Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/15/2021-is-the-year-quickbooks-can-untangle-your-business-accounting-nightmares.html
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Nooooooooooooo! Quickbooks became the standard because they were in early and trapped a lot of users. Truthfully, the system has been tweaked for maximum profitability for Intuit/Quickbooks. They’ve got a lot of reports…except the ones that really dig into helping your business…those cost extra. Their system has a lot of quirks, and a phenomenal amount of ‘experts’ you can pay to help you out with those. Hope you love keeping stuff in spreadsheets still, because you’ll need them to do the heavy lifting.
The QBO (Quickbooks Online) version is handy because you can log in anywhere, but it’s sincerely crippled compared to the desktop version (which I am remoting into right now :shakes fist:).
I used to like Sage products, but they picked up on the Intuit business model and do the same thing now. I wish I could recommend something better, but I’m not sure if there’s anything BUT pain out there for accounting.
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Yes! We use it at my job (we all remote in) and the quirks are so frustrating. We were going to migrate to a new accounting platform (Acumatica) that was not very user-friendly (a plus of QBs) but it could play nice with Salesforce and Avalara, and do a much better inventory control. In the end, we ditched SF, and now the entire crew is on QBs. Scary.
That’s very sad to hear because our CEO wants to go all in with online soon (as soon as he gets our enormous file down to the required size). Also, I believe desktop version support will be going away?
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Yikes; I hadn’t heard that. Although ‘support’ has been pretty thin anyway. I find more help on Reddit than I do in their help center.
My bosses like the idea of QBO but we integrate QB with our whole ticketing/production/payment system and that’s not doable with QBO yet. It DOES have APIs for certain data to move more cleanly, but mysteriously the info you need always seems to be juuuust out of reach (I used it at a prior employer and maintained the same overall dashboard spreadsheets I do now).
To get the use/info we want we’d need to get Enterprise QB, but just can’t justify the price compared to doing a few exports each month and maintaining some spreadsheets. There are so many ways they could improve on QB to automate various systems, but they don’t, so I feel like I just sit here and twiddle dials and prod arcane processes into motion.
You’re dealing with the massive file size issue as well? Goooood times. We split our database and it still didn’t come down very much. It DID cause weird balance sheet issues that are ongoing and annoying.
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Preach. We even use the Enterprise QBs, but I’m convinced that it’s not for heavy usage either.
I see the QBs commercials, and it makes me believe that they’re pivoting and going with the very small business owners who have fewer needs: simple receivables and payables. If you have accounts with multiple brokers, just forget about it.
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Thanks for that input; I’ll stop pondering on Enterprise then.
I agree; the push for QB/Intuit seems to be getting new companies into the fold (which makes sense because it’s how they hook everyone). Once you’re in it gets harder to leave (and it’s not like there’s anything better).
It makes me want to build a better mousetrap, but I actually did QA for a person building a small tool for nonprofits to quantify/track their funding and it’s still being built. That’s a lot of years and dollars for the hope of future profit.
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Ah! It appears that Intuit is offering a 2021 desktop version. Our CEO is on crack. 
Our software is 2019, so maybe it will be sunsetting? He can be fill of misinformation at times.
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Ah, Saas (software as a Screwing) the ultimate in lock in.
There are free (as in freedom) accounting software out there. Just poke around. but what is really needed is a simplification of tax laws, but of course the middle men of the accounting world wont let that happen, as they would no longer be needed.
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Intuit’s support window is 2 years, so yes. And because it’s Intuit, they generally have ways of locking you out of things you need on the version you paid for until you upgrade again.
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^^ That, and they promise miracles with the next version, which turn out to be really specific scenarios that don’t actually fit most needs.
It’d be a tiny improvement if QB would at least stop ‘disappearing’ a vendor from the vendor list when I update any related transaction (have to re-sort the list to see it again), and would quit deleting company names from the secondary company name field under each vendor. It’s just disconcerting, and makes me wonder what else it’s messing with.
This grump brought to you by working 16 extra hours over the last two weeks to produce year-end reports while QB was fighting me at every possible point. 
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