If you follow me on twitter, you will have seen me having a conversation with someone very nice who works for Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks. It started when I tweeted about how much I hate QuickBooks. The conversation went on for many tweets. The sad part is that, despite the good efforts of the person manning the QuickBooks twitter account, their “help” was marginal at best, and completely useless for the most part. I do feel bad for them; I know they are trying their best. But if you look at the QuickBooks profile page for twitter, every single tweet is someone complaining. I didn’t see a single “Gee thanks @quickbooks for making my life easier” not one. That is sad. This tweet from them really exemplifies it all. Really? Your support for why it might be my computer and not the software is that not EVERYONE has a problem with speed? This means that lots of people do!
So why don’t they fix it?
It all comes downs to economics. It always does, by the way. But for those of you that don’t know competitive environments, let me give you a short lesson:
QuickBooks has a de facto monopoly on the small business accounting market. They are by far the most common choice. What does this mean? Monopolies have market power:
Though monopolists are constrained by consumer demand, they are not price takers, but instead either price-setters or quantity setters. This allows the firm to set a price which is higher than that which would be found in a similar but more competitive industry, allowing them economic profit in both the long and short run.
From Wikipedia:
In a competitive environment, if people are not serving customers properly, new entrants will enter the market and draw customers away. In a monopoly, the firm decides what price or quantity to produce at. There is a given level of demand for small business accounting software. Especially in our heavily regulated world, businesses really HAVE to keep books. And using a computer is generally faster. So they have to buy something. Enter QuickBooks. QuickBooks can select a price that allows them to cover their cost (not technically, but this is the remedial version). However many customers buy at the product is fine. And then they increase profits by getting more money from each customer who HAS to buy their software at a given price level. Enter the barrage of merchant services, payroll, credit cards, loans, etc.
So, why does QuickBooks have mediocre software? Because no one can scale up enough to compete with them. When Microsoft decides to stop competing with them, what hope do you think a small startup has? Not much.
But wait Andrew, don’t you recommend QuickBooks to your clients?
Yes, I usually do. Why? Because they are a monopoly which means they set the standard which makes certain things easier. And for most clients keeping it fool proof is more important that increasing speeds of their workflow.
BUT
If you are willing to invest a little time (which can be painful for a business owner) there are LOTS of great software tools out there to switch to. If you are just starting out, you have it even easier. Pick something new and go for it.
I decided to write this post because I wanted people to know my official opinion on accounting software. There are lots of options that you can use and if you can, I would recommend one of those. But they might require some more work (up front) to find and get going the way you want. QuickBooks is the easy choice. And for some people, the easy choice is the best choice.
For people that about technical stuff, keep reading. If you don’t, you can stop now.
Why does QuickBooks suck? Proprietary database. Here is the example: I have 18,402 transactions in the company file for my CPA firm. This goes back 42 months. The total file size is 72.5625 megabytes. That means that each 253.6 transactions take a MB of space.
Why? It’s just numbers and text. No images, sounds, video, nothing. Each transaction has an average of 100 characters. That means that it takes 1 MB of storage to store 25,600 letters and numbers. This is ridiculous. In addition, the page file size is nuts for something like this. In our firm, we had to create a separate server to hold QuickBooks files (we have lots, for all our clients) because the memory leak in the program was paging out the entire server. It will take ALL the performance you throw at it, and use it up.
Why? Because they built their own database decades ago and each “new” version of QuickBooks is simply more crap… ahem… features bolted onto this chassis.
Why invest more in doing a rebuild when I get to pick the price? Why not keep the database proprietary so it makes it even more difficult for customers to leave, maintaining my market dominance and pricing power?
What you end up with is a Twitter feed full of users complaining. We all hate it, but have to use it anyways.
So what’s the next suggestion? We’d love to ditch Quickbooks both for ourselves, as well as for our customers. I’ve evaluated quite a few options, including gnucash, sqlledger, and turbo cash, as well as ERP offerings that have accounting modules, like Compiere and Postbooks. Typically all of them are backed by an sql-compliant database. We prefer and promote open source solutions, as there are opportunities for integration and automation. None of them have all the “features” of Quickbooks, but I’m pretty sure the great majority of the features aren’t used by most small businesses.
From a technical standpoint, all of them are far superior to the Quickbooks architecture. What I do NOT know is how well they function from an accountant’s standpoint. What choices would you support? What if we need to change accountants? Will they be willing to work with an unfamiliar software solution? Will it cost significantly more? What are the key features we should be looking most closely at?
You’ve told us why Quickbooks sucks, and I agree completely. Now, how about some guidance regarding the alternatives?
So, the only real advantage to using Quickbooks is it ubiquity. This sh!t is everywhere! LOL
I Started a small computer repair business last year and decided to to use quick books. We are using the base 2012 edition but we are using it like a cash register but we dont have the POS module. Let me tell you , it is an absolute nightmare.
We don’t carry stock we just bring things in from our suppliers as needed, so the process to get a new customer a new product is absolutely a horrible experience.
create new invoice
add customer
customer title
customer contact
costomer name (these are 3 difference fields for all the same things, and you need to fill in at least two of them)
address
phone number
mailing address (this is what shows on the invoice, you have to basically manually put the phone number in this box for it to show up on the invoice)
save
check date (it doesnt always have the current date, it will hold the date of the last invoice you edited, maybe a return from two years ago(though we should not be able to edit and invoice for obvious reasons))
add item, oh the item doesnt exist yet, add new item
add new
product catagory
name product
describe product (name do not show on invoice, only description)
cost price
retail price
income account
tax’s
save
“you must save before you close or else changed will not be kept…” I KNOW, I JUST HIT SAVE
Purchase order
select supplier
add item
quantity
(dont hit enter or it will save and close that PO and open a new blank one)
check tax type
if you add then remove an item from the PO the total will not update
“total cannot be greater than cost of items….”
manually add up new total and change it
save and close
you order and pay your supplier
Receive PO
open an entirely different window that looks exactly like the new PO window, Receive the PO
close that
Pay bills
manually find the name of the supplier with no indication which suppliers you owe money to
click on it
it tells you how many PO and the total, but it doesnt fill in the TOTAL, you have to do this manually
method of payment
paybills
“you have paid a bill, would you like to pay another” no
now you bank account/credit card balance SHOULD be in order
your customer comes in for their $12 item….
receive payment, this lists the payments your are owed, it should show the pay bills window Whats Up
select the payment type and put the check/cheque # for some reason.
the invoice has now been changed to include the ugly “paid” stamp with the date under it
so now you can go open the Create invoice window and manually scroll back through all the other invoices you made since you made this one, assuming the correct date was on it and it didnt get slotted into a date that happened last November. Or you can go to the customer area and find the name of the customer then sift through the many two-of-a-kind invoices each duplicate subtly marked invoice or paid
to find the one you want and double click on it.
once open you can print it on a full-sized sheet of paper with the ugly 1983 invoice template that is possible to change but after 14 minutes of caring you quickly realize life is passing you by while you edit text box sizes. I have received dot-matrix packing slips with better designs than this paid product comes with.
now that your customer has paid and left you you can see how much money should be in your bank, and its friday so your gonna do a deposit before you leave…
Make deposit
it shows all the people that have “paid” you check them off and say deposit.
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I don’t think I embellished anything, I may have even over simplified it. Some steps seem easy when written down but if you received two small orders a week, each with products that you havent had in the past, it takes about 20 minutes to process each receipt.
The one thing i will say is that the help file (which is open be default, ….a feature which, if nothing else, is telling of its (non)ease of use) is moderately useful.
I hate quickbooks, and would never purchase anything made by intuit ever again. Also I just this minute coined the nick name QookBooks because its so complicated to use that the books could easily be tampered with and no one short of forensic accountant could detect it.
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I am a self taught computer expert for the past 12 years, could solve most any problem or figure out any program in less than 5 minutes, have created multiple website in html, sql, css etc, learned multiple os platforms, done hardware mods for 10 years on consoles, the list of skills goes on but I cannot for the life of me learn to use the arcaic Quickbooks accounting software. I also took acounting in Highschool and passed, with a decent grade.
been using QB 2012 for 8 months, hate it. now I struggling to find a way to ditch it altogether.
thanks
I can feel your pain! It sounds like you have fallen into the trap that QuickBooks created with their monopoly. “I started business, therefore I need the standard business software which is QuickBooks, right?”
In this case, I do know that there are some shortcuts that you could be using to help streamline things. You don’t need to receive POs and issue them, or have unique items for every customer as some examples.
But really, you picked the standard tool and it has way too many features for what your business needs. I would consider looking at something like Square Register, or Wave Accounting for you needs.
Thanks for writing in!
Andrew
Have any of you guys looked at Acumatica? its an ERP solution that I was hired to create a conversion tool for (Solomon, Quickbooks ect –> Acumatica) The only reason I suggest it is because in my use I have found it to be quick, easy to implement and customize to fit a companies needs, and also from a technology standpoint it does some impressive stuff (Direct CIL injection ect).