BRIAN MORRIS TECHNOLOGY SERVICES

QuickBooks’ miserable mandatory upgrades

Every three years, the dreaded mandatory upgrade notice comes from Intuit notifying customers that they must pay for a new version of QuickBooks in order to be able to use integrated online applications such as payrolls, credit cards, etc.

I had to move from QuickBooks 2000 to 2003, then to 2006, and each one was much slower than the last with no beneficial new features (sounds like Vista…).

This time was the worst.  I bought QuickBooks 2008 a while back and saved it for just this occasion.  With limited time, I put it off until May 29 (the sunset was June 1).  Everything seemed to go fine at first. However, each time I subsequently opened QuickBooks it would forget what windows I had open during the last session.  It should be able to remember this setting from 2006.  This same problem happened with 2003 to 2006.  The solution is to go to Edit menu, Preferences, Desktop View, My Preferences tab, “Save when closing company.”

That weekend, I wanted to synchronize my contacts from QuickBooks to Outlook 2000 like I’ve always done.  When I tried, it made me download a sync application and install it (the 2006 version had a small, built-in sync program).  I had to close Outlook for it to install, but when I went to open Outlook, it wouldn’t open.  I finally uninstalled the sync app and closed all my programs and then Outlook opened.  That scared me…

Then I noticed other things..  If I tried to use a right-click Sent To – Mail Recipient or a built-in email function, it wouldn’t work.  Many times I couldn’t get my Outlook to open again, even with the sync app gone.  I finally figured out that with QuickBooks 2008 open, Outlook won’t open and many of it’s functions are messed up.  There aren’t any add-ins for QB in Outlook.

I finally figured out the solution: Edit menu, Preferences, Send Forms, My Preferences tab, change “Send E-mail Using” to QuickBooks E-mail from Outlook.  This will disentangle the programs.  Errr.

On the following Monday (June 1), I was reviewing my automatic credit card billing through the integration via Intuit Payment Solutions/Innovative Merchant/whatever-they-are.  All my automatic credit card billing was gone!  Being that they were supposed to hit on June 5, I called on Monday for support.  The only nice thing about their phone support is that a live person answers everytime..   I got transferred to support and they had never heard of my problem.  I had someone call me back and he reset something in QuickBooks, but the customers’ charges were still missing.  He said that they did get reports from other customers and that they were working on a solution.  I called over 6 times over the next week, left two polite messages with the same technician, with no return call.  On June 5, since the tech wouldn’t call me back, I asked for tech support and the person told me they were still working on it…  That’s helpful.

I’m very happy to report that I received a satisfaction survey in my email about my support call.  Ha!  I reported honestly how I felt..

Finally, this morning the tech left a message saying that I installed QB on June 1.  Since it was past the sunset date, all the data was deleted.  I called back and left him a message saying that I have logs to prove that I installed it on May 29 and that I was very unhappy that he wouldn’t return my calls and that I was very unsatisfied with his company that they would be so dumb as to delete customer data.  (I bet the problem is not of deleting, but of them not being able to figure out how to fix it.)

I stayed home this morning and spent hours organizing my credit card forms and reentering all my auto credit card charges.  That was fun.

Message to Intuit: people hate your company, they hold their nose while using your products (except for older versions).  Stop making products (QuickBooks, Quicken, TurboTax) that get worse rather than better.  Give us the option to pay an annual fee to keep older versions working and only come out with new version when you actually need to.  Oh, and give the people in charge of Innovative Merchant and kick in the pants for me.