I'm a QuickBooks ProAdvisor and have been one for over 20 years and the last few years has convinced me that Intuit is determined to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by:
1) Forcing all their customers to migrate to the online version of their program. Many of the clients I've spoken to were happy with and preferred the Desktop version. The Desktop version is faster and can do more than the online version.
2) Throwing major updates at the online version that hides or moves functionality. I work with multiple clients and based on the client their version of QuickBooks can be very different from another's. Even the same client that has multiple businesses and has to use multiple subscriptions could have a different look. I don't know what drives this at Intuit but it's confusing for me and I'm supposed to be the expert.
3) Relentlessly raise prices. Intuit has been annually raising their prices in what appears to be an attempt to eventually price everyone out of their product. Some clients have to pay 200.00 a month for the advanced version for one feature they need to have for their business! The attitude from Intuit feels like "So where else are you going to go?"
For most of my adult life I've worked as an accountant that works mainly with QuickBooks but I'm worried that I'm going to have to try to find a new way of supporting myself because Intuit appears to be demonstrating by their recent decisions that they don't need to show loyalty to customers or even keep customers. If they can have a few stay on to pay ridiculous subscription fees that's all they need.
It's crazy how slow it is to get anything done with Quickbooks Online. The site is slow to respond, it has very limited keyboard shortcuts, if you open it in multiple tabs to cross reference information, it's constantly logging you out of the other tab, and they discontinued the desktop electron wrapper that let you have more than one tab open.
Historically, a huge strength of Intuit was the huge population of bookkeepers and accountants who would recommend QuickBooks to clients, but I don't see how anyone would recommend it at this point.
Similarly, Intuit Mint has gotten worse and slower over time as well. I used to use it to track all my spending (including manual entry for cash transactions and much manual categorization of all transactions), but I gave up a few years back because it was all taking so much time and was so slow. Now I just use it to see all my account balances in one place, but otherwise don't interact with transactions much at all.
The advertisements that are constantly trying to push you towards their payment processing and payroll services are also really terrible. There's no way to permanently turn them off.
> Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new pencil that had to be gripped differently for no reason, they'd throw it in the trash.
>
> But in software, we tolerate buggy tools that change all the time for no discernible reason. We tolerate software that simultaneously targets professionals and casual users, serving both segments poorly. We tolerate software that can't be customized or adapted for specific workflows. It's tough to put into words, but if you watch a musician or a painter interact with their tools, there's a very clear difference that emerges, and over time you start to realize how much better all of their stuff is.
>
> In most professional artistic settings, workflow changes only happen because they have a clear benefit -- drawing from your shoulder instead of your wrist, changing your embouchure if you play an instrument. And even in those fields, it's generally accepted that over time people will end up with very specialized setups that are very consistent and refined and that remain constant for years and years.
>
> Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my professional tools should change because change is inherently good. Only in commercial software would an elegant, consistent interface like Markdown that allowed me to build up decades of muscle memory until my computer was an extension of my fingers and I didn't need to think about the way I typed -- only in software would that be considered a bad thing.
I’m a business owner and use Quickbooks online and a couple years ago they just flat out changed how they calculated taxes. When I reported the bug they just kept repeating how I could completely change my process to make it work, like they had released some new feature. But they really just broke shit, and refused to ever acknowledge it. There’s no way I was the only person reporting this. They obviously don’t care
I once offered to fix the tab order on an input form, so the cursor started in the right box. The manager of that team got very excited and asked me not to change anything, the team had got used to the keystrokes!
> just using excel because it won’t change on them.
Are your accounting people quite young? Excel moves and changes stuff, though not on quite such an aggressive timeline. Modern Office is not like 1990s Office where you buy it and then it doesn't change unless you decide to change it.
This is fine, the universe's one constant is change, if we fight it we'll lose, but it's worth calling out that there will be change, just some of these outfits are taking the piss.
Most users and companies I've encountered want to remain on the desktop version. Its faster, gives them more functionality, its under their control and if they want they can pay or not pay maintenance fee. But the software firms are obsessed with the cloud and so are the heads of the Finance teams, they think it makes them look technically knowledgeable to move to the cloud so this pincer movement is forcing the everyday users onto something they dont want or need. Any cost savings disappear in rapidly rising yearly subs, but by then the people that forced the move are gone and everyone's lumbered with an expensive, clunky restrictive finance system.
last few years has convinced me that Intuit is determined to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by:
Is that you, Arlene?
Seriously, everything you list (and more) are things my accountant complains about. You're not alone in being a QuickBooks insider who hates QuickBooks and would love to move their clients onto something else.
> Even the same client that has multiple businesses and has to use multiple subscriptions could have a different look. I don't know what drives this at Intuit but it's confusing for me and I'm supposed to be the expert.
I guess that, behind the scenes, Quickbooks might run each client on its own code base or some limited multi-tenancy on a shared code base. So if your clients span those code bases, they could easily be on different versions. And the heuristics for when a code base is upgraded may depend on factors that you can’t see.
This is just a hypothetical, but that’s where my money is.
I canceled my subscription a month ago and moved to wave. What an awful piece of software and company. Slow, ads and promos and every interaction, slow, not very intuitive, did I mention slow? The only reason I signed up was because of a deal I got but it was not worth the gray hairs that I got.
It's inevitable that Intuit will snuff out the desktop version of Quickbooks. The question is, what will rise up in its place? Will it be QBO or does something else have a shot?
I'm curious what the secret sauce is that Intuit/QB has provided advisors, like yourself, to stay on their platform for the past 20 years. What would it take for another accounting software company to get you, and others in your same situation, to commit to their platform for the next 20 years?
One huge problem with Quickbooks Desktop is that it's hugely expensive to integrate it with anything, be it cloud-based software, or another piece of on-premise software. This inevitably results in it becoming an "information silo", and necessitates stuff like dual data entry (i.e. entering the same information twice, first in QB and then in some other software).
One thing they are going to start pushing via their online platform is likely things line AR and payments via Melio (their a big investor in the company) and likely push out other vendors in that space as a result. My grapevine understanding is this is less possible with the desktop version because you’d need everyone to upgrade.
Genuine question: do you find there is creativity and the satisfaction of creating something from nothing in accounting work? It has always seemed so dull from the outside looking in (cue the joes about accountants) but is this the reality?
Many people don’t see software engineering as creative but it certainly can be!
I think it is the naive idea that bookkeeping is accounting.
I am an accountant, I never do any bookkeeping.
Last week a few things I did were
1) worked on a way to get sales rebates to correctly reflect in the product cost. This is half accounting knowledge and half ERP.
2) presented accounts at a meeting where I was trying to use the numbers to make the business take a different strategic direction.
3) reviewed and questioned the commercial sense in other people's plans
4) worked out how to run a new process through the ERP so the accounts flowed through correctly
In other weeks I may be forecasting cash needs, doing an investment appraisal, building business plans, getting funding, writing sql to get data, building a BI system...
I like the creativity and the amazing variety of what I get to do in accounts.
I work around financial software, so I met a lot of accountants over the decades.
There is some creativity in defining where to stash this or that number so that everything works out in the best way for the business. As others said, it's a bit like solving puzzles, and it's harder than it looks - it requires a significant level of preparation, and keeping up with constantly changing regulations.
What a lot of them also get pride from is formatting their reports "just so" - so that they're readable and enjoyable by businesspeople, while still being exact, comprehensive, and meeting formal standards. To me, that sort of thing is kinda boring and trivial, but for them it can be career-defining, life-or-death stuff. In a way, it's a hyper-specialized branch of graphic design.
My sister is an accountant and she genuinely enjoys working with the numbers. She finds it, not exactly fun, but kind of fun? She describes it like every situation is a puzzle she gets to solve, and then maintain. She also likes working with her customers and enjoys those interactions, like she gets a good feeling from helping her customers out. That's enough for her.
Not the vocation for me but it's very interesting to talk with her about her experiences, because they're so remote from mine...
I'm a small business owner and I get a lot of satisfaction from the feeling of confidence that everything is properly counted down to the last cent. Both for business and for IRS I have a confident answer. Kinda like designing a proper DB schema for the use case, using proper data types, optimal queries etc.
It is boring, incredibly so. There's no real creativity involved unless you're trying to stretch the rules capture a transaction in a certain way or make it look like you're doing something you're not really. Its not fun and at some point you become aware of what you're doing and you quickly supress the memory in the deepest part of your mind. Its a hugely usefull skill though that helps you with so many other things, like budgeting, raising finance, running a business, investing. The the profession itself is like being force fed cold porridge for eternity.
Accounting work is in many ways similar to a garbage collector in program runtimes (e.g. JVM). Their primary goal is to manage available resources: keeping track of current usage, anticipate future availability and prevent misuse. In that sense, there can be a lot of creativity in the optimization of that process just as software people have from tweaking a piece of code to work better.
Accountants are like attorneys. The shitty ones go through the motions and create problems. The great ones often solve problems before you know you have one. They get a bad rap from a stereotype perspective!
At one point many years ago I did tax preparation. I liked to joke the secret to being a good tax preparer was to be creative. But not so creative that the IRS gets angry.
Xero do a similar pricing thing. I have to pay for the $100 a month plan to get multi currencies because I contract to an overseas company. The standard plan which has everything I need but that is 1/3 the price.
the online thing is one aspect, but even the desktop part is hostile. forced obsolescence when you think you are buying a "perpetual" license. disgusting.
i've not found any local solutions that i like, at a cost (perpetual license is a requirement) that i like. so i moved to xero. it's slow and annoying in lots of ways, but it's very usable. some things are less abstract than QB, ie the method of entry for those is closer to just doing a journal entry, i guess this is good or bad depending on the user.
This sounds like what Adobe and Microsoft are also doing. It seems like they assume that they are somewhat invincible and therefore can do whatever they want.
They are just not as good as QuickBooks and not many accountants are familiar with these other packages. The prices keep increasing but the QuickBooks online functionality is the best out there and it is the platform with which most other tools make sure to integrate.
I recently attempted to help a non profit setup Gnucash. It turned out to be cheaper to get commercial software (Xero) as they were spending too much time on upskilling in Gnucash.
They took a week to onboard to the new system and are amazing at how quickly they can do everything they need to do.
> “…I'm worried that I'm going to have to try to find a new way of supporting myself…”
What? I work in accounting and I was reading your post with curiosity until this. How do you support yourself—being a QB Pro advisor or as an accountant?
I am strongly considering a switch to GnuCash, but not for the reasons in TFA.
>Crashes were frequent; QuickBooks users know to make backups every few minutes to avoid losing work.[...] More recently, Intuit has discontinued support for the desktop version entirely in an effort to force all users to its online, paid-by-the-month service.
Both of these statements are not true, based on both my professional and personal use of Quickbooks desktop for over 15 years. QB uses transaction logging[0] so that transactions are not lost, even after for example a power outage. And the desktop versions are still available, but no longer with a perpetual one-time license, but rather $800 annual subscription for the Accountant's version. (This is a doubling in price over just the last few years).
So, I will be able to use my 2022 desktop version into the future at no extra cost, however some of the internet-based services (receiving payments, for example) will no longer be supported after 3 years.
I have installed and started to migrate to GnuCash because I am not going to pay $800/yr to Intuit, especially when less and less of my use is for professional purposes.
QB Enterprise uses Sybase internally, which is a sound choice, except they also do some kind of crazy file-locking over a SMB share, which can sometimes go wrong and cause issues. They scramble the login/password (and there are tools to do this computation so you can try to connect to the DB directly, but the schema is convoluted, and clearly decended from their old Dos/Win 3.1 roots), and then connect over the network to Sybase.
Network clients crashing can cause issues that are difficult to unwind. It should not be possible to get the database into a state where backups + verification fail if it was enforcing referential integrity, but that seems to be common.
The official tools to get yourself out of a pickle from Intuit are guesses at best. There is a cottage industry of people who will (for a great fee depending on how urgent it is), attempt to recover/correct the database for you, because they have experience peeking behind the curtain and building additional tools on the XML API.
Good luck if you are using EDI or other electronic document exchange with other customers, and you transmit sales order numbers for a few hundred orders in the morning, and then things go pear shaped and QB refuses to cooperate and open the file in the afternoon. Going back to last night's backup means carefully/manually re-ordering 4 hrs of work to make sure that everything lines up, so you're probably in for a late day.
Intuit "officially" supports a linux based server for QBE, but the community seems to thumb it's nose up at it, and offers no support for this configuration.
QB, for many years was a very good price for the SMB market. There was a LOT of pricing headroom to the next best accounting package. Someone @ intuit has figured that out over the last 10 years and they are ratcheting up the price till customers fall out -- figuring it's finally worth it to drop QB for another solution.
I'm aware of a migration from QB Enterprise to QB Online, that after signing up and paying, Intuit basically aborted the process. "Sorry, we don't support doing multiple tax rates for employees in multiple states in the QB Online version, here's your money back". Maybe they fix that eventually, but that's where it stood last year.
QB is a frustrating product, for the inertia it currently has.
QB Online works pretty well, I've used it for many years.
Intuit has an obvious disrespect for their customers - some important bugs have gone unfixed for years amid continual complaints, while the newbie support people suggest they be reported to Intuit!
I handle the accounting for a small non-profit. We need the ability to categorize our revenue and expense, which now requires the full QBO.
At $850 / year, the cost is out of line with our $30K / year revenue. But, I'm rather stuck because the organization needs to be able to transfer the work to another accountant if something happens to me, and GnuCash, ledger, hledger, etc. aren't well known. Also, we need the ability to accept payments from PayPal and Stripe without a lot of manual entry.
That's where I am. Our 2017 QB desktop was getting to the point where it felt likely to stop working so I switched to GnuCash. However, I am worried about another user learning it and being able to do it right. I do a lot of babysitting of the program as it is.
QB online would be too expensive. Xero might work. The fact that entering bills is an "advanced feature" in most packages gives me pause.
It looks like there is a market for GnuCash support contracts priced at, say, $300 a year. It could offer some consultation and hand-holding in complex cases.
She had one of those "not calculators" with a built-in printer.
Not sure what they are properly called.
Her "not calculator" was old, stained with cigarette smoke and coffee and
she did not wish for a new one.
I got paid a bit a few times to clean it up inside and out.
The thing was a tank.
(If it still exists, it should still work with a bit of care and attention.)
She used some form of financial software running on a terminal.
I think it was from an AS/400.
She was an expert on both.
Whatever key combinations were required to enter data on the terminal
had become so ingrained that if you asked her how to do it,
she would have to look at what her hands did. (weird).
The UX on the terminal was shit if you had to learn it.
(Since I got paid to do some data entry, I felt the pain).
But if you got used to it, it was damn fast.
No lag, no mouse pointing, and it stayed entirely consistent.
A bit like VI I guess.
As far as I know the system never crashed on her.
The server did need care, but it would order it on its own.
At some point they brought in Windows PCz and Lotus Symphony, I think.
She hated that.
She found it all slow, inconsistent and did not like the mouse one bit.
The other way around though.
When someone new was hired and we were in the age of Microsoft Windows,
new people were horrified by the old terminal software.
I still sometimes see people at warehouses or stores that use terminal driven
software and some of them are just as fast.
It is fun to see.
The majority though hunt, scratch head, peck, hit whatever undo is, and try again.
Should we make easy to use software or software as a tool for those who
go through the effort to learn?
I dont think any "windows/osx/linux/" screen UI accounting system would be as fast to use.
> Whatever key combinations were required to enter data on the terminal had become so ingrained that if you asked her how to do it, she would have to look at what her hands did. (weird).
As an Emacs user, I'm like that too. I don't know which keys I need to type to perform some operations, only the movement. I'm pretty sure a lot of Emacs users are like that too.
I'm the same way with vim. Funnily enough, even though I've been using vim for 15 years and rarely ever have to think about what keys to press, when I am on display (for example in a screen share or pair programming) I'll sometimes forget how to use vim and until I can get myself relaxed a bit I'll fumble around like I have no idea how to use a computer.
Counter-intuitively, making terminal software is harder because you have to think hard about the UX. You have to design how the accountant (or the user) is going to use, you have to make shortcuts, you have to think about the progression, etc... This is not the case for what's happening on GUI-land where the "designers" just randomly put texts, buttons, buttons that look like text, input boxes, tables, etc... It's all there just click a few buttons to get there.
GUI software for professional use takes the same amount of care to develop. I've been involved in data entry applications used for call center agents, cashiers and industrial control. A lot of care is taken about tab-order, keyboard shortcuts, proper use of F-keys, readability of everything, color-coding related functions and stability of known workflows. The advantage that GUI brings to the table is that a novice or one-time-user can make progress by just using the mouse as always. But e.g. with tooltips, a mirrored F-key toolbar (think Norton/Total/Midnight Commander), always on hotkey hints, learning a more efficient workflow is made possible.
This makes intuitive sense, but isn't an idea I'd thought of before. Are there any resources you'd point to as an intro to terminal/CLI/etc UX (especially any that contrast against GUI instincts)?
> I dont think any "windows/osx/linux/" screen UI accounting system would be as fast to use
Doesn't make sense for such a general assertion, you can fully replicate the keybinds of any terminal system and make all the "screen UI" strictly additive to the keyboard experience
Is this basically the accounts section of ERPNext? If not, what is the difference? I'm considering ERPNext for a small home business I'm starting up, but accounts are something I've never really delved into much beyond a few attempts at personal budget tracking in the past.
Really neat! This looks like something that could be immensely helpful to me. I have very minor accounting needs but am on the verge of outgrowing the Spreadsheet method.
May I ask how you fund development? What is your feeling on the future?
Hey, Frappe Books developer here. Not as of now, but it is something that we will be adding in. There has been a lot of requests for multi user support.
I use the SQLite backend for the same reason Jonathan chose GnuCash: scripting. I can script in bash with the `sqlite3` command-line tool.
I also use the reports extensively.
I personally enter every transaction because I want to know where the money is going and categorize every expense into a budget, but yes, import is important.
As soon as I can, I am going to support GnuCash better than just shilling.
Serious question - why are people stuck on QB when there are seriouly decent alternatives put there, like xero?
My minimum price to go back to QB online would probably be $150k, maybe even more. Here is why:
- constant down time
- constant errors
- clueless offshore support
- inflexible reporting
- constant UI changes for no reason
Switched to Xero, havent looked back.
QB Desktop was quite good but working offline is impossible these days for any tech startup.
>why are people stuck on QB when there are seriouly decent alternatives put there, like xero?
When you're an business owners employee you don't have time or authority to change accounting software because you're overworked & thought of as a cost centre.
When you're a business' owner you do whatever your accountant says which is usually a legacy software because a lot of tax preparers & accountants aren't actually in the trenches anymore and don't know about the granular bookkeeping part of accounting and how much better software has gotten in the last decade.
When you're an tax preparers employee you don't get to talk to the client.
When you're the tax preparer director/owner you don't use software anymore.
Source: accounting startup who has doubled revenue 2 years in a row thanks to all of the above
The problem to use it in France is that there is regulatory barriers preventing to use it officially.
In theory accounting solutions have to comply with rules that are complicated to follow with your own opensource solution!
Maybe there is business for developing the missing features. I would pay for that.
But there is also a requirement for certifying that the data of the software can't be altered, and you are not allowed to certify yourself. This is the bad catch 21 situation.
Even if it was possible to ensure that data can't be modified on your computer, something like android protected storage, I guess most people would not like that because if you use open source it is to have control over your machine.
So the only solution is the "cloud"/hosted solution by a provider, but again, if you use open source in the first place, probably it is because you don't want some external people to have control over your data.
Readit News
1) Forcing all their customers to migrate to the online version of their program. Many of the clients I've spoken to were happy with and preferred the Desktop version. The Desktop version is faster and can do more than the online version.
2) Throwing major updates at the online version that hides or moves functionality. I work with multiple clients and based on the client their version of QuickBooks can be very different from another's. Even the same client that has multiple businesses and has to use multiple subscriptions could have a different look. I don't know what drives this at Intuit but it's confusing for me and I'm supposed to be the expert.
3) Relentlessly raise prices. Intuit has been annually raising their prices in what appears to be an attempt to eventually price everyone out of their product. Some clients have to pay 200.00 a month for the advanced version for one feature they need to have for their business! The attitude from Intuit feels like "So where else are you going to go?"
For most of my adult life I've worked as an accountant that works mainly with QuickBooks but I'm worried that I'm going to have to try to find a new way of supporting myself because Intuit appears to be demonstrating by their recent decisions that they don't need to show loyalty to customers or even keep customers. If they can have a few stay on to pay ridiculous subscription fees that's all they need.
Historically, a huge strength of Intuit was the huge population of bookkeepers and accountants who would recommend QuickBooks to clients, but I don't see how anyone would recommend it at this point.
They’re one step from just using excel because it won’t change on them.
> Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new pencil that had to be gripped differently for no reason, they'd throw it in the trash.
>
> But in software, we tolerate buggy tools that change all the time for no discernible reason. We tolerate software that simultaneously targets professionals and casual users, serving both segments poorly. We tolerate software that can't be customized or adapted for specific workflows. It's tough to put into words, but if you watch a musician or a painter interact with their tools, there's a very clear difference that emerges, and over time you start to realize how much better all of their stuff is.
>
> In most professional artistic settings, workflow changes only happen because they have a clear benefit -- drawing from your shoulder instead of your wrist, changing your embouchure if you play an instrument. And even in those fields, it's generally accepted that over time people will end up with very specialized setups that are very consistent and refined and that remain constant for years and years.
>
> Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my professional tools should change because change is inherently good. Only in commercial software would an elegant, consistent interface like Markdown that allowed me to build up decades of muscle memory until my computer was an extension of my fingers and I didn't need to think about the way I typed -- only in software would that be considered a bad thing.
I once offered to fix the tab order on an input form, so the cursor started in the right box. The manager of that team got very excited and asked me not to change anything, the team had got used to the keystrokes!
Are your accounting people quite young? Excel moves and changes stuff, though not on quite such an aggressive timeline. Modern Office is not like 1990s Office where you buy it and then it doesn't change unless you decide to change it.
This is fine, the universe's one constant is change, if we fight it we'll lose, but it's worth calling out that there will be change, just some of these outfits are taking the piss.
It's not about looks, it's about locking people to the platform and milking them in a subscription model
Is that you, Arlene?
Seriously, everything you list (and more) are things my accountant complains about. You're not alone in being a QuickBooks insider who hates QuickBooks and would love to move their clients onto something else.
I guess that, behind the scenes, Quickbooks might run each client on its own code base or some limited multi-tenancy on a shared code base. So if your clients span those code bases, they could easily be on different versions. And the heuristics for when a code base is upgraded may depend on factors that you can’t see.
This is just a hypothetical, but that’s where my money is.
Edit: intuit and quickbooks
I'm curious what the secret sauce is that Intuit/QB has provided advisors, like yourself, to stay on their platform for the past 20 years. What would it take for another accounting software company to get you, and others in your same situation, to commit to their platform for the next 20 years?
In contrast, QB Online has a REST API.
That’s what I think this is all about
Many people don’t see software engineering as creative but it certainly can be!
I am an accountant, I never do any bookkeeping.
Last week a few things I did were
1) worked on a way to get sales rebates to correctly reflect in the product cost. This is half accounting knowledge and half ERP.
2) presented accounts at a meeting where I was trying to use the numbers to make the business take a different strategic direction.
3) reviewed and questioned the commercial sense in other people's plans
4) worked out how to run a new process through the ERP so the accounts flowed through correctly
In other weeks I may be forecasting cash needs, doing an investment appraisal, building business plans, getting funding, writing sql to get data, building a BI system...
I like the creativity and the amazing variety of what I get to do in accounts.
There is some creativity in defining where to stash this or that number so that everything works out in the best way for the business. As others said, it's a bit like solving puzzles, and it's harder than it looks - it requires a significant level of preparation, and keeping up with constantly changing regulations.
What a lot of them also get pride from is formatting their reports "just so" - so that they're readable and enjoyable by businesspeople, while still being exact, comprehensive, and meeting formal standards. To me, that sort of thing is kinda boring and trivial, but for them it can be career-defining, life-or-death stuff. In a way, it's a hyper-specialized branch of graphic design.
Not the vocation for me but it's very interesting to talk with her about her experiences, because they're so remote from mine...
i've not found any local solutions that i like, at a cost (perpetual license is a requirement) that i like. so i moved to xero. it's slow and annoying in lots of ways, but it's very usable. some things are less abstract than QB, ie the method of entry for those is closer to just doing a journal entry, i guess this is good or bad depending on the user.
Digital feudalism is a real thing.
Deleted Comment
If you want to change either your bookkeeper or your accountant, your new bookkeeper and accountant know how to use it.
Every time I have to open up QB, I cringe. Painful!
Agree with the points above about updates and $$$ increases. The worse!
I recently attempted to help a non profit setup Gnucash. It turned out to be cheaper to get commercial software (Xero) as they were spending too much time on upskilling in Gnucash.
They took a week to onboard to the new system and are amazing at how quickly they can do everything they need to do.
What? I work in accounting and I was reading your post with curiosity until this. How do you support yourself—being a QB Pro advisor or as an accountant?
>Crashes were frequent; QuickBooks users know to make backups every few minutes to avoid losing work.[...] More recently, Intuit has discontinued support for the desktop version entirely in an effort to force all users to its online, paid-by-the-month service.
Both of these statements are not true, based on both my professional and personal use of Quickbooks desktop for over 15 years. QB uses transaction logging[0] so that transactions are not lost, even after for example a power outage. And the desktop versions are still available, but no longer with a perpetual one-time license, but rather $800 annual subscription for the Accountant's version. (This is a doubling in price over just the last few years).
So, I will be able to use my 2022 desktop version into the future at no extra cost, however some of the internet-based services (receiving payments, for example) will no longer be supported after 3 years.
I have installed and started to migrate to GnuCash because I am not going to pay $800/yr to Intuit, especially when less and less of my use is for professional purposes.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_log
Network clients crashing can cause issues that are difficult to unwind. It should not be possible to get the database into a state where backups + verification fail if it was enforcing referential integrity, but that seems to be common.
The official tools to get yourself out of a pickle from Intuit are guesses at best. There is a cottage industry of people who will (for a great fee depending on how urgent it is), attempt to recover/correct the database for you, because they have experience peeking behind the curtain and building additional tools on the XML API.
Good luck if you are using EDI or other electronic document exchange with other customers, and you transmit sales order numbers for a few hundred orders in the morning, and then things go pear shaped and QB refuses to cooperate and open the file in the afternoon. Going back to last night's backup means carefully/manually re-ordering 4 hrs of work to make sure that everything lines up, so you're probably in for a late day.
Intuit "officially" supports a linux based server for QBE, but the community seems to thumb it's nose up at it, and offers no support for this configuration.
QB, for many years was a very good price for the SMB market. There was a LOT of pricing headroom to the next best accounting package. Someone @ intuit has figured that out over the last 10 years and they are ratcheting up the price till customers fall out -- figuring it's finally worth it to drop QB for another solution.
I'm aware of a migration from QB Enterprise to QB Online, that after signing up and paying, Intuit basically aborted the process. "Sorry, we don't support doing multiple tax rates for employees in multiple states in the QB Online version, here's your money back". Maybe they fix that eventually, but that's where it stood last year.
QB is a frustrating product, for the inertia it currently has.
Intuit has an obvious disrespect for their customers - some important bugs have gone unfixed for years amid continual complaints, while the newbie support people suggest they be reported to Intuit!
I handle the accounting for a small non-profit. We need the ability to categorize our revenue and expense, which now requires the full QBO.
At $850 / year, the cost is out of line with our $30K / year revenue. But, I'm rather stuck because the organization needs to be able to transfer the work to another accountant if something happens to me, and GnuCash, ledger, hledger, etc. aren't well known. Also, we need the ability to accept payments from PayPal and Stripe without a lot of manual entry.
QB online would be too expensive. Xero might work. The fact that entering bills is an "advanced feature" in most packages gives me pause.
She had one of those "not calculators" with a built-in printer. Not sure what they are properly called.
Her "not calculator" was old, stained with cigarette smoke and coffee and she did not wish for a new one.
I got paid a bit a few times to clean it up inside and out. The thing was a tank. (If it still exists, it should still work with a bit of care and attention.)
She used some form of financial software running on a terminal. I think it was from an AS/400.
She was an expert on both.
Whatever key combinations were required to enter data on the terminal had become so ingrained that if you asked her how to do it, she would have to look at what her hands did. (weird).
The UX on the terminal was shit if you had to learn it. (Since I got paid to do some data entry, I felt the pain).
But if you got used to it, it was damn fast. No lag, no mouse pointing, and it stayed entirely consistent. A bit like VI I guess.
As far as I know the system never crashed on her. The server did need care, but it would order it on its own.
At some point they brought in Windows PCz and Lotus Symphony, I think. She hated that.
She found it all slow, inconsistent and did not like the mouse one bit.
The other way around though. When someone new was hired and we were in the age of Microsoft Windows, new people were horrified by the old terminal software.
I still sometimes see people at warehouses or stores that use terminal driven software and some of them are just as fast. It is fun to see.
The majority though hunt, scratch head, peck, hit whatever undo is, and try again.
Should we make easy to use software or software as a tool for those who go through the effort to learn?
I dont think any "windows/osx/linux/" screen UI accounting system would be as fast to use.
As an Emacs user, I'm like that too. I don't know which keys I need to type to perform some operations, only the movement. I'm pretty sure a lot of Emacs users are like that too.
Doesn't make sense for such a general assertion, you can fully replicate the keybinds of any terminal system and make all the "screen UI" strictly additive to the keyboard experience
Would love if someone tried to package it into a standalone migration tool, so non-technical folks could make use of it!
- https://frappebooks.com
- https://github.com/frappe/books
Do check it out!
May I ask how you fund development? What is your feeling on the future?
We have one full time engineer working on it. If end up using it, please give us feedback and help spread the word.
I use the SQLite backend for the same reason Jonathan chose GnuCash: scripting. I can script in bash with the `sqlite3` command-line tool.
I also use the reports extensively.
I personally enter every transaction because I want to know where the money is going and categorize every expense into a budget, but yes, import is important.
As soon as I can, I am going to support GnuCash better than just shilling.
My minimum price to go back to QB online would probably be $150k, maybe even more. Here is why: - constant down time - constant errors - clueless offshore support - inflexible reporting - constant UI changes for no reason
Switched to Xero, havent looked back.
QB Desktop was quite good but working offline is impossible these days for any tech startup.
When you're an business owners employee you don't have time or authority to change accounting software because you're overworked & thought of as a cost centre.
When you're a business' owner you do whatever your accountant says which is usually a legacy software because a lot of tax preparers & accountants aren't actually in the trenches anymore and don't know about the granular bookkeeping part of accounting and how much better software has gotten in the last decade.
When you're an tax preparers employee you don't get to talk to the client.
When you're the tax preparer director/owner you don't use software anymore.
Source: accounting startup who has doubled revenue 2 years in a row thanks to all of the above
If you’re not an accountant, and want someone to take it over for your business, they usually start you on QB.
The problem to use it in France is that there is regulatory barriers preventing to use it officially. In theory accounting solutions have to comply with rules that are complicated to follow with your own opensource solution!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEPPOL Peppol]
Is anyone working on something like that?
But there is also a requirement for certifying that the data of the software can't be altered, and you are not allowed to certify yourself. This is the bad catch 21 situation. Even if it was possible to ensure that data can't be modified on your computer, something like android protected storage, I guess most people would not like that because if you use open source it is to have control over your machine.
So the only solution is the "cloud"/hosted solution by a provider, but again, if you use open source in the first place, probably it is because you don't want some external people to have control over your data.