Mac users who want to (or have to) use have plenty of choices—we can run the Mac, Windows, or Web app version. One of those options probably pops out as an obvious choice, but as I recently discovered, the least-obvious solution is sometimes the best one. My wife and I are both professional writers. A few months ago, on the advice of our accountant, we reorganized our small business as a corporation. We agreed to endure a considerable amount of extra paperwork in exchange for significant financial and legal benefits. Accountants love QuickBooks (even if authors don’t) Our accountant all but insisted that we use QuickBooks so that she could easily view and update our financial records. However, I don’t like that the Mac versions of both QuickBooks and Quicken have for years lagged behind the Windows versions, and I find that expensive annual updates rarely add crucial features.

Recently, I also learned about the. Despite my misgivings, I agreed to use QuickBooks to keep my accountant happy. Free app for mac. Initially, I assumed I’d buy the ( ), but when I read Macworld’s review, I discovered that the app’s data files aren’t cross-platform compatible.

If you have more than one user license, you may set up QuickBooks in multi-user mode to ensure all users can access the file at the same time. Open the Multiuser folder. Drag the QuickBooks Server icon to the Applications folder. If prompted, select Authenticate to modify the Applications folder and enter the Admin username and password. QuickBooks for Mac's online version can be accessed on from anywhere and any device. Win 10 drivers for goflex. The online version provides more features than the desktop version, such as automatic scheduling and invoice sending, advanced security and access for up to five users. QuickBooks for Mac also offers a mobile app for iOS.

So if I wanted to share data with my Windows-using accountant, I’d have to back up my data in QuickBooks for Windows format and send her that file, which she could then “restore.” Once she finished with the file, she would send it back to me and I could reimport it. But in the meantime I wouldn’t be able to make any changes to my company’s data, because unlike QuickBooks for Windows, QuickBooks for Mac has no way to merge an accountant’s changes into an existing file. Well, I thought, I’ll just buy the. After all, I have Windows 7 running on my Mac thanks to ( ).

But before I clicked the Buy button, I saw the fine print about licensing, which changed my mind. The Mac and Windows versions of QuickBooks 2013 cost the same—$250—for a single-user license.

But we would have two users—my wife and I would both need to work in QuickBooks, sometimes concurrently, on different computers. Whether or not it would have been technologically feasible for us to share a license, I prefer to stick to the letter of the law. So we would have had to pay $500, not counting the cost of future upgrades.

Outwitting file-format foibles online Then I noticed another option on the QuickBooks website:, which is essentially most of QuickBooks rolled into a Web app. We wouldn’t have to mess with Windows software, or with exporting and importing files, and our accountant could access our data over the Web, too. QuickBooks Online can perform nearly all the functions of the desktop version of QuickBooks, including producing a wide range of reports.