Scare Tactics

March 17, 2007 @ 2:55 pm- from Maui, Hawaii

I love companies who are going through the effort of scare tactics to take advantage of users. Check out this dialog thrown up by Quickbooks 2006 when it starts:

While I can understand that there may be incompatibilities, this kind of dialog that can't be turned off is a major annoyance. And everything about this dialog screams out - "Don't do it!". Clearly geared at 'strongly encouraging' people to upgrade. Now at the same time I've been using this version on Vista for over a year without any issues.

Let's take a step back here though - QuickBooks is a financial package. It's filebased and uses a single data file for its data storage. How bad could it possibly be affected by Vista? UI issues aside (of which there aren't any that I've noticed) there's no reason that an application like Quickbooks should have any problems on Vista. Yet you get a warning and a nudge to upgrade for another $180 (or whatever it is these days) to upgrade (and no upgrade rebates).

More likely the problems come from the daemon processes that QuickBooks runs. Quickbooks loads a bunch of startup programs and downloaders that are constantly sucking resources. These processes download files in the background who knows where and those probably have issues now under Vista. OTOH, a company like Intuit probably should have been ready for any file system based issues long ago, given that the same environment issues apply to XP when set up with a more strict security policy than the default Admin account logon.

In the past I've been very happy with QuickBooks, which has been a good fit for my business for many years. But a few years ago QuickBooks turned into a monster from hell. Even on my fairly fast dual core machine Quickbooks runs like a dog at the end of a rubber leash - dragging, dragging. Then Intuit decided to do away with upgrades altogether and just makes you pay full price on an update for updates that are usually not adding anything new at all, only making the product even more sluggish than it already is.

It's funny to look back on the history of Intuit which was originally an underdog company and became a player mainly because they got the UI and workflow right above anything. Lean and mean - now look what we have <s>... There hasn't been anything that I've seen in years that Intuit has done that has any value for my business. I've upgraded 2 times in the last 6 years, mainly to get a stable version for the OS I was running. The last upgrade to QB 2006 was probably a mistake as it was an order of magnitude slower than the previous version (QB 2003).

Yeah I can kick and scream, but like many others I'm now tethered to Quickbooks in many ways. I have two of my main business applications that dump data directly into Quickbooks (a royal pain due the fucked up data formats Intuit uses), my accountant uses QuickBooks and it's our means of sharing data and of course there's tons of business data inside of QuickBooks. So while I would love to go a different route, it's at this point a pretty major undertaking switching off QB.

So, yeah when I see a 'friendly reminder' like the above I get a little upset...

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re: Scare Tactics
by Andy Robinson March 18, 2007 @ 10:11 am

Rick,

If you could change, what would you use? I am in the process of restarting a small (sub-s) consulting business. I don't have any history so I could go with just about anything.

re: Scare Tactics
by Mike Lyons March 18, 2007 @ 4:25 pm

I hear your pain Rick. I recently swapped my accounting package over to Quickbooks and have had nothing but headaches; sluggish, poor phone support, trying to charge me for speaking to a sales person to find out about their SDK, rude phone support, no support for vista, then lack of support for vista.... the list goes on and on.

<start rant>
Initially I was told by intuit that I would have to buy a 2007 as 2006 will never support Vista and that phone support then accused us of illegal activities for having Vista before it was launched in January.

I no longer recommend running Quickbooks to any of my clients and I'm glad to hear that other people think that the company is from hell.

I spoke to MYOB recently about their SDK and they were more than happy to help me out even though I don't have a copy of their software. Looks like this maybe the final nail in the coffin of Intuit for me.
</start rant>

re: Scare Tactics
by Rob Conery March 20, 2007 @ 12:41 pm

I just installed 2006 the other day as well - i'm the treasurer of our canoe club and need it for the books :). I used to use Quicken, like you, for my business but jumped to Office Accounting 2007 because I was sick of the slothiness.

OA 2007 is actually even slower. And I've had my problems with it too (too much to list here). So I think i'm actually going to start using Excel :). Why not? People used it for books for years and my accountant actually prefers it.

Then again I'm a one-man corp...

re: Scare Tactics
by Rick Strahl March 20, 2007 @ 1:35 pm

Rob, I feel the same way. <s> I would love to just ditch QB but the fact is there's a lot of investment there. The main thing is tax services which is a heck of a lot easier to hand somebody a quickbooks file than anything else since many small business accountants will accept QB files. I doubt they'll take Office accounting or even Peachtree (which is somewhat more popular) files.

Like you I'm a one man shop and so accounting is not a high priority so I can probably put up with it, but I still hate the fact that this software has been getting worse and worse over the years.

It seems more and more software is falling into this trap of adding more and more features that only few people use and in the process killing the performance and user experience.

re: Scare Tactics
by Jim March 20, 2007 @ 7:22 pm

Intuit suck balls. I was threatened that I'd get a bill just for daring to report a bug. Plus their so called upgrades often have nothing more than new tax tables... argh

re: Scare Tactics
by Rob Conery March 21, 2007 @ 4:00 pm

This year I called my CPA (who's also my best friend - wahoo!) and asked him if he cared if I sent him an Excel file or Quickbooks. He told me that all he does in QB is run a P&L, export it to Excel, and then work on it some more. I know that's just him, but I think all accountants are Excelophiles at some level.

Anyway- this is the best part - I went to my bank (First Hawaiian and Wells Fargo) and they both allow you to grab a CSV of all your transactions over the year (Wells even categorizes them FOR YOU). I opened up Excel, added a column called "Category", then called my buddy and said "what do you want to see?".

He rattled off the categories he needs for my return (S-Corp) and so I sorted the expenses by location, and was able to get all the categories down within 2 hours :). I then grouped everything by category and mailed it off to him.

He told me it was the cleanest books he's seen of mine in years :). But that's not sayin much I spose.

Anyway- it was a MAJOR eye-opener for me since every March I used to spend hours and hours preparing my books and reconciling with the bank. No more!

Finally - yep - couldn't agree with you more RE software. Beer's getting better though! And you got a cold one comin to you in a few weeks in Lahaina!

re: Scare Tactics
by Andy September 12, 2007 @ 4:35 am

Well if you're in the market for a new accounting system, i'd seriously consider http://www.agresso.com/

regards,
Andy