Day: January 10, 2008

I have been using Quickbooks for more than 10 years to track our small business accounting. I’ve never minded upgrading. I’ve been completely happy with the company and the program. But sometime in the past year one of the automatic updates removed my ability to print W-2 forms without subscribing to their payroll service. Last year I could print them. This year I can’t. The payroll service costs over $200 per year. This is reasonable for a company with many employees. It is ridiculously high for our little business with only one employee. Now I am suddenly aware that those automatic updates can break my accounting systems. I can’t figure out how to turn them off. And there is no way to back track and undo the update that removed this vital capability.

So I guess tomorrow will begin with an unpleasant phone call to Quickbooks to complain.

Edit 1/20/08: In the end I just subscribed to the payroll service. I could have messed with doing W-2 forms by hand, but it would have cost me hours. I saved 3 hours on the W-2 forms alone. I’ll also save an hour or two each quarter working with the quarterly reports. I’ll also save 30 minutes each month on paychecks. Add it all up thats 15 hours per year I’ll save. Since my time is worth at least $15 per hour, the payroll service is worth the expense. I’ve also realized the reasons why they require subscriptions. If they included the forms in the software, then people would be using those exact forms for the next 10 years even though tax forms change from year to year.