Does QuickBooks Bug You?
While QuickBooks is a widely used and popular program that has been around for quite awhile, there are a number of “issues” that cause people problems. “Bugs”, if you will. I would like to try something here. Leave a comment that briefly describes a bug that is causing you problems. Let’s see if there are some big ones that affect a lot of people, and maybe we can draw some attention to them at Intuit.
I hate to use the word “bugs”, because that is so generic (besides, I’m a programmer, I hate “bugs”). Sticky points, annoyances, hear-tearers, design flaws, shortcomings. In one prior company I owned we called them “floobies” rather than say that we had bugs. No matter what you call them, they hurt your business and we all want to see them go away.
At this time I’m focusing on things that don’t work the way they should. That leaves out “design flaws” for example. Do you need LIFO inventory accounting? That isn’t a bug, it is a design flaw. The program works the way they designed it. If there is interest, maybe later I’ll run a survey on that kind of thing. But, even it if is a “design flaw” where QB does something on purpose, if it is something that really interferes with your business flow, go ahead and add that.
So, what is bugging you about QuickBooks?
Dick Kusleika | Jan 27, 2010 | Reply
The only true bug I know about is that the Inventory Valuation Summary report will eventually crash QB if you use a date range other than “All”. Intuit’s said they hope to fix that in future releases.
Design flaws that bug me? Don’t get me start. Oh, I already started here http://qbimprovements.jottit.com/
It’s hard to pick just one, but:
“I want to export to CSV and have it appear in Excel automatically and unsaved just like when I export directly to Excel. The CSV will not have the formatting and blank columns.”
Would probably impact me the most.
Jerry | Jan 27, 2010 | Reply
I have come across this bug in Client Data Review. In the Undeposited Funds section of Clients Data Review, it shows six customer accounts that each have a deposit the is unapplied. There is nothing on the right side of that page to apply the deposit to. Yet in the COA the Undeposited Funds account has a zero balance and, it so happens, that each of those customers also have zero balances when you call up their accounts in the customer center. Doubled checked and all dates for invoices and payments are within the reporting period I am reviewing. Tech support at Intuit connected to my file and verified what I just listed. At this time this “bug” has been escalated up at Intuit.
Rustler | Jan 27, 2010 | Reply
Ahhh Charlie you should not have opened that bag of worms.
1. Sales Tax Group have a rounding error on some transactions.
2. Chart of accounts – Credit card is not a liability, bank account is not an asset (cannot be listed under those accounts)
3. Report generator is so basic as to be funny.
4. You cannot link accumulated depreciation to the fixed asset it applies to.
5. When you sell a fixed asset it is not removed from the fixed asset list.
6. There should be a one button or menu choice to roll up equity at EOY.
7. Graphs share the basic functionality of the report generator.
8. No control over what accounts are displayed in the account list open on the home page.
9. There should be an option to flag an invoice as being a recurring transaction.
Shirley | Jan 27, 2010 | Reply
In the 2010 Pro version, on the customize icon bar, the user license icon shows up. I’ve deleted it, I’ve moved it to the bottom, and the next time I open the program, there it is. I should be able to have my program how I want it – especially the customize icon bar.
VS Lingam | Jan 27, 2010 | Reply
Would you also be interested in “bugs” in the Aus version of QB? The guys down under inherit the limitations of the US version of QB.
Bruce Tupper | Jan 27, 2010 | Reply
I just discovered the ability to export reports in CSV format. Has that feature been there all along?
Sherry Williams | Jan 27, 2010 | Reply
1) The written support is not helpful. Not even the book I bought by Kathy Ivens for QB 2009.
2) When I imported Quicken data into QB a year ago, the banking records were so messed up, I ended up using Quicken for our banking.
3) So what I use QB Pro for is to track our monthly customer bills. I set it up a year ago so the 2 bills we send, Water and Homeowners Dues, were co-mingled. Then it became hard to look at a customer and figure out just what they owed for one or the other account.
4) So as of Jan 1 2010 I wanted to start a new “company”, import all the customers, and have 2 separate companies for Water and Homeowners. But try as I might, I could not get a new company to import my customer list so I stayed with the old system, with the 2 separate companies comingled.
It is all very frustrating. But on the positive side, the program does the one big job I need it to, which is to generate the bills for Water and Homeowners and to print them all out in the form I need for an envelope with a window.
Gourdfather | Jan 27, 2010 | Reply
Ah Charlie..you are a BRAVE man….We have over 4000 inventory items that we need to look up frequently, change the cost on just about every shipment we receive, etc…..BUT, if I want to look up an inventory item (ex. LS00765), the best I get is the first letter (ex.L) and then have to scroll till you find it. One semi-helpful, but quirky “feature” is that if you type the first TWO digits REALLY, REALLY fast, it will jump to the first two digits (ex. LS), and then you have to scroll…I haven’t been fast enough to type in THREE digits really fast ;-(.
Short version, the item list should be able to be accessed directly by typing in the item number (predictive typing).
#2 To change inventory count, you must go into “Adjust Inventory” where you can ONLY adjust qty (and thereby Valuation) but not cost; to adjust cost, you must Edit the item record, but you CANNOT adjust the quantity in EDIT.
Overall, I find QB not very user friendly…yes, I can eventually accomplish MOST of what I need to do, but at a cost of 3 to 10 times the effort(and help from the Community)
Now the Payroll is a shining star in this mess…it WORKS, gives me what I need, reports, tracks liability..I LOVE the Payroll module!!!! Thx Charlie!!!
Elizabeth | Jan 27, 2010 | Reply
I wish there was a way to track Loans Receivable and book interest on them automatically. The Loan manager module for loans payable is difficult to set up and use.
Yvonne Bryan | Jan 27, 2010 | Reply
When I import a list to a new company, I always “lose” a few items or customers, etc. Where did they go?
Most reports automatically come up with “amount” and “balance”. Most accounting type people would rather see “debit” “credit” and “balance”. I understand that Intuit cannot please everyone, but I assume that it is mostly bookkeeper and accounting type folks that use QB.
Dan Berube | Jan 28, 2010 | Reply
It would be nice to have some more date controls — like locking down just accounts payable or accounts receivable.
A better 3 way match would be nice to. One that didn’t push all of your transactions to the bill date, but kept the date of the receipt separate.
Charlie May | Jan 28, 2010 | Reply
Wow, where to begin?
Bugs:
One major problem I am having is every month we close out the prior month with our accountant, what we are discovering is that within a months time, the Balance Sheet is out of balance. The first time I discovered this, back in February, the general consensus was to rebuild your data. So far, this has worked every time. But I would like to know why it is happening at all.
Design:
I would really like to be able to archive prior years to minimize the size of our active data but have yet to get that “Feature” to work. I have data back to 2004 and my company file is over 300 meg (which is probably part of the reason for the balance sheet problem)
Some type of SQL feature in the reporting area so that I can pull reports with Where Product LIKE ‘1f%’ and Product Not LIKE ‘%-3000′ (so basically, list all parts starting with 1f but do not have the -3000 suffix) without having to go through the multiple selection screen and hunt them down.
If it wasn’t for the export to excel feature, this entire area of quickbooks would be useless.
Better address handling for pulling reports based on location. No matter how much I’ve tried, there are certain countries that I just can’t get quickbooks to find in a report. I currently went around this problem with a custom field.
Give us an area on the home screen that we can put favorites in. Instead, Quickbooks decides to move icons off the home screen (build assemblies for one) and ad their advertisements for features I don’t want. Give us an area where a user can put their icons for easy access to what they do daily.
I’m going to stop now, I could fill up the internet on the subject of Quickbooks Annoyances.
Jennifer Hilpert | Jan 28, 2010 | Reply
One “bug” that I have encountered with QuickBooks Enterprise 10.0 is when using the online banking feature, for some reason, not all of our transactions out of Bank of America gets received. It seems to happen completely randomly, it can happen to any transaction from large to small amounts; no certain payee is more prone to their transactions not getting received. I would say about 6% of 7% of my transactions do not get received, and I have no clue as to why?
Margaret | Jan 28, 2010 | Reply
What fun!
1. As someone else has pointed out–reports and account registers should use debit/credit wording, not increase/decrease etc. I get confused!
2. Many of my clients want to use customer numbers.
3. I’d like to be able to have the bank rec report default to detail. I never want to print both.
4. Joe Woodard (QB guru) once pointed out that QB should have an extra day or a ‘non day’ at year end to be able to view a clean close of the prior period (might be a design flaw, sorry).
Margaret
Chris Solberg | Jan 28, 2010 | Reply
@Sherry Williams: Have you tried simply setting up 2 separate A/R accounts — one for homeowners and one for water? When doing this, QB adds an A/R drop-down to invoice forms and payment forms, so you can keep different types of transactions separate and perform a collections report (for example) for only one of the A/R accounts. Probably a better solution than 2 companies.
@Gourdfather & Charlie May: I would also find the ability to do “predictive typing” in the item list (although I CAN type fast enough to get 3-5 letters in!) — and ESPECIALLY the ability to do exclusions & partial matches from finds & filters. I can’t tell you how often, for example, that I want to do a report of items with “xyz” “somewhere in the part number” or find all of something EXCEPT those that match “xyz”.
Something not mentioned yet: in Enterprise 7, the “Sales Order Fulfillment Worksheet” *would* be a wonderful tool, except is absolutely useless because of the lack of a “INVOICE SELECTED” button — instead they only let us print the selected sales orders. What good is that??? Why would I select open sales orders for fulfillment if I wasn’t going to fulfill them? If they have fixed this oversight, they’ve never mentioned it in their sales copy.
Finally, let me add/remove “centers” from the Navigation Icon Bar. I don’t want the whole bar turned off, but why do other employees need the Employee Center? And I always pull reports from the report menu, so I ONLY want Customer & Vendor Center buttons visible to save space!
Eugene Monnig | Jan 28, 2010 | Reply
There’s currently no issues driving me nuts in QB, but QBPOS: We installed POS in Jan 2007. In March (after many long conversations with India) we had a problem no one has been able to fix. Two transactions got tangled up with each other, one payment was lost, and the other was unlinked. No matter what upgrades or patches have been applied, that error still shows up on my daily crossload to QB.
What do you know?
Deb Lyons | Jan 28, 2010 | Reply
The way QB does not include invoices that have been entirely paid with credit memos on the bill payment stubs makes it difficult for vendors to know that you are paying these invoices with credits even if there are other invoices being paid with the same ck. It would be nice if there was a report that would show which ck or credit memo paid each invoice.
Cheryl Short | Jan 28, 2010 | Reply
I would like to be able to enter more than one A/R or A/P on a general journal entry.
Renee | Jan 28, 2010 | Reply
Depending on the way I build a report, I have been having trouble getting Assets to equal Liabilities+Equity. The Inventory account is consistenly wrong if I run the report for a period, as in Jan 1 to Dec 31. If I change the parameter to ‘Yearly’ or Quarterly’ A=L+E will be in balance.
That is with no adjustmets entered. It is always the inventory account that throughs it off.
Don Peck | Jan 29, 2010 | Reply
1. Cannot input “piece work” in “Time Sheet” mode
2. Estimating thru job creation is cumbersome and poorly documented.
3. There is a issue with creating an “Accountants copy” over a network.
Steve Gill | Jan 29, 2010 | Reply
I know I could come up with dozens, Charlie, but 2 stand out that bug me when I am doing extensive clean-ups for clients:
1. The need to undo bank reconciliations all the way back to the month when I make a change to a transcation and then re-reconcile all over again. I HATE this!
2. Limitations on what I can do in an Accountant’s Copy, especially inability to enter/edit banking transfers and inability to use some of the Client Review cleanup tools and have the transactions post to the client’s company file.
And while I’m on Client review, I like the new reclassifiaction tool, but what about allowing reclasses from expense accounts to balance sheet accounts (for example when client has incorrectly recorded a loan payment as an expense).
Jeff H | Jan 29, 2010 | Reply
Does QuickBooks bug me? No, not really. But Intuit sure does
Forcing developers from the SDK to Flex on “the cloud” through the strong-arm tactic of freezing the SDK is [insert your favorite explicative here] frustrating.
Charlie | Jan 29, 2010 | Reply
Wow, Jeff, don’t get me started on that subject…
Actually, I’m going to be writing a bit about that later this year…
Lizzz | Jan 29, 2010 | Reply
I wish we could E-file 1099’s. In the meantime I wish the 1099’s would print the 2nd form on each page correctly instead of printing too low so it doesn’t fit in the window correctly. I did buy some other software 2 years ago to file electroncally but it was a hassle. This 1099 “fix” is not even on the Intuit radar. Dang. Otherwise, I love QuickBooks!
Chris Solberg | Jan 29, 2010 | Reply
I’m with Cheryl on wanting to enter more than one A/P or A/R account on a transaction (Gen Journal, Bill, Check, etc). Usually its not because I actually need to split an entry into multiple AR/AP accounts, but rather need to split an entry among several customers or vendors (ie entering the appropriate amount for each customer as its own line item on a single transaction). Happens frequently!
@Renee: have you ruled out a corrupt data file by rebuilding? Personally, I’ve experienced the same types of issues periodically and they’ve always fixed themselves via a rebuild.
Sandy | Jan 30, 2010 | Reply
When modifying reports, there are many options that show up as possible columns, that don’t pull any information. Wouldn’t it be nice if they would only list RELEVANT columns?
Diahann | Feb 1, 2010 | Reply
For whatever reason….When I try to email the invoice from the send invoice, QB either takes forever to go thru or shuts down. Any suggestions?????
Gabriel | Feb 1, 2010 | Reply
I am using 2009 Pro – 3 user –
One of the users’ QB program shuts down after about 30 minutes if not used. The main one does not and the other secondary neither. All three computers are the same. Vista 64.
Where is the bug???
Charlie | Feb 1, 2010 | Reply
Sorry, Diahann, that isn’t enough info to help. But even if I had all the detailed info, there are many different reasons for this. Hard to say what is going on without seeing the actual system. If it is a 64 bit system and a current (2009 or 2010) release, you may have PDF driver problems. Other than that, a long list of possibilities.
Charlie | Feb 1, 2010 | Reply
Gabriel, I’ve seen reports of that happening, but I’ve never seen a solution (and I have never had it happen to me, so I don’t have first hand experience).
Robin | Feb 3, 2010 | Reply
Hi Charlie, I just wanted to express my interest in your idea of discussing design flaws. I think my problem might fall under that category more than a ‘bug’ but I think it is a major shortcoming that you can not customize customer statments. I ended up creating on on Excel because the QB one is so unadaptable. Thank you, Robin
Matt L. | Feb 5, 2010 | Reply
Hi Charlie,
Interesting post as always.
A simple quirk I wish Intuit would address; In the customer address field it automatically inserts a comma between the city and state. The postal service specifically recommends to no longer include commas or .periods for that matter, when sending correspondence.
Thanks,
MPL
Steve Gill | Feb 9, 2010 | Reply
Just ran across a “bug” that I haven’t seen anyone discussing anywhere..so maybe it’s just me. When I use the company data review in Accountants Edition 2010 and try to apply unapplied customer payments, QB shuts down with a fatal error as soon as I click Save or Save & Close. Anyone else have this problem or know what might be happening? I have rebuilt company file, etc, but it keeps happening.
Steve Gill | Feb 9, 2010 | Reply
Just took a shot at this on my other computer running Windows XP and it worked fine..so I guess chalk this up to ANOTHER Vista 64-bit issue? If I had Vista 32-bit I would try it there as well.
Eugene Monnig | Feb 19, 2010 | Reply
We have QB2009 and have recently installed QB POS 9 (upgrade from a previous version.) We have a new issue with cash sales. When cash sales are sent to QB2009, the cash sales are showing up in the “Cash in Drawer” account, labeled as “Undeposited Funds.” But when we create a bank deposit, these funds do not show up. We have to do a journal entry to correct this, every day. This is new since our upgrade to QB POS 9.0. Any suggestions?
Charlie | Feb 19, 2010 | Reply
Eugene, I would have to have a lot more information to be able to say anything about that. Hard to answer without having hands on the system and seeing how you are entering cash sales, how your preferences are set up, and so forth.
Kelli Collins | Mar 5, 2010 | Reply
@Deb – I’m with you on applying credit memos to bills. The credit memos being applied to the bills you are paying need to be shown on the payment stub.
The main issue I have with QuickBooks is posting dates. I think someone already brought this up. If you have a bill that is dated in December and you post it in January, it posts to December, which screws up your financial statements. You should be able to post a transaction in the current period (month, year, etc.) for a prior period so you don’t change financial statements that have already been submitted.
Joe Luzanski | Mar 8, 2010 | Reply
I’d handle the inventory/COGS transaction by factoring the dollar amount of sales. E.g. sales price ($100) / 1.667 (40% margin) giving $59.99 transferred from inventory to COGS. It’s that simple. I could do it manually if I could disable the averaging.