Keri Smith and I started a company earlier this year. When setting up a business, advice comes in from everyone from parents to roommates to lawyers, etc especially with regard to financial advice. We take it all with a grain of salt, but most of our advisors suggested we buy Quickbooks for our small business accounting. People rave about it ie "your interns can run it," "it's so easy for your accountant at the end of the year," "the program practically runs itself."
Everyone in our company is relatively tech savvy, so this is a no brainer, right? I picked up Quickbooks for Mac. Upon installing the program, there were a plethora of options, and I'd rather be spending my time managing our artists instead of bookkeeping. Thus the lovely and talented finance whiz Shamisa agreed to handle our bookkeeping for us. Yay.
One of our first tasks was to install the program on a laptop other than mine for Shamisa and also ensure that Quickbooks was accessible for my business partner, who is based in LA (I'm in New York). Easy, right? Notsomuch. We tried logging in and the password I had set up didn't work. Hmm, weird, but no biggie, we'll just go through the password retrieval process, right?
It turns out, the password "hint" is "Who is your childhood hero?" I have been inspired by many people throughout my life and tried to plug in anyone that could fit this category from John Lennon to my family to my first grade teacher. Nothing worked, and we've been locked out of attempting.
Ok, whatever, my fault for not remembering what I had initially plugged in as my "childhood hero." I did think it was odd that an accounting program would use a non-quantifiable question for its password retrieval process, but like I said, mybad as the consumer.
I'm lucky enough to have a small army of interns here at Whitesmith Entertainment, and asked that intern cum apprentice, Katrina aka @ladymelisande, call Quickbooks and sort this out so our bookkeeper and LA partner can have access to the Quickbooks program that we purchased and our files.
After over half a dozen calls totaling at least 6 hours (and I swear that is a conservative estimate) on the phone with Quickbooks, we still do not have our password, nor have they reset it for us. They have asked Katrina to upload and send them a file while there server was down multiple times. They have told us to get a new password it will cost $79. Yesterday they told Katrina they'd call back with our new password, and no one ever called. This has been going on for weeks. Literally. I kid you not.
We're going to try contacting Quickbooks again today, but our faith in this recommended accounting program has been broken. Not only have they clearly not been helpful with a simple task such as re-setting a password, but Quickbooks is actually hurting our business since every hour Katrina spends with their customer "service" she is not working on our artists.
I have a policy about not posting anything out to the universe that is negative. But, I will make an exception today for Quickbooks as I feel the world has to know this.
If you or someone you know works for Quickbooks, please give us our password or let us re-set one, and no, I don't want to pay you $79 to do so.
To my wide network of friends and colleagues, many of which are opening or running small businesses in this 2009 world we live in: I advise against purchasing Quickbooks if you don't want your staff looking like this:
Although I have not tried these programs, here are some alternative accounting software programs in the meantime, as if I'm going to vent to the universe, I'd like to leave you with options:
If anyone has positive experiences with an accounting software company they'd like to share, lemme know and I'll post the link up to spread the word.
Love,
Em Wizzle
Emily@WhitesmithEnt.com
