Best add-ons for QuickBooks

Tom,

There are several cloud based solutions that offer a meaninful upgrade in functionality without a huge capital expenditure.

You can find a great converastion around this topic here:
https://www.proformative.com/questions/cloud-computing-saas-software/answer/which-accounting-software-most-useful-easiest-smbs

This is a well regarded planning tool that I believe can work with Quickbooks.

In addition to Fishbowl there is also Misys. QB assumes a flat BOM and both Fishbowl and Misys can handle multiple layers. There is actually an marketplace where you can search for Apps

http://marketplace.intuit.com/find-software.aspx

Since QuickBooks will not export a full Trial Balance by CLASS code, or a Net Change Trial Balance, nor one with the G/L account number in it's own field - I had to write my own utility to do this. I put it on a shopping cart and am selling it for $100 It is also available on Intuit's marketplace. I hope to release a new version in the next week or so that will produce a 12 month net change T/B in 12 monthly columns.

I have worked as a financial consultant and used Quickbooks and other small packages. My general advice is to stay away from addons and invest the effort in becoming more proficient in Excel. I have done business planning by exporting data into Excel and building the planning model, fully customized, from there. Addons promise a lot, but usually are just as time consuming as other methods. The advantage is with an Excel model, you can usually overcome most shortcomings and end up with a better result for your business. If you should have access to a computer programmer, you can even poke more information you need from the database instead of using the export facilities in the package.

One not listed yet that I find very useful is ActiveBooks, which is useful for automatically emailing out reports from quickbooks. So if someone wants to see a balance sheet every Monday morning, for example, ActiveBooks will do this.