In the end I asked to escalate it as I was getting nowhere. Got put through to the UK and the woman gave me a valid activation code straight away, with the caveat that it’s not certified on Windows 7.

What a shambles of a company.

It’s now 05:45AM. I have been wrestling with my VAT return since midnight. Until I upgraded from QB2006 to QB2008, this was accomplished at the click of a button. Seemples!

I’m a one-woman band, and the relevant sales/purchase entries would fit on once side of A4. The numbers QB is spewing out are madness – apparently my turnover has been about 5 times what it actually was, and it expects me to pay the VAT Man several thousand more than I actually owe (presumably with the money I don’t actually have).

Ever since I made the *monstrous* mistake of upgrading, I’ve wrestled with the legendary ‘uncategorised VAT amounts’ problem every VAT quarter. No advice anywhere. The built-in help doesn’t cover it. It sends you to a link to the QB support website. Which doesn’t open from the built-in link. So I go to the QB site myself. Eventually find the right FAQ link re uncategorised VAT (not easily done) only to find a ‘This page doesn’t exist anymore’ notice.

So this is what I get for my £45/month licence fee, including the non-existent tech support which QB twisted my arm into getting the first time I had to call to get them to help me with this – at a cost of £35 for the phone call. Of course, the tech support option has to be taken out for a whole year, no refunds. Why am I even paying a monthly fee anyway when I bought the software outright, initially? I never wanted the stupid upgrades – 2006 did everything I wanted. The upgrades have caused me nothing but grief. Steer well clear is my advice.

Tomorrow I’m cancelling my subscription. I’d rather go back to using an Excel spreadsheet – it was much quicker and easier. Come to that, I’d rather use a pencil and paper… or an abacus.

Quickbooks are definately trying to earn as much money as they can from their customers. If you are a growing business, then you will want to upgrade each year (there are problems if you skip a few years). But if you want a decent accounts package with no future upgrades, then buy the 2006 version. Everything went downhill after that! There is quite a good knowledge base on the Internet for Quickbooks, after a while one becomes fairly expert oneself.

The problem as I see it is that Quickbooks have not developed the product in the way that their users would like. Instead of really useful improvements (I am still waiting for them to allocate numbers to Bills, an issue I raised back in 2003) they have gone for glitsy changes to make it look up to date.

To compensate for those who wanted something basic, they brought out Simple Quickbooks. free if you download. Avoid at all costs! It is only good for raising Invoices, it can’t cope with the payment or anything else connected with payments.

Re the earlier comment about importing transactions: Yes in theory, no in practice. I had a charity that needed to move to a new company file (that’s another issue. it either gets too big, or the records develope problems that can’t be fixed by the rebuild utility). There were lots of receipts that had to be brought into the new file. Importing Nominal Accounts, Customers etc was fine, very easy infact. But when it came to transactions, I found there were bits that wouldn’t import properly each time I tried it. Spent 2 weeks trying to resolve this, matching up the receipt with the bank was the stumbling block. Eventually I found the solution; print out a report showing the receipts and re-enter them manually into the new Quickbooks file. This turned out to be surprisingly easy, as the one thing Quickbooks is good at is entering transactions.

One day Quickbooks will be blown away with an Open Source online solution, till then I’ll just stick with my old Quickbooks version

I honestly see most software (even mission-critical stuff) migrating away from being a desktop application to an online service. In that respect alone, services like Xero are the way to go, and QuickBooks and Sage are relics of the past

I am now working for a company, just started but with a projected turnover of £4.5mill in the first year. I spoke to our accountant and he wants me to use Sage, but he is old school and knows Sage inside out. I used Sage in the late 90′s but since finding QB so easy to use and with the amount of web based apps that I am told sync with QB – I came on-line this morning to purchase it as I need to claim a vat refund from hmrc….

So, what should I do? Sage or Quickbooks……. HELP……..

QB is also sloooow and unstable. Unless you have the money for the enterprise version (about $4000 in Australia)- which runs with a different database setup – files that get bigger than about 10 Meg suddenly experience significant drops in speed and reliability. The QBi series was supposed to fix this problem, but has actually made it worse.

QB has very limited inventory facilities. Construct an order for 30 items and convert it to an invoice and QB will tell you that one of the items are oversold, but it won’t tell you which one! So you have to go through each of the 30 items one by one! This is only one example.

Support is only available at $890/year through their “advantage” system, an expensive price, even if the product is not working properly. (any company that requires you to quote your 10 digit customer number before providing any support is not dealing with you as a person). So we have to pay $800/yr for up to date tax tables plus about $890/yr for support to make sure the software works!

Inventory is limited,
CRM is non existent, (I don’t think you should need a $30,000 ERP program for CRM),
Importing/Exporting of transactions can be done, but only with third party software such as from Baystate Consulting etc,

Every year you need to refresh your Quickbooks licence, which can be quite frustrating experience if the local website is not working properly. I have waited on the phone for hours to get the licence renewed.

“Updates” are not really updates. Very little changes for users from year to year, sometimes some changes are made for accountant, as distinct from the users, as accountants seem to be more important to Quicken than the end users. I think the logic is that if the accountant uses quickbooks then the user will be forced to also use quickbooks. Usually the main changes are color schemes.

All I can say is cloud accounting – roll on, destroy those evil QB providers!