QuickBooks Pro Small Business Accounting Software with Enhanced Payroll 2015 (Old Version)

I use this product as a small business owner that also does bookkeeping for a half dozen small businesses on the side. I end up purchasing this every year just for the Enhanced Payroll subscription...going on 8 years now. Intuit is the 800 lb gorilla in the industry. There are lots of other options and wannabe's but few have the ubiquity, quality, and versatility--all for a reasonable price. Is it perfect? No. Is it garbage? Absolutely not. Most of the negative reviews seem to be people frustrated that a better or easier or cheaper alternative isn't readily available. Of course I wish I could still find it for less than $100 like only a few years ago, but that ship has sailed. For what it offers, it's a decent product.On the rare occasion I need to interact with customer service, it is frustrating. I have had 2-3 positive interaction over the past few years but most suffer from long wait times, transferring to other departments to resolve multiple issues, etc. If you can avoid needing customer service, the product is a decent value compared to alternatives.Pros: Reliably interfaces with outside applications and parties. Reporting customization and simplicity has improved. For my small business (less than 10 employees), the monthly fees for direct deposit payroll are reasonable. Keep in mind that for larger companies (50+ employees), the direct deposit fees quickly get expensive.Cons: My biggest irritation with QuickBooks is the limited number of institutions that allow for free electronic data download. Most credit unions allow for importing into QuickBooks without an additional fee. Most banks charge $20-40 PER MONTH if you want to download transactions electronically. VERY FRUSTRATING. I don't know if Intuit assesses a fee on the banks who are then marking it up for their customers, but it is ridiculous. Oddly enough, Quicken downloads (an Intuit consumer product) are almost always free. I'll just keep dreaming that this will get fixed. Until then, I'll keep steering my business clients to use credit unions or manually enter data so they can save a little cash.I have to cancel my auto-renewal every year to avoid Intuit's exorbitant renewal fee--it is always cheaper to purchase a new copy.

I read all the negative reviews lately on this product and hesitated buying after using quickbooks for the last 18 years. Went ahead and purchased this morning, Downloaded and installed without any problems. Called Intuit to activate the payroll, spent about 15 minutes on the phone with a very helpful lady. Activated the payroll with no issues, did have to update my credit card due to different charge date. Already knew about the $2.00 per month per employee charge as had to do that with 2014 version. It still comes out cheaper than buying the old enhanced payroll for more than 3 employees when you only have 4 or 5 employees.

I was using QuickBooks Pro 2014 with Enhanced Payroll. After one year, the renewal fee for Payroll was a whopping $434 for (1) employee. After speaking to Intuit, they offered to match the $289.99 Amazon price for QuickBooks 2015 + Enhanced Payroll BUT only for the payroll portion itself. In essence, I would continue to use QB Pro 2014 but get Enhanced Payroll for another year for $289.99. In order to do that, they would charge me the full $434 then refund the $144 difference.Guess what? My credit statement showed a $434 charge but no refund. I angrily called Intuit and demanded that they cancel my Payroll subscription and refund my $434. Instead, they said they would refund me $434 minus one week of pro-rated Payroll service of $7.22. Not a lot of money but I was NOT going to let them get away with that. After arguing with (2) employees and (2) supervisors, they finally refunded me the full $434.Unfortunately, my bookkeeper has to use QuickBooks so Ihad to buy this $289.99 combo package through Amazon. I installed it BUT the Enhanced Payroll would not activate when I followed the instructions. Had to call Intuit Support to walk me through the process and but she got the same error as well, twice. The rep even had me change my Internet Explorer (?) settings but still no success. Eventually, she had to manually activate the Payroll subscription on her end. She told me later that the reason for the activation error was that I had a slow internet connection. Hmm, I guess a 60 Mbps download / 10 Mbps upload connection is too slow for Intuit!Moral of the story: it may be cheaper to purchase this Combo Pack through Amazon BUT be prepared for a back-end hassle to cancel your current payroll subscription and get the new payroll activated.One last note: next year, I will opt to purchase the CD version rather than the download version. The CD version has separate license numbers for QuickBooks and Payroll, whereas the Download version only has a QuickBooks license number that's tied to Payroll.