  It really knocked down QB's popularity at the time.  We'd been recommending QB since 2000, with dozens of happy clients, until they upgraded (many were led by QB to believe it was compulsory!).  Many of our clients suffered massive problems and the QB support was as useful as a chocolate fireguard - making out there wasn't a problem, when the internet was full of other users reporting massive problems.  As a result, we stopped recommending it, and many of our clients now use alternatives,  

From your experiences, perhaps they've sorted themselves out now and can start to rebuild their brand and reputation again.  I hope so because it was good software.  I may even start to recommend it again!

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By Captainblack
01st Jul 2012 09:09

VAT Report

Yes, knowing there were VAT related issues in the past, the VAT report was the first thing I checked and it's completely correct. I never experienced any VAT related issues when upgrading from 2006 to 2008 but I know a lot of people did. My view is that anyone starting with QB from 2010 or 2012 versions will be absolutely fine - it was the unfortunate "upgraders" that suffered.

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply.

Captain

 

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Replying to fawltybasil2575:
By Captainblack
01st Jul 2012 12:01

Further Update
Further update.
Having now processed many transactions in QB 2012 i spotted a small number of minor but irritating screen glitches.
I have found that it is necessary to make sure that the Microsoft .NET framework software (upon which QB is built) is up-to-date. This is easy to do, the standard Windows Update utility downloaded the necessary 'patches' and the glitches are gone.

Note that the Automatic Update feature in Quickbooks (which keeps your QB software updated) does not update .NET even though the QB installation process loads it originally from the CD. So, if you install QB I suggest you immediately use Automatic Update to bring QB bang up to date and then immediately use Windows Update to do the same for .NET.

Captain

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By Healthpay
05th Jul 2012 11:20

I am grateful to Quickbooks......

..... for their entirely crap upgrade routines in the past. I moved away from QB because of these (I was on 2005 and facing up to the fatally flawed 2008) and have never looked back. I moved to Clearbooks, which was good, and now to Quickfile, which is very good indeed, has wonderful support and is free. What more could I ask! Oh yes, and it works on Linux and Android without fuss, and integrates with Paypal and GoCardless.

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By tltodman
05th Jul 2012 13:50

S-L-O-W

Have a client who subscribes via the Barclays Business Manager service. Did their upgrade for them this week from 2010 to 2012. As mentioned above it took about an hour to uninstall old/install new. What was the killer was then upgrading the company data file. When it started it said was going to take 16 HOURS (it's a 32mb file). Actually took about an hour - but I wasn't expecting that after the hour I'd already spent installing the program.

Ran out of time then to check it has all worked OK. First job of the day when I'm there next week.

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