Comments on: QuickBooks Online Banking – Interview and Updates

By: Dennis Woodriff

Dennis Woodriff — Fri, 15 May 2009 08:13:41 +0000

I switched to Peachtree

By: Diane Offutt

Diane Offutt — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 04:21:03 +0000

R7 has not fixed the online banking unrecognized characters issue. It is unacceptable to me that 2009 is such a mess. I have been a QB ProAdvisor since 2003 and I have always upgraded my company file. I absolutely refuse to update from 08 to 09. Yet my 06 clients had no choice and now they are having problems.

If Intuit does not fix this problem soon they will lose so much business. I can see clients moving to Peachtree over this issue.

By: LeRoy

LeRoy — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 06:38:23 +0000

Software companies with a cash cow often suffer from hubris and Intuit is no exception. Like many other users I’ve seen Quickbooks evolve over many years to its apex and am watching it now decline. Their inability to listen to their customer base will be their own undoing. Hopefully the market will provide a suitable alternative. If a responsive vendor provides a way to transfer accounting data out of Quickbooks into a less bloated application they could garner a huge market share. We need to encourage these alternatives with our dollars. That is the only thing those arrogant SOBs at Intuit will really understand.

By: Peter Smith

Peter Smith — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:39:57 +0000

I am a long time user of QuickBooks, and have employed it for my company’s accounting records since 1992. I have read this thread and others with interest, because I am convinced that QuickBooks 2009 is by far the worst version of QuickBooks ever released, and agree with Kathy Ivens that it is potentially dangerous to accounting accuracy.

For what it is worth, I have taught accounting at the graduate level in two universities, and can be considered at least highly proficient, if not expert, on Vista and most common business software. Talking to the people at Intuit’s Help Desks about any technical problems is like doing a litigation deposition in a foreign language. They are literally there NOT to help, but to make you think you simply don’t know how to use the program, or to encourage you to wait for the next fix. R7, the latest version of kick the can down the road, DOES NOT fix the problems.

Monopolists or market dominators are not evil people, but their myopia can make even the most loyal customers dizzy with frustration. I can’t stand QB2009, and feel stupid for buying it, but will now wait until QB2011 before upgrading, and in the meantime, look for a substitute.

By: Kathy Ivens

Kathy Ivens — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:59:20 +0000

My article isn’t at odds with the general opinion, and I’ve been unwaveringly critical of the changes in online banking. What disturbs me is that, except for accountants, nobody is pointing out that the biggest problem isn’t the confusing new interface, it’s that if you used online banking before R7, you faced a serious risk of ending up with bad accounting figures (see my earlier articles on the subject on the Troubleshooting QuickBooks section of the cpa911 website). My article on R7 says that now that Intuit finally figured out how to unlock the program so you can get to menu items, you can use online banking (it was totally and absolutely unusable before they took that step). My article also advises you to ignore all the transaction entry screens available in the Online Banking window and use the regular QB transaction windows to add transactions. In other words, I believe that the new interface and its transaction functions are not just slow, annoying, and badly designed; they are also dangerous to the accuracy of your accounting records. For those who upgraded and found it difficult to roll back to their previous version of QB, at least R7 provides a way to manage Online Banking accurately.

By: Charlie

Charlie — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:24:43 +0000

Laurie, there are many ways to look at the issue. Those of us who are ProAdvisors, who have clients using the product, have to find a way to help our clients. Kathy’s description shows how you can make it work. And she has been very clear that feature was broken. If you have to use the new online banking feature, Kathy’s article is a good description of what you have to do to use it properly.

Some of the users in the Intuit Community aren’t interested in trying the new approach, they just want the old approach back. I can’t say that I blame them. No matter how much the new feature is changed, no matter if it ends up being better than the old approach (I’m not saying it is there now), they won’t be satisfied.

Intuit representatives have been pretty clear – their approach is going to be to fix what they have now, and to not go back to the older method. I’m not sure what you think a “reasonable response” is, but if you are set on wanting the old version, I’d say that you will probably be disappointed (at least based on what I’m seeing from Intuit). And I don’t see them offering rebates, refunds or methods of converting data back to the older product, which others think would be a “reasonable response”. If a “reasonable response” to you is that they are committed to fixing the problem and coming up with a workable program feature, then I’d say that you’ll probably get that.

This is all just opinion. I am not a big user of the online banking feature, and few of my clients actually use it. I can’t say that I have a typical client base or not. For those of my clients who rely on online banking heavily, most of them (who are using the 2009 product) are now using a third party solution.

Thanks for your comment…

By: laurie

laurie — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:10:05 +0000

Charlie,

Kathy Ivens’ evaluation seems to be at huge odds with the discussion going on the Intuit Community forum. (See http://community.intuit.com/post/detail/cjBihctECqllvkab8P4pmk?page=6 for a peek into the hundreds of messages in this thread.) People there are irate. Some are beyond irate. These users had a feature (the online banking interfact) that worked just fine in a product they liked (QB2008), and now they are extremely frustrated and seem to have no recourse and no reasonable response from anyone at Intuit.

I, for one, and seriously considering my options, because I don’t know if I’ll ever trust Intuit again.

-laurie

By: Charlie

Charlie — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:33:45 +0000

William, in my article on the R7 release I have a link to a PDF from Kathy Ivens. Have you had a chance to look at that? Kathy has a number of articles about the online banking feature. In her evaluation she believes, as I understand it, that the R7 release helps improve things by quite a bit. I’ll defer to her, she is the online banking expert. It isn’t a feature that I use myself.

I look at this from two different standpoints: Online Banking and Future Development. The whole New Online Banking feature is a disaster from beginning to end. Poorly designed, poorly implemented. If I were using online banking extensively for my own company, I’d most likely be using a third party product to handle that chore. However, my real interest and concern with this is Future Development. I am hoping that they not only learn from this experience, I hope that they implement actual changes so that this never happens again. For me personally, that is a far more important issue (again, as online banking is not a core feature for my business, so the impact of that feature on me is very small).

That is a self centered view, I know. However, from things that I’m seeing as a third-party addon developer, Intuit has some big changes that they are playing with that could affect lots of things down the line, and it is important that this kind of debacle doesn’t happen again.

By: William Delpino

William Delpino — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:54:19 +0000

Well Charlie, R7 is out now and although you haven’t tried it as you mentioned in the forum, I’m sure you’ve read the other comments.
Not much changed from what I can see. You can now open other windows while running the OLB module and it did seem a bit quicker, but that’s about it. All the other problems are pretty much still there.
I know you want to believe, but it’s just not happening. What’s going on is beyond amateur, beyond ineptitude. It’s like they’re paralyzed.
What blows the mind is that they seem completely unable to implement simple functionality features to something they’re desperately trying to defend.
They failed at the initial implementation and they continue to fail miserably in it’s defense by promising and not delivering the necessary results.

By: Charlie

Charlie — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:54:20 +0000

William: The best I can say at this time is, we’ll see if things change. I’ve been unhappy with their field testing policies for years, although this was the first year that I’ve actually been included as a beta tester. And during the beta test, I had serious reservations about their process. It clearly has to change. If it doesn’t, things won’t get better.

They seem to be “cleaning up the mess”, we’ll see if they clean it up well enough. I’ve talked to one person who has seen the upcoming release, and that person feels that it will go a long way towards fixing the problem (not completely, but significantly better). I’ve not see the upcoming release so I can’t comment much about it.

I do tend to be an optimist. I do expect that they will change their procedures. I hope that they will make significant enough changes to actually prevent this kind of thing from happening again. I will also note that I’ve seen a number of changes on a corporate-wide level in the past several months that are encouraging – they are more open to discussing problems and to engaging in conversations than they ever have been in the past (in my experience), so that is a good sign.

But it only benefits us if they really do make substantial changes. If they don’t, we’ll all scream, and/or move on to some other product.