I have personally been a Quickbooks user, in several capacities different capacities, for the last 8 years. It is an OK product from a functionality perspective. It is relatively easy to use and has become the default standard for accounting software in small businesses. For that reason, we are often required to deal with supporting it for our customers. The problem is, the more we have to use it (as an accountant and as tech support) and especially the more we have to deal with Intuit for support or sales, the more all of us get tired of it. After today, I am past being tired of it, I think I just hate it.

So yes, we do a lot of accounting with Quickbooks. And in the course of doing so and supporting it from a technology perspective, here is a list of several of my major gripes:

1. Intuit support (for lack of a better word) sucks. A company file just corrupted today through no fault of the users. Call Intuit support… “Sorry, this license has not paid for a support contract. Our data services group can fix the file but you must buy a support contract”. Pay Intuit to fix a file that their software broke? Bad design in the first place to use company files but then to pay them to fix their own problem is really crazy.
2. Remote access to Quickbooks is next to impossible. You cannot use the company file over any kind of VPN so if you are outside the office, you are next to hosed. You can take the file with you every time (headache) or use terminal services to sign into an unused computer at the office and use it to run Quickbooks (also a poor solutions). It is 2008, yet Intuit still doesn’t realize the workforce is mobile.
3. No way to write custom reports. Once data is in Quickbooks, it’s kind of stuck there. There are no ways to pull a custom set of data out for use somewhere else if Intuit hasn’t built that functionality into the software (another drawback of using a file to store data rather than a database). The export functionality is no good.
4. Operating system support is terrible. We continue to fight all kinds of crashing and compatibility problems with Quickbooks on Vista. There are some problems with this in the latest (2008) versions even but if you have a slightly older copy and got a Vista computer you are really out of luck. Hello upgrade purchase for an upgrade you don’t care about. Worse though is if you have a Mac. Just read this article and I need say no more about how great an experience using Quickbooks on a Mac is. Last stop, Linux. This is an easy one; there is no Linux version (surprise).
5. The licensing is a headache. Advertised as the great $99 accounting solution for small business, oh, unless you need to set prices by customer type (upgrade to premier required) and want two people to be able to use Quickbooks (multi-user license required)… hello $999 worth of accounting software.
   
6. The sales pitches are ANNOYING. After support was no help at all today in fixing my corrupted file, they actually had the nerve to ask about selling me payroll and credit card processing services. They cannot be serious. As if the 12,000 popups I have said no to while using the software weren’t hint enough, I guess they had to ask once more while I was really happy with them.
   

The long and short of it is this… time to start looking into new accounting solutions. We can’t afford to keep putting our customers through this headache and definitely can’t afford to continue providing them the support to resolve the headache. I hope someone at Intuit is listening. Now, back to restoring a two-week old version of our corrupted file and reentering all of the interim transactions. Nothing better to do.

Thanks and have a great day!

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