And why I spent $300 total to do so. I’ve had the most difficult time. Turns out Intuit does not support QuickBooks Pro for the PC running in a virtual Windows environment on your Mac. Who knew? Much online research did not point this out to me.

I was using an early 2009 iMac 24″, the latest VMfusion 3, Windows 7 Pro and QuickBooks Pro 2010. All new, all up to date, all SLOW. And a frequent problem was that often QuickBooks refused to email or print invoices. It all has something to do with QuickBooks PDF Converter 2.0. Windows seems to insist that this is the default printer when operating in QuickBooks. Deleting it or switching default printers does not help. There are a few fixes that don’t necessarily work. Sometimes downloading and using “Cute PDF Converter” works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

I had the same problem using QuickBooks Pro 2009 in Windows XP. Which is why I upgraded to 2010 and Windows 7. That was an expensive lesson.

Out of frustration I tried and have since purchased QuickBooks 2010 for Mac. And what do you know. It works. Every time. It’s too bad I can’t return my copy of QuickBooks Pro to Staples as I’ve already opened and used it. And Intuit won’t take it back since I bought it from Staples. They did offer a 20% discount for the Mac version but, again, Staples was cheaper.

So the lesson of this story is if you run a Mac, use QuickBooks for Mac. It’s a much nicer and more reliable experience. Switching over my merchant account was also easy. Intuit was very helpful with this. Whether it works or not remains to be seen. I’m waiting for my next charge customer. Need a website, logo or business card design? Have any questions on my QuickBooks experience? Just call 310-791-5803.