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I'm a QuickBooks ProAdvisor and have been one for over 20 years and the last few years has convinced me that Intuit is determined to kill the goose that lays th

I'm a QuickBooks ProAdvisor and have been one for over 20 years and the last few years has convinced me that Intuit is determined to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by: 1) Forcing all their customers to migrate to the online version of their program. Many of the clients I've spoken to were happy with and preferred the Desktop version. The Desktop version is faster and can do more than the online version. 2) Throwing major updates at the online version that hides or moves functionality. I work with multiple clients and based on the client their version of QuickBooks can be very different from another's. Even the same client that has multiple businesses and has to use multiple subscriptions could have a different look. I don't know what drives this at Intuit but it's confusing for me and I'm supposed to be the expert. 3) Relentlessly raise prices. Intuit has been annually raising their prices in what appears to be an attempt to eventually price everyone out of their product. Some clients have to pay 200.00 a month for the advanced version for one feature they need to have for their business! The attitude from Intuit feels like "So where else are you going to go?" For most of my adult life I've worked as an accountant that works mainly with QuickBooks but I'm worried that I'm going to have to try to find a new way of supporting myself because Intuit appears to be demonstrating by their recent decisions that they don't need to show loyalty to customers or even keep customers. If they can have a few stay on to pay ridiculous subscription fees that's all they need.

tomrod 3y ago
Why would people not go to Gnucash or Fresh books?
- molsongolden 3y ago
  They are just not as good as QuickBooks and not many accountants are familiar with these other packages. The prices keep increasing but the QuickBooks online functionality is the best out there and it is the platform with which most other tools make sure to integrate.
  - clashandcarry 3y ago
    Also, none of the open source alternatives support simultaneous multiuser access. Users can slowly adapt, but most businesses larger than a sole proprietorship need multiuser capability.
    - wrycoder 3y ago
      This is a big one. I switched from GnuCash to QBO for a non-profit because of that.
    - toyg 3y ago
      One would think it can't be that hard to put together a webapp to freaking sum up some numbers, but nobody seem to want to do it in open source. It could be because it's indeed so easy that it's boring, or could be that anyone with the necessary knowledge of accounting standards makes way more money doing other stuff than coding for free.
      - antiloper 3y ago
        I'd assume that the overlap between capable open source developers and people who enjoy accounting enough to write their own accounting solution is fairly small.
- gwbennett 3y ago
  Quickbooks is currently a necessary evil for me. I have to use it, because that is what my bookkeepers and accountants use. If you want to change either your bookkeeper or your accountant, your new bookkeeper and accountant know how to use it. Every time I have to open up QB, I cringe. Painful! Agree with the points above about updates and $$$ increases. The worse!
- xupybd 3y ago
  Gnucash is hard to use. I recently attempted to help a non profit setup Gnucash. It turned out to be cheaper to get commercial software (Xero) as they were spending too much time on upskilling in Gnucash. They took a week to onboard to the new system and are amazing at how quickly they can do everything they need to do.
bombcar 3y ago
The thing that pisses off the accounting people where I work is how often everything changes. They’re one step from just using excel because it won’t change on them.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  > just using excel because it won’t change on them. Are your accounting people quite young? Excel moves and changes stuff, though not on quite such an aggressive timeline. Modern Office is not like 1990s Office where you buy it and then it doesn't change unless you decide to change it. This is fine, the universe's one constant is change, if we fight it we'll lose, but it's worth calling out that there will be change, just some of these outfits are taking the piss.
  - rvba 3y ago
    Many companies have tons of desginers who need to prove they are needed, so they force change for the sake of change - at the cost of users.
    - andai 3y ago
      It might be like the thing at Google, where people want to get promoted and big changes or new launches are the only way up, regardless of the effect on user experience.
      - Projectiboga 3y ago
        With M$ the bias is towards their certification and training business. They have to change enough to make training seem more important.
        Spooky23 3y ago
        That’s just one leg of the stool. They used to be relentless at driving SQL Server Enterprise adoption. Now it’s shifted to M365 E5, plus accessory subscriptions. PowerBI, Viva and Copilot for whatever are the new legs.
TrueSlacker0 3y ago
Point 2 is driving me crazy. Everything moved to places that now seem illogical.
reaperducer 3y ago
last few years has convinced me that Intuit is determined to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by: Is that you, Arlene? Seriously, everything you list (and more) are things my accountant complains about. You're not alone in being a QuickBooks insider who hates QuickBooks and would love to move their clients onto something else.
cameldrv 3y ago
It's crazy how slow it is to get anything done with Quickbooks Online. The site is slow to respond, it has very limited keyboard shortcuts, if you open it in multiple tabs to cross reference information, it's constantly logging you out of the other tab, and they discontinued the desktop electron wrapper that let you have more than one tab open. Historically, a huge strength of Intuit was the huge population of bookkeepers and accountants who would recommend QuickBooks to clients, but I don't see how anyone would recommend it at this point.
- the_only_law 3y ago
  From quickbooks to TurboTax, Intuit software has been some of the most god awful both to use and to develop against in my experience.
  - jmainguy 3y ago
    Argocd is pretty nice
    - cschmatzler 3y ago
      My team’s product is mainly built on Argo Workflows, and while the idea of the tool is great, we have learned to massively distrust it. It doesn’t always do what you tell it to, or, worse, it tells you it’ll do something and then does something else.
      - technics256 3y ago
        Can you elaborate? Just started building out a new platform centered on it
    - airtonix 3y ago
      [dead]
    - jacooper 3y ago
      Wait, argocd is owned by intuit? It's under the CNCF, is it not?
pharmakom 3y ago
Genuine question: do you find there is creativity and the satisfaction of creating something from nothing in accounting work? It has always seemed so dull from the outside looking in (cue the joes about accountants) but is this the reality? Many people don’t see software engineering as creative but it certainly can be!
- tough 3y ago
  Creative accounting and tax avoidance do exist tho
- Frondo 3y ago
  My sister is an accountant and she genuinely enjoys working with the numbers. She finds it, not exactly fun, but kind of fun? She describes it like every situation is a puzzle she gets to solve, and then maintain. She also likes working with her customers and enjoys those interactions, like she gets a good feeling from helping her customers out. That's enough for her. Not the vocation for me but it's very interesting to talk with her about her experiences, because they're so remote from mine...
  - jimmygrapes 3y ago
    FWIW I share your sister's take. A large part of my job involves accounting and audit/compliance, and few things stimulate me more than trying to figure out "what the fuck were they thinking" and fixing it.
  - saiya-jin 3y ago
    Sounds like some hardcore deep backend software dev jobs (I have similar for more than a decade), but actual creativity is scaled down to few %. Accountants are extremely limited by rigid tools they use and laws they have to adgere to. Then comes given company's 'way we do things here' limit. Take any modern programming language, you start with unique big problem/task, have to crack hundreds little and big problems, often with use of stackoverflow and other webs, but ie hard alghoritmic problems I solve mostly on my own since nobody faced those in exact mix of technologies, data and other constraints. There are sone further limits but my alghoritms are my solid creations, nobody ever questioned them nor made me refactor them for any reason. To outsiders it may look exactly same weird nerd stuff of course. To me, accounting has very little room for creativity, its there but almost microscopic. And the joy you describe is also present, thats there in many jobs that actually create stuff, digital or not
nerdponx 3y ago
This sounds like what Adobe and Microsoft are also doing. It seems like they assume that they are somewhat invincible and therefore can do whatever they want.
- toyg 3y ago
  The sad truth is that they actually are. Digital feudalism is a real thing.
ricardonunez 3y ago
I canceled my subscription a month ago and moved to wave. What an awful piece of software and company. Slow, ads and promos and every interaction, slow, not very intuitive, did I mention slow? The only reason I signed up was because of a deal I got but it was not worth the gray hairs that I got. Edit: intuit and quickbooks
- areyousure 3y ago
  Which software and company is awful? It is not clear from your comment.
  - r00fus 3y ago
    This is a well-deserved Intuit complain-fest.
  - ricardonunez 3y ago
    Intuit, tax and quickbooks. In addition to quickbooks online not being great, Just an example: I own the gmail for my name, somebody used it by mistake on turbo tax so I get their emails. I called their support and explained it to them but I have to give personal info on the account but I don’t own the account. It was like that for years until recently they fix it, although I already had created a filter for it. Similar happened with mint.
no_wizard 3y ago
One thing they are going to start pushing via their online platform is likely things line AR and payments via Melio (their a big investor in the company) and likely push out other vendors in that space as a result. My grapevine understanding is this is less possible with the desktop version because you’d need everyone to upgrade. That’s what I think this is all about
- boppo1 3y ago
  AR? Augmented Reality? Wtf is Intuit gonna do with that?
  - Biganon 3y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounts_receivable https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounts_receivable
drumhead 3y ago
Most users and companies I've encountered want to remain on the desktop version. Its faster, gives them more functionality, its under their control and if they want they can pay or not pay maintenance fee. But the software firms are obsessed with the cloud and so are the heads of the Finance teams, they think it makes them look technically knowledgeable to move to the cloud so this pincer movement is forcing the everyday users onto something they dont want or need. Any cost savings disappear in rapidly rising yearly subs, but by then the people that forced the move are gone and everyone's lumbered with an expensive, clunky restrictive finance system.
- _xivi 3y ago
  > they think it makes them look technically knowledgeable to move to the cloud It's not about looks, it's about locking people to the platform and milking them in a subscription model
  - drumhead 3y ago
    That's the software company, I was referring to management.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ElCapitanMarkla 3y ago
Xero do a similar pricing thing. I have to pay for the $100 a month plan to get multi currencies because I contract to an overseas company. The standard plan which has everything I need but that is 1/3 the price.
- plantain 3y ago
  Xero's been juicing the lemon more and more aggressively every year...
enraged_camel 3y ago
One huge problem with Quickbooks Desktop is that it's hugely expensive to integrate it with anything, be it cloud-based software, or another piece of on-premise software. This inevitably results in it becoming an "information silo", and necessitates stuff like dual data entry (i.e. entering the same information twice, first in QB and then in some other software). In contrast, QB Online has a REST API.
jiveturkey 3y ago
the online thing is one aspect, but even the desktop part is hostile. forced obsolescence when you think you are buying a "perpetual" license. disgusting. i've not found any local solutions that i like, at a cost (perpetual license is a requirement) that i like. so i moved to xero. it's slow and annoying in lots of ways, but it's very usable. some things are less abstract than QB, ie the method of entry for those is closer to just doing a journal entry, i guess this is good or bad depending on the user.
AuthorizedCust 3y ago
> Even the same client that has multiple businesses and has to use multiple subscriptions could have a different look. I don't know what drives this at Intuit but it's confusing for me and I'm supposed to be the expert. I guess that, behind the scenes, Quickbooks might run each client on its own code base or some limited multi-tenancy on a shared code base. So if your clients span those code bases, they could easily be on different versions. And the heuristics for when a code base is upgraded may depend on factors that you can’t see. This is just a hypothetical, but that’s where my money is.
bradgessler 3y ago
It's inevitable that Intuit will snuff out the desktop version of Quickbooks. The question is, what will rise up in its place? Will it be QBO or does something else have a shot? I'm curious what the secret sauce is that Intuit/QB has provided advisors, like yourself, to stay on their platform for the past 20 years. What would it take for another accounting software company to get you, and others in your same situation, to commit to their platform for the next 20 years?
xtiansimon 3y ago
> “…I'm worried that I'm going to have to try to find a new way of supporting myself…” What? I work in accounting and I was reading your post with curiosity until this. How do you support yourself—being a QB Pro advisor or as an accountant?

tomrod 3y ago

Why would people not go to Gnucash or Fresh books?

molsongolden 3y ago
They are just not as good as QuickBooks and not many accountants are familiar with these other packages. The prices keep increasing but the QuickBooks online functionality is the best out there and it is the platform with which most other tools make sure to integrate.
- clashandcarry 3y ago
  Also, none of the open source alternatives support simultaneous multiuser access. Users can slowly adapt, but most businesses larger than a sole proprietorship need multiuser capability.
  - wrycoder 3y ago
    This is a big one. I switched from GnuCash to QBO for a non-profit because of that.
  - toyg 3y ago
    One would think it can't be that hard to put together a webapp to freaking sum up some numbers, but nobody seem to want to do it in open source. It could be because it's indeed so easy that it's boring, or could be that anyone with the necessary knowledge of accounting standards makes way more money doing other stuff than coding for free.
    - antiloper 3y ago
      I'd assume that the overlap between capable open source developers and people who enjoy accounting enough to write their own accounting solution is fairly small.
gwbennett 3y ago
Quickbooks is currently a necessary evil for me. I have to use it, because that is what my bookkeepers and accountants use. If you want to change either your bookkeeper or your accountant, your new bookkeeper and accountant know how to use it. Every time I have to open up QB, I cringe. Painful! Agree with the points above about updates and $$$ increases. The worse!
xupybd 3y ago
Gnucash is hard to use. I recently attempted to help a non profit setup Gnucash. It turned out to be cheaper to get commercial software (Xero) as they were spending too much time on upskilling in Gnucash. They took a week to onboard to the new system and are amazing at how quickly they can do everything they need to do.

bombcar 3y ago

The thing that pisses off the accounting people where I work is how often everything changes. They’re one step from just using excel because it won’t change on them.

tialaramex 3y ago
> just using excel because it won’t change on them. Are your accounting people quite young? Excel moves and changes stuff, though not on quite such an aggressive timeline. Modern Office is not like 1990s Office where you buy it and then it doesn't change unless you decide to change it. This is fine, the universe's one constant is change, if we fight it we'll lose, but it's worth calling out that there will be change, just some of these outfits are taking the piss.
- rvba 3y ago
  Many companies have tons of desginers who need to prove they are needed, so they force change for the sake of change - at the cost of users.
  - andai 3y ago
    It might be like the thing at Google, where people want to get promoted and big changes or new launches are the only way up, regardless of the effect on user experience.
    - Projectiboga 3y ago
      With M$ the bias is towards their certification and training business. They have to change enough to make training seem more important.
      - Spooky23 3y ago
        That’s just one leg of the stool. They used to be relentless at driving SQL Server Enterprise adoption. Now it’s shifted to M365 E5, plus accessory subscriptions. PowerBI, Viva and Copilot for whatever are the new legs.

TrueSlacker0 3y ago

Point 2 is driving me crazy. Everything moved to places that now seem illogical.

reaperducer 3y ago

last few years has convinced me that Intuit is determined to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by: Is that you, Arlene? Seriously, everything you list (and more) are things my accountant complains about. You're not alone in being a QuickBooks insider who hates QuickBooks and would love to move their clients onto something else.

cameldrv 3y ago

It's crazy how slow it is to get anything done with Quickbooks Online. The site is slow to respond, it has very limited keyboard shortcuts, if you open it in multiple tabs to cross reference information, it's constantly logging you out of the other tab, and they discontinued the desktop electron wrapper that let you have more than one tab open. Historically, a huge strength of Intuit was the huge population of bookkeepers and accountants who would recommend QuickBooks to clients, but I don't see how anyone would recommend it at this point.

the_only_law 3y ago
From quickbooks to TurboTax, Intuit software has been some of the most god awful both to use and to develop against in my experience.
- jmainguy 3y ago
  Argocd is pretty nice
  - cschmatzler 3y ago
    My team’s product is mainly built on Argo Workflows, and while the idea of the tool is great, we have learned to massively distrust it. It doesn’t always do what you tell it to, or, worse, it tells you it’ll do something and then does something else.
    - technics256 3y ago
      Can you elaborate? Just started building out a new platform centered on it
  - airtonix 3y ago
    [dead]
  - jacooper 3y ago
    Wait, argocd is owned by intuit? It's under the CNCF, is it not?

pharmakom 3y ago

Genuine question: do you find there is creativity and the satisfaction of creating something from nothing in accounting work? It has always seemed so dull from the outside looking in (cue the joes about accountants) but is this the reality? Many people don’t see software engineering as creative but it certainly can be!

tough 3y ago
Creative accounting and tax avoidance do exist tho
Frondo 3y ago
My sister is an accountant and she genuinely enjoys working with the numbers. She finds it, not exactly fun, but kind of fun? She describes it like every situation is a puzzle she gets to solve, and then maintain. She also likes working with her customers and enjoys those interactions, like she gets a good feeling from helping her customers out. That's enough for her. Not the vocation for me but it's very interesting to talk with her about her experiences, because they're so remote from mine...
- jimmygrapes 3y ago
  FWIW I share your sister's take. A large part of my job involves accounting and audit/compliance, and few things stimulate me more than trying to figure out "what the fuck were they thinking" and fixing it.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  Sounds like some hardcore deep backend software dev jobs (I have similar for more than a decade), but actual creativity is scaled down to few %. Accountants are extremely limited by rigid tools they use and laws they have to adgere to. Then comes given company's 'way we do things here' limit. Take any modern programming language, you start with unique big problem/task, have to crack hundreds little and big problems, often with use of stackoverflow and other webs, but ie hard alghoritmic problems I solve mostly on my own since nobody faced those in exact mix of technologies, data and other constraints. There are sone further limits but my alghoritms are my solid creations, nobody ever questioned them nor made me refactor them for any reason. To outsiders it may look exactly same weird nerd stuff of course. To me, accounting has very little room for creativity, its there but almost microscopic. And the joy you describe is also present, thats there in many jobs that actually create stuff, digital or not

nerdponx 3y ago

This sounds like what Adobe and Microsoft are also doing. It seems like they assume that they are somewhat invincible and therefore can do whatever they want.

toyg 3y ago
The sad truth is that they actually are. Digital feudalism is a real thing.

ricardonunez 3y ago

I canceled my subscription a month ago and moved to wave. What an awful piece of software and company. Slow, ads and promos and every interaction, slow, not very intuitive, did I mention slow? The only reason I signed up was because of a deal I got but it was not worth the gray hairs that I got. Edit: intuit and quickbooks

areyousure 3y ago
Which software and company is awful? It is not clear from your comment.
- r00fus 3y ago
  This is a well-deserved Intuit complain-fest.
- ricardonunez 3y ago
  Intuit, tax and quickbooks. In addition to quickbooks online not being great, Just an example: I own the gmail for my name, somebody used it by mistake on turbo tax so I get their emails. I called their support and explained it to them but I have to give personal info on the account but I don’t own the account. It was like that for years until recently they fix it, although I already had created a filter for it. Similar happened with mint.

no_wizard 3y ago

One thing they are going to start pushing via their online platform is likely things line AR and payments via Melio (their a big investor in the company) and likely push out other vendors in that space as a result. My grapevine understanding is this is less possible with the desktop version because you’d need everyone to upgrade. That’s what I think this is all about

boppo1 3y ago
AR? Augmented Reality? Wtf is Intuit gonna do with that?
- Biganon 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounts_receivable https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounts_receivable

drumhead 3y ago

Most users and companies I've encountered want to remain on the desktop version. Its faster, gives them more functionality, its under their control and if they want they can pay or not pay maintenance fee. But the software firms are obsessed with the cloud and so are the heads of the Finance teams, they think it makes them look technically knowledgeable to move to the cloud so this pincer movement is forcing the everyday users onto something they dont want or need. Any cost savings disappear in rapidly rising yearly subs, but by then the people that forced the move are gone and everyone's lumbered with an expensive, clunky restrictive finance system.

_xivi 3y ago
> they think it makes them look technically knowledgeable to move to the cloud It's not about looks, it's about locking people to the platform and milking them in a subscription model
- drumhead 3y ago
  That's the software company, I was referring to management.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ElCapitanMarkla 3y ago

Xero do a similar pricing thing. I have to pay for the $100 a month plan to get multi currencies because I contract to an overseas company. The standard plan which has everything I need but that is 1/3 the price.

plantain 3y ago
Xero's been juicing the lemon more and more aggressively every year...

enraged_camel 3y ago

One huge problem with Quickbooks Desktop is that it's hugely expensive to integrate it with anything, be it cloud-based software, or another piece of on-premise software. This inevitably results in it becoming an "information silo", and necessitates stuff like dual data entry (i.e. entering the same information twice, first in QB and then in some other software). In contrast, QB Online has a REST API.

jiveturkey 3y ago

the online thing is one aspect, but even the desktop part is hostile. forced obsolescence when you think you are buying a "perpetual" license. disgusting. i've not found any local solutions that i like, at a cost (perpetual license is a requirement) that i like. so i moved to xero. it's slow and annoying in lots of ways, but it's very usable. some things are less abstract than QB, ie the method of entry for those is closer to just doing a journal entry, i guess this is good or bad depending on the user.

AuthorizedCust 3y ago

> Even the same client that has multiple businesses and has to use multiple subscriptions could have a different look. I don't know what drives this at Intuit but it's confusing for me and I'm supposed to be the expert. I guess that, behind the scenes, Quickbooks might run each client on its own code base or some limited multi-tenancy on a shared code base. So if your clients span those code bases, they could easily be on different versions. And the heuristics for when a code base is upgraded may depend on factors that you can’t see. This is just a hypothetical, but that’s where my money is.

bradgessler 3y ago

It's inevitable that Intuit will snuff out the desktop version of Quickbooks. The question is, what will rise up in its place? Will it be QBO or does something else have a shot? I'm curious what the secret sauce is that Intuit/QB has provided advisors, like yourself, to stay on their platform for the past 20 years. What would it take for another accounting software company to get you, and others in your same situation, to commit to their platform for the next 20 years?

xtiansimon 3y ago

> “…I'm worried that I'm going to have to try to find a new way of supporting myself…” What? I work in accounting and I was reading your post with curiosity until this. How do you support yourself—being a QB Pro advisor or as an accountant?