QuickBooks POS 2016 VS 2015

All I can say is, "it's about time". For several years now, I have wondered about QuickBooks’ commitment to the POS market. V10 was a disaster and 2016 (V11) was an attempt to fix the interface problems with V10, as well as make a more stable product. Intuit was successful in cleaning up the interface and performance/stability got better. Progress at last. Then the skies opened and the people at Intuit decided to get serious about Point of Sale again. They realized that POS is the best product in Intuit’s line up to have a natural attach to Intuit Merchant Services, which is a huge source of recurring revenue for them.

I was privileged to be part of a group known as the POS Posse. We were a group of Resellers who were painfully aware of the problems with POS and were very vocal in what need to be fixed. Intuit listened to us and we now have a product that I am excited to represent again. In addition Intuit partnered with Revel and have a cloud based product. See my Will’s reveal of Revel for more details. Intuit is back in the POS market in a BIG way.

The first thing we asked for was a product that worked. Sounds simple, right? Not so much. POS starting with V10 is actually 2 programs. QBPOS and QBPOS Shell. The shell program is all of the new screens like the sale receipt, customer list, etc. A large part of the problem was that getting the two programs to play nice led to some significant performance issues. Intuit has fixed those problems. The new program loads up to 10x faster and there is almost no lag switching between screens. Additionally, everything runs faster even if you have a large POS database.

Secondly, in V9 and earlier, you could have multiple windows open. In V10 and V11, because of the 2 programs, multiple window functionality was not possible. That meant that if you had a report open, you had to close the report to take a sale. Yuck… Well Windows are back in V12. The windows menu has returned and you also have a window icon on the home screen. This is a HUGE fix in the software.

Lastly, the program now looks elegant. V11 was a huge improvement over V10 in look and feel, but V12 is much prettier. They changed the color palette to make it look better and to help people that are color blind. They added visual cues like dark black lines to separate sections of screens.