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
6 comments:
HI there! I am so sorry to hear you have had a negative experience with QuickBooks! Password re-setting is a very sensitive thing, because small business owners have their sensitive data entered into their QuickBooks files. Please email me at alison_ball@intuit.com and we can see what we can do to help.
Hi Emily it's Nari.
Couple things, one Intuit customer service is horrible, and their only saving grace is that so is customer service for almost every other software product.
Second is that you must setup a secure password management system, even if it's just a text file on 2 encrypted USB thumb drives (one for you and one for Keri). There are people who have lost their gmail, hotmail accounts--forever.
Third the Quickbooks Online service would work better for you, because it's web based, so everyone can access it from either coast, without having to install licensed copies of any software.
hope this helps.
I've heard nothing but horror stories about Intuit customer service, and also I hear Quickbooks for Mac sucks.
If you stick with Quickbooks (which, unfortunately, is still the industry standard) I too would recommend Quickbooks Online. Just within the past month or two they have FINALLY made it compatible with Safari 3 on the Mac (won't work with Safari 4 beta or with Firefox on the Mac).
Just catching up on my blog reading and saw this. We've used QB for 6 years at the music school and its greatest weakness is customer service. This year they F'd up our state tax withholding for our 30 teachers and my bookkeeper's experience in dealing with them was similar to yours. And while THEY didn't receive a fee for resolving the situation, I compensate our bookkeeper well, so we felt a hit due to their incompetence. In summary: I feel your pain!
I hope the many other aspects of startup have been a better experience for you!
Emily, I stubled on your blog through Facebook. Pete Nellius (the younger) here.
I thought I would put in my advice for this problem. A lot of my business customers tend to go with software available at www.myob.com for their accounting for Mac. From what I hear it imports many popular file formats. I suggest checking it out. There's even a free trial on there.
I get complaints all the time about Quickbooks for Mac. Supposedly it's rushed software. Hopefully they do something about it in the next release because it was obviously nowhere near ready to be released when it was.
Hope things are well, let me know if you have other Mac-related questions.
I'm sorry about what happened to your business when you used Quickbooks. I was actually planning to buy it, but I took a look on some reviews first. But then I saw your blog, and it had me thinking whether I should buy it or not. Maybe I'll get that other program instead. My friends were telling me something about a Peachtree accounting software which is, according to them, very useful and a very effective tool for your accounting needs in your small business. Thanks for sharing your experience with us, by the way. I hope that the other visitors will be enlightened as well.
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