Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

I use Quickbooks Online, an overpriced, poorly designed piece of garbage for the business I run (small business, lots of online transactions). For instance, the official PayPal app is problematic, my accountant says, because of the way transactions are recorded on the QBO ledger (the issue is mentioned here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT5zKWBXtQU). This means manual processes, which sucks for me in terms of extra time and costs (paid to my accountant to manually reconcile these transactions).

QBO is so bad that sometimes the Intuit support people I talk with have trouble figuring out answers to simple questions about how to use the software.

Trying to undo certain transactions is an exercise in frustration for me and my accountant. Once my bank got involved when it upgraded its online front end and back end, and certain transactions wouldn't sync to QBO. Of course, no one in front-line customer support on either side wanted to own the problem and it took weeks to resolve (only after I visited the bank in person with my laptop to show them what I was seeing, and the bank itself was able to get the attention of the integration team at Intuit).

I would dump QBO if I could. I only use it because my accountant insists. It's the same for most small business accountants in the U.S., which really limits the possibilities for new or established competitors.

Besides banking, what are your other "must-have" integrations?

Any sense as to why QuickBooks is so entrenched with accounting firms? I've seen Xero mentioned more often lately, and curious how they broke through the QB barrier to entry.

I manage QBO for a small business and would love to dump QBO as well. I have encountered a lot of bugs that required support to resolve. My other "must-have" integrations are Shopify and Fishbowl Inventory. Xero seems to be the other viable alternative, and at least in my case they broke the QB barrier by supporting my current business critical software as well as several other potential services I have my eye on.

I ended up on QuickBooks because my accountant insisted on it when i started my business. About ten years later i found out she's part of some kind of insider program. She probably thinks it's just cool for her to get special access to stuff. But i don't think she realizes it's a plot to lure small businesses into the QuickBooks platform.

The Quickbooks Accountant program isn't 'special access to stuff', but Intuit does offer accountants a special version of the software (at no charge IIRC), which allows them to easily work with many customer files with no complicated licensing requirements (as is the case with many other softwares).

> isn't 'special access to stuff'

> a special version of the software (at no charge IIRC)

So the accountants get it for free as long as they offer up their customers for Intuit to exploit / price gouge? That sounds pretty shady to me.

The plethora of proprietary accounting softwares are a pox upon accountants; put yourself in their shoes, and imagine that you had a variety of customers who each had their own software. Would you (as an accountant) want to pay for a license for each software, and have to learn how to use it? Do you think your clients would reimburse you (for the training and the license)? Would you have to set up some complicated and confusing virtual machine?

I think that giving (outside) accountants free licenses is or should be table stakes for these accounting packages.

And don’t forget they have a similar for self employed people which you’d think would be the same app just gated off but no, it’s seemingly a completely different app that their own support people don’t even understand and give answers for QBO even tho QBSE doesn’t support.

Found it cheaper to just hire someone to deal with it than having it all messed up end of year by QB.

One that I came across was on a recurring sales receipt because that's the only way to auto-pay with a card, and when the card wouldn't process the receipt status would still say "paid". Had to click into the receipt to see the card payment failed.

After a few years it was fixed, so that it says "paid (failed)".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com