AccountEdge

Overall AccountEdge is a pretty straightforward product with regards to accounting. Its major strengths are budgeting and the input of that data, financial reporting (monthly books) and accounts payable.

There are some bigger issues that I am not a fan of with AccountEdge and in my 26 plus years of doing accounting I can say there are some poorer products but there are a lot of much better ones as well. Accounts receivable and the vendor/customer input needs some serious updating. We recently did an import of our data from the old owners to the new owners and it took the developers some serious time to get that figured our and fixed even after we were told it was not that difficult of a process by support. There is not mass way to remove and customer/vendor profiles. The billing system, if you want to give your customers the ability to be sent their month invoices and make payments, actually resides in another product, Account Edge Connect not in the base Account Edge. With that being said they only talk to each other with a manual "sync" each time you want them to update the other. There is no way to export data to a banking website for things like Bank of America's positive pay. So ACH's are a very manual process. If it was 10 years ago I could see why this wouldn't be a feature but its 2021 folks and this should be able to be done at this point. Especially with how virtual we all have to be nowadays. Support is hit or miss. There are a few really awesome folks and then again not so much. They offer no after hours support so you better only have an issue between 9am-5pm eastern time, otherwise you are stuck.

I'm focused more on the payments processing and warning prospective buyers on the downside of the exclusive arrangement between AccountEdge and Forte

AccountEdge/Forte Payments processing, IMHO leaves the user open to price gouging for credit card processing ,

After three years I'm comfortable with the daily use of AccountEdge. I used my failing Peachtree to calculate payroll for the first year and entered the numbers manually. Now I use the payroll subscription, which is not as flexible as I would like but it works. (I don't need the uploaded rates and could easily enter them manually.) I emailed a note about my frustration with manually calculating different matching and withholding SIMPLE rates for different employees and the answer completely solved the problem--the program now issues perfect paychecks and tax reports. This was one of two customer service experiences that were positive

My CPA finds it incomprehensible. As a corporation we carry profits and losses forward as retained earnings and are not required by law to distribute profits as dividends. AccountEdge does not allow me (or my CPA using his copy) to make the year-end adjustment to Retained Earnings reports so we can't know where we stand. I want to retire and sell or hand off the business but can't produce accurate reports via AccountEdge.
Also I detest the automatic numbering feature for payments (it's great for invoicing) and wish that could be optionally turned off. I pay at least half our bills online and record the confirmation number in the check number space, which is especially handy for reconciling half a dozen monthly federal and state tax payments to my bank--and to verify that I sent the payments! A great many confirmation numbers (IRS, Colorado payroll, unemployment, credit cards, FedEx, Comcast) exceed the maximum 8 digits allowed for check numbers. (I can enter the full numbers in the memo space.) It is obvious to me that the program had its origins in Apple/Mac as it has automatic functions that actually hamper accounting. It doesn't integrate with our estimating software as does QuickBooks so I may end up just using it for payroll (to avoid that Quick Books cost).

It is very easy to set up your company. It is very easy to navigate through the program. It has all the features that the big name overpriced software companies have and more. It works great for our air conditioning company with accounting that can be broken down by jobs. The payroll service is very easy to use and they keep it updated all the time. I think I have only called customer support 2 times and both times they had my questions answered right then. I would recommend this software to anyone needing to breakdown your accounting for custom reports, job tracking, employee handling.

The one pet peeve I have is that most of the payroll reports don't have totals you have to export them to excel and reconfigure them to get your totals or total everything by hand. Some of the reports they way they are laid out make it very hard to reconfigure them in excel. It doesn't let you access history more than two years so you have to look up on your back ups if you need to find something older.