QuickBooks Point of Sale Multi-Store v12 Desktop Upgrade

I was not happy about going from QB POS V9 to V11. But after looking for a good alternative, I became more concerned that Intuit might stop making POS software altogether. V10 and V11 were terrible and I could not see how Intuit could continue to produce a product customers hated. There are a lot of new POS systems that are cloud based available now. But they don’t allow me to review and react to inventory and sales data within one or two screens. If you look at other POS systems, you either can’t do things you can do in QB POS or you have to use multiple reports and screens to do the same thing.Last year I asked around and learned that there were a group of advocates pushing for improvements and Intuit was putting greater resources to improve QB POS. So here we have V12 promising improved speed and stability along with the return of windows functionality for multitasking.I upgraded ten computers across four stores last week. Here is some quick feedback based on a very short period of use:1. Installation: Overall install was smooth. After you download the software from Intuit, load it onto a USB flash drive instead of downloading to each computer. You can then quickly drag the update onto each desktop where you want to load QB POS V12 on. The install was pretty fast. However, I killed an hour with Intuit tech support figuring out why store exchanges were not working. For multi-store you initially have unique POS license number for each computer. After registering, you will have a unique POS license for each store that every computer at that store will use. At the HQ store, you need to reference each remote store license correctly. At every remote store, you need to reference the HQ license. Ideally this was done automatically.2. Intuit tech support: I have called Intuit tech support a few times in the past. If you are not good at fixing hardware and software issues and your computers are fairly new and well maintained, then I highly recommend finding a local QB POS expert. Intuit tech support has bailed me out quickly on some issues in the past. At the same time they probably work with many business owners on a budget with slow and dated computers. One time they wanted me do a system reload of Windows 7 Pro on a Friday morning for a simple issue. If you are using a five year old pc with an Pentium processor, don’t blame Intuit tech support if your POS is not running well.3. Company file compression: I first loaded QB POS on a backup computer that still had my original 4.2GB company file. Last year I had to use “Clean Up Company Data” function because QB POS V11 could no longer backup files larger than 4GB. What’s interesting is V12 compressed my 4.2GB file to just over 2GB on my backup computer. However V12, it didn’t reduce the size of my company on our actual HQ computer and it still takes a few minutes to compress the file when I shut it down.4. Overall look, feel and functionality: Overall V12 looks a lot like V11. Ringing up a sale is almost identical. Search function is still not as good as V9 as it may not find something the first time but if you type slower the second time, it will find it. Fortunately I did not get lots of calls, emails and texts from confused employees. To me this was a very good sign.5. Stability and speed: Mixed feedback on this. No more QB Shell errors. Our busiest stores, which are remote stores, reported the fewest issues and QB POS seemed to run faster without hangups. Our HQ computers had more issues which may be due to how we use remote desktop on those computers from various computers with different screen resolutions. I’ve had to restart the HQ POS server a few times (just the software, not the pc) as it seems to get hung up on some screens after I access it remotely from my other computers and iphone.6. Windows function: Windows functionality has returned but it’s still not as smooth as V9 and there are certainly some bugs. Transfers and PO’s are automatically saved if you switch windows. Reports stay open when you switch windows. I had a couple odd hang ups like multiple open receipt windows which I have not been able to reproduce. On the HQ server, the item and customer entry fields disappear on the make a sale screen and I’ll have to restart POS. Hoping updates fix these issues soon. I’m so used to not having windows features I find myself just closing windows between functions. These bugs may be related to remote desktop access I mentioned above.7. Overall: I give it three stars for effort. I’m hoping updates push it to four stars. I can live with QB POS V12 for the next 2-3 years. Intuit’s partnership with Revel resulted in QB POS online. Check out the reviews on Quickbooks accounting online, not so promising at this time. I’ll switch to QB POS online once it can do the same things QB POS V12 desktop.8. But wait there’s more . . . new Quickbooks Payments new merchant service plans: If you don’t upgrade to V12, at least switch to the new Quickbooks Payments merchant service plan. I’ve been using the only compatible credit card service QB POS allows. Back in the day it was Wells Fargo, then it was IMS, now it’s Quickbooks Payments. Interesting thing is when I called a few weeks ago to get a rate reduction on my credit card fees they said I was I at the lowest available rate for my plan. I reviewed what I have been paying for credit card processing fees and found out my rate on average has been a 3.5% combined for Visa, MC, Discover, Amex and debit cards. My old IMS merchant service plan looked like I had somewhat competitive discount fees, but my per swipe rate was $0.27 and all these odd additional fees on the statement added up. Go to the Quickbook Payments page. There is a new “Reduced Rates” plan for $19.95/mo where your swipe rate is 1.75% and keyed in rate is 3.15% and a per swipe fee is 0.25. There is also a $0.50 bank transfer fee. I compared the bank fees with my old rates to my to the new plan and the new rate dropped from 3.5% to 2.7% combined for Visa, MC, Discover, Amex and debit cards including swipe fees. That is a huge savings for credit card transactions. For me, this alone pays for my V12 update within a few months. Another improvement is each type of deposit is combined per store. There used to be a separate deposit for credit cards and debit cards per store. Call the number from the Quickbooks Payments website. It seems like the new accounts staff has more incentive to set you up on a new plan than to lower the rates on your existing plan.

An absolute nightmare. Randomly hard freezes a couple times a day requiring a hard reboot with no solution anywhere, although it seems to happen more often when adding a note to a sale. (All hardware is top notch, i5-6600 on Z170 chipset with 16GB ram and Samsung 850 Pro SSD with Windows 10-64 (crashed in all compatibility modes too) No system crashes of any kind except when POS is loaded. Both meanings of POS apply to this version.Intuit obviously added an overlay to their existing POS software to update the GUI and reduced overall functionality in areas. I don't know what version they started this with. There are many annoying aspects about the new flow like, in order to see a customer's full sales history without being confined to a tiny scroll window, you have to run a report of the customer list, which BTW breaks you out of the overlay and into the old GUI or technically you an search all sales history and filter by name, but in a transaction, either method takes too damn long when it used to quick to access. It would be nice if you could bypass the new overlay altogether if that is where the crash bug is occurring.I am glad I only have about a 20 second boot to desktop time to get restarted.

useful, thank you

I received this item without a product key and the program is useless without it. Really upset I purchased this now.

My company just installed Qb v12 a few weeks ago. I’m incredibly disappointed. The reporting function may appear to have a wide variety of options, but seems horribly weak to me. For a given timeframe it is fairly easy to see how many of each of your items have sold. It is also fairly easy to see the $ amount your customers have purchased. But you can not get a report that can combine these things, so you can not get a report that lists your customers and then what and how many they purchased. Another reporting problem is when exporting the report from Excel. Many of our item numbers have the format xx-xxxx. Now completely randomly, it will export some of these to Excel in date format. Example, 06-2248 will show up in my Excel spreadsheet as Jun-48, and when you try to change the cell format to general or text it won’t revert to 06-2248, but some completely different number with out any hyphens.Since, I am in the first 30-days, I get “free” support from their 800 #. This has not helped me on either of these two issues. The wait time to get to an agent is not horrible, it has been less than 5-minutes, but once you get them it really slows down. The English is so so, but they constantly put you on hold for extended periods of time. My call today was over an hour with the actual communication time probably about 10-minutes. You ask a question get put on hold for 10-minutes, get answer that doesn’t really help, ask another question get put on hold again and repeat for as long as you can take it.We formerly used Retail Star which has a whole other list of what is wrong with it, but you could pretty much get the data out of the system any which way you wanted to slice it. I guess I just thought when my boss told me we were switching to a QuickBooks product, I just assumed it would be a vast improvement. What I have is trading one set of problems, to a whole new set of problems. I have to believe there is a much better POS system than QB.