Thanks Dale

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Pretty much the sort of information I was after.


"While QuickBooks has some annoyances, it has a large numbers of reports built-in and it is fairly easy to build useful custom reports which can be printed or transferred to excel (with some loss). I have always found gnucash reporting capabilities to be deficient. The settings to me are non-intuitive. I did not try to delve into scheme and create my own reports."

Well if it turns out that I can't figure out how to customize my reports, that will be a problem*. From our perspective, the built in reports of QuickBooks Non-Profit might have been customizable in some senses. Yes of course, I could have retitled the "Profit and Loss" report and MAYBE could have convinced it to do a "balance sheet" report comparing (and balancing to) the previous period as is common with non-profit balance sheets. BUT -- this was supposed to BE the "non-profit" version. If we're paying for something, ought to get it, yes?

"This weakness combined with a number of issues connected to the organization, the parent organization, and the fact that in the future I was not going to be the only one using the software, made QuickBooks Pro the right choice."

And why I considered the time ripe to do the evaluation now. I'm running 2.2.0 under Windows XP. The issue of reports that might have  to be created isn't something that would ordinarily be the responsibility of the person occupying the Treasurer's office. In other words, I might have to write the schemes for some custom reports, but once written, we'd have them available. And presumably whoever was Treasurer in the future and needed a custom report could have an analyst type create them. The issue would be could an ordinary end user USE the reports once that report type had been added, not whether he or she could create the scheme (the job of somebody like myself). 

Michael

* If GnuCash has a facility for creating custom reports but a systems analyst can't figure out how to use it that would represent a SERIOUS problem in either the facility itself or its documentation. Not a serious problem if the average "end user" can't do it. That's one of the analyst's jobs, being able to elicit from the "business client" what the business needs are and then making the system provide that. 

-- 
There is no possibility of social justice on a dead planet except the equality of the grave.