Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

EDIT (12/9/2012): Intuit's R4 update of QB Pro 2013 has some improvements over the original 2013 release (see below). At least one is quite important since it allows one to readily tell which company file is open. Even so, I left this as four stars, but call it four and a half! There are other improvements listed but I haven't looked at them yet. I wish I could give two star ratings: One for new users and one for up-daters. The four-star rating I gave is for new users. New users should go ahead and read all the reviews for earlier versions. QuickBooks is popular for a reason. It does the job and does it well. It is not perfect and has room for improvement but there are not a lot of other choices in this price range. For up-daters, I give it three stars. There is no compelling reason to go from the 2012 version to the 2013 version. Of course if you are on an earlier version that is reaching the end of its support life then you really should update and there is no compelling reason *not* to go to this version. Well, I suppose you can still get the 2012 version (as of this writing) and get it cheaper but that would just mean your next forced update would come a year earlier, pretty much wiping out whatever you might save. Comments on some of the complaints I read in reviews here: 1. Wasted screen space. The worst offender is that big, fat, icon bar on the left, taking up about 20% of the available space. At first this was enough to make me want to chuck the whole thing, but you can use the View menu to move the icon bar back to the top where it belongs, or even remove it completely since there is nothing on the icon bar that can't be reached from the menu bar. 2. Larger fonts. This is another space waster, requiring additional scrolling through lists and even left-right scrolling (or adjusting column widths, where there is room). There is not too much you can do about this one but it is not all that big a problem on my 1600x900 screen. I can see where this could be more of an annoyance for lower resolutions. EDIT (12/9/2012): Intuit's latest release (R4) claims to have improved the fonts. I didn't notice a difference so it may be quite subtle, or maybe it is isolated to areas I haven't explored yet. 3. No more color schemes. Yup, you need to stick with the one they give you. No choices. As mentioned elsewhere this is a disadvantage if you want to use color schemes to distinguish between companies. I personally have only one company to deal with and find the color scheme they provide to be just fine. Even though I have only one company I sometimes like to experiment with things and in the past used a red-leaning color scheme as a warning that I was in my experimental "company" so this is somewhat an annoyance to me also. EDIT (12/9/2012): Intuit's latest release (R4) has a little colored "flag" on the top window border that can be set to any one of a good number of color choices, a different one for each company. This solves what I think was the most serious problem with QB Pro 2013. Also, I like the looks of it. Apparently they listened to the chorus of complaints about this! They also allow for a lighter background on the icon bar that makes the different icons easier to distinguish. I actually prefer the more soothing-to-the-eye original (for 2013) darker color -- you get used to the different icons' locations and don't need to look as carefully after a while so the darker color is not a problem and it is more soothing. Bottom line is a repeat of what I said above: Update if you need to and there should be no big problems, but I see nothing in the new version that is compelling. There are slight disadvantages but they are not that important, at least to me. If you are new to QuickBooks, might as well go for this version as getting the latest will put off forced upgrades for an extra year.