Gave up on EasyStart

Well, we gave up on EasyStart almost immediately because it does not have online banking, which for me, I rely on heavily because I don't want to reconcile my bank statements by hand.

Overall, there are things I definitely prefer with Easy Start for these reasons:

- less clutter in the interface, easier navigation

- i liked you could list invoices/receipts like an actual list.  I've never been a fan of how QB shows Invoices as a 'stack' with Next/Prev buttons.  It's just not very intuitive and makes it hard to browse through items.  This actually gave me an interesting idea, what if QB viewed invoices similar to the coverflow feature of iTunes?  I think that would be a really slick addition, that would give the interface a renewed look, and make browsing easier.

- way too many menu items in Pro/Premier.  It reminds me of Microsoft Word, and how its difficult to remember exactly which submenu you would find a certain item.

I would've been completely satisfied with EasyStart if it had online banking downloads, but I guess that's a good reason to keep this feature in the more expensive flavors.

Customizing templates with layout designer

My last post also prompted me to post something specifically about Layout Designer.  It has been great!  It was really easy for my wife to create custom, professional looking invoices that actually looked quite different than the standard QuickBooks ones.

As I mentioned before, I was actually kind of surprised that this is available in the lower-level EasyStart.  It seems like something that should be reserved for Pro or higher.

A few other comments about our experience with the layour designer:

- it was a bit difficult explaining to my wife the difference between a 'label' and a 'field'.  ie, something that is static, versus something that is dynamic (different on every invoice).

- the main table of the invoice, with the columns & headings is a bit cumbersome to use.  Especially since you edit the table area in a completely different way than when you edit a label, or add a new field.

I can see why some customers would be upset about not being able to bring their templates forward from pre-logan, they probably spent a lot of time customizing them to their needs (as we did)

Switching from Premier to EasyStart

I started off my wife by using Premier (Retail) flavor, but found that she is getting confused once in a while, its a bit too much for a new user to absorb.

I switched to the EasyStart flavor, after some initial investigation, and found that it handled all of our needs, and has a simpler interface!

I wanted to make sure it still had the layout designer for customizing templates, which it still does (which actually surprised me a bit).

I will report back in a few weeks to see how her experience with EasyStart is, and whether it has helped or not.