Have you ever used Intuit’s Quickbooks desktop software? I’m sure many of you have had this pleasure … or should I say this teeth-grinding, rage-inducing, brutal test of your inner fortitude and resolve?
Have you ever used Intuit’s Quickbooks desktop software?
I’m sure many of you have had this pleasure … or should I say this teeth-grinding, rage-inducing, brutal test of your inner fortitude and resolve?
Perhaps the problem is that I’m not really an accountant nor do I play one on TV … accountancy has always seemed to me to be one of the black arts, an advanced form of prestidigitation … now you see this money, now you don’t.
My accounting hassles have been going on for a long time. For example, last year I needed to reconstruct the books for my company for the whole of 2009.
At that time Wells Fargo only made 90 days of transactions available for download but I had been downloading the data once per month in every format they made available which included Quicken® 2005 (MAC) & 2008 (PC) or later (Web Connect), QuickBooks® 2008 or later (Web Connect), QuickBooks® 2000 or later (.iif), and Comma Delimited (ASCII, Spreadsheet).
It turned out in the end that importing any of those files of transactions into QuickBooks was not possible. I tried everything including a handful of really crappy third party tools but nothing worked so we wound up sitting there for two days entering transactions one by one … very tedious.
This brings up one of the many things I don’t understand about QuickBooks – and there may be some arcane, black accounting rationale for this: Why, if you can enter transactions from the keyboard, can you not import a file of saved transactions which contain exactly the same data?
This doesn’t seem like rocket science but maybe, just maybe, it actually is so advanced and sophisticated that I simply can’t understand it. Either that or Intuit a) has lousy program architects, or b) has some customer-hostile strategy for locking us into their hideous way of doing things.
Anyway, this year, the same thing happened, I wound up needing to reconstruct the books from scratch but now the person who needed to do the books was elsewhere and I’d need to have access. The obvious solution was to use QuickBooks Online Edition.
Once again, importing my downloaded data was required (Wells Fargo now — hallelujah! — retains well over a year’s worth of data so monthly archives are no longer necessary) but, as with the desktop version, this was not simple.
Worse still, with the online version, everything looks and is laid out differently.
And this is another thing I don’t get: Why is the online version of QuickBooks visually and organizationally different from the desktop products?
Intuit has this huge, committed user base which they want to keep committed yet they manage to be inconsistent in a key issue for anyone doing accounts: You want a single, consistent view of the process no matter what platform you’re on and moving between platforms shouldn’t be hard (in fact, it’s inexcusable for it to be hard!).
This is a simple workflow issue that starts when you hit the first display and any change to that workflow requires either incredible user interface design skills (which Intuit patently doesn’t have) or it has to add some huge benefit (which the online version certainly doesn’t have over the desktop versions).
Anyway, it appeared that the online version would import transactions directly from my bank but when I tried; it would only give me a maximum of the last 90 days!
I figured that there must be a way around this but, nope, after wading through Intuit’s labyrinthine help system (which apparently was translated into English by native Hindi speakers from a Japanese version) as well as looking for online comments from other users it appeared there was no such ability.
I wound up creating a company on a friend’s installation of QuickBooks Premier Accountant’s Edition 2010, importing the transactions which required me to categorize each one as “Unrecognized” (although it appears that there are bulk processing options in reality there aren’t … that’s pathetic), I was able to export a company file in the Online Edition format and then upload that into QuickBooks Online Edition.
So, now, after far too much messing around and time wasting, we’re ready to get the company accounts sorted out.
My takeways from all of this are simple: Intuit doesn’t like its customers and thinks that they are just there to have their money extracted at regular intervals, the QuickBooks Online Edition developers and marketing people need adult supervision, and that accounting is, as I have always suspected, a soul-destroying, ugly process that I am not emotionally equipped for.
Excuse me, I now need to go and lie down in a dark room and think of something soothing otherwise I may need to re-program my computer with an axe.
