BloggernityQuickBooks Or Rather Intuit Sucks
ByIntuit Sucks. in case you missed that first part, let me repeat it. Intuit Sucks. Allow me to explain.
I bought 2008 QuickBooks Pro and installed it. It opens fine, it does what it’s supposed to do. And then I click on the “close” button and it just sits there on my screen. It refuses to close.
So I have to open up my Task Manager, find the QuickBooks .exe file, and shut it down.
Now, I know a bit about computers. I know that the problem is probably a conflict of some sort with a driver on my computer. It’s probably not Intuit’s fault.
However, I went online to their web site and couldn’t find an answer. No big deal. The big deal was that there’s no way to get help from them without paying them $79 up front.
All I wanted them to do is help me get their product working properly on my computer. I even called the corporate office. The receptionist told me the same thing. You can’t get technical help until you pay $79.
Only a software company would have that level of arrogance. We’re so big, we’re so dominant, we just don’t give a damn about you. Pay us up front to help you or go screw yourself.
Imagine if I told all my clients, you can’t call me for help or answers unless you pay first with your credit card. Then we’ll talk. I’d be living under a bridge in a cardboard box inside a month.
I just looked online. The average price I saw for intuit’s QuickBooks Pro 2008 was $130. So the $79 fee is 60 percent of the price I paid for QuickBooks Pro 2008.
Imagine if you went to your car dealership a week after you bought the car and said, “the car has a slight problem. The engine doesn’t want to shut down and I have to pull the cable to the battery to shut it off.” Then imagine the service person says, “Fine. Pay us sixty percent of the cars original price and then we’ll look at it.”
“Let’s see, I paid $17,000 for the car last week so you want $10,200 to look under the hood. Hmmm…I’ll just put that on my credit card.”
Did I mention that Intuit Sucks?
Originally posted 2008-10-18 11:21:07. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
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21 Comments
March 24th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Intuit sucks. They will disable the email function of my QuickBooks if I do not pay them another $80 – $100.
May 5th, 2009 at 10:07 am
I started with QB 97, it was fairly good and hardly ever crashed. Then I upgraded to 2005. Much bigger and slower loading. Crashed a few times, the last time it corrupted my company file. Unfortunately I hadn’t been making backups as often as I should have. The QB tech recommended I upgrade to 2008 and use the convert older file feature. No luck. Now I’m running QB 08. It has to be one of the most bloated programs out there. It takes fully as long as XP to load on my PC (which isn’t exactly a cutting edge PC). Also, it seems to crash much more often, and I never have been able to get the multi-user networked part working. And believe me, I’ve tried everything in the books and then some. Definately would not recommend QB anymore. They (and their software) have gotten too big for their own good.
May 5th, 2009 at 10:29 am
I feel your pain, Nelson. I’m still using Quickbooks because I finally got it working but I’m busy looking at other options. Something liteweight, fast, and easy to understand.
If anyone has any suggestions for alternatives to Quickbooks that fit those criteria, I’d love to hear about them.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:24 am
We use QB where I work. I detest it. Google should come up with an accounting program. It would probably trump QB without even trying.
I second the “bloated” comment. That and we call it “slow books” around here because it takes a full five minutes just to boot up. And don’t even think of trying to open/use another program while it’s booting because it will lock up the whole system. And this is on a newer computer, not ancient tech.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
To give you another perspective on Intuit’s tactics. they are making as much money off of the financial institutions as they are from the general public that purchases their quicken software. They charge the banks thousands of dollars to be listed in the downloads directory. Even though the downloads are freely available on the open financial exchange. They also go to the vendors of financial institutions to extort money, by saying that they have to be “certified” to offer these downloads and the directory listing.
reality is, fewer and fewer people are using quicken. It is a dying / failing product as more online financial management solutions become available. Within 3-5 years, all of these capabilities will be available right within online banking or through a number of online (often free) services like Mint.com
So currently, Intuit is trying to suck as much money out of this old dog, as they can get. Myra, commented on Google! Give it a couple of years and that will happen. Intuit is heading into a rough period for them. They are rapidly losing their grip on this industry.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:05 am
“Sucks” is too kind a word for what Intuit has done to its customers. For way over a year now, they have heard their customer rail about the “new” online banking interface only to ignore them. My guess is that they will try (it will be try in my case) to sell us the new & improved interface (old version) in QB2010. I’m not buying. I’ll get back to spreadsheets first.
August 8th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
I wish I had read this before I got involed, this company is the worst!!!!!!!!!!!! Even their customer services sucks!!!!
BUYER BEWARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!111
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Immoral company. Running 2007 for Mac on OS 10.4. Bought a new MacBook running 10.6 (VERY MINOR UPGRADE for those unfamiliar with Macs).
2007 will not register when installed on 10.6!
WTF?!?
Companies official stance is “2007 is quite old”. You will need to upgrade for another $199! Mind you the software runs just fine, but without registering, you only have 15 uses and then need to delete and reinstall!
November 19th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Intuit is one of the WORST companies I have ever come across. As someone who has worked extensively in the software industry I can attest that they are #1 in poor customer service, buggy software, arrogant upgrade and transfer policies as well as they hold their clients hostage to crap unwanted services and service fees down their throats. I have never encountered a more irritating company in my 20 + years of computers. NEVER. I cannot wait to see the day where they go out of business. I EFFING HATE INTUIT !!!
December 1st, 2009 at 3:16 pm
I cannot agree more strongly. Intuit really is a horrible company to deal with. I purchased QB Premier Pro 2009 in July as an upgrade to a previous version that no longer worked with my email client, Thunderbird. After to upgrading my OS to Windows 7, QB 2009 was no longer able to print or email invoices for my clients. Intuit’s answer, 1) pay us $60.00 service charge and we’ll troubleshoot with you, but we don’t have a fix for that or 2) you’ll need to buy QB 2010, at full price, even though your software is less than 6 months old because it’s the only product we support for Windows 7.
So, idiot that I am, I purchase it, confident that it will fix my problems, only to find out, the company policy is to ONLY allow emailing of forms from Outlook, Outlook Express or Windows Mail, NONE of which are available with Windows 7. As a user of Thunderbird, I don’t want to use a microsoft email client and don’t see why a) intuit will only allow it or b) this wasn’t stated clearly in the system requirements.
I too hate Intuit and want the world to know!
December 10th, 2009 at 11:07 am
I just spent two days and a total of 4 hours on a customer support lin repairing the Bug filled R9 ‘upgrade’ for my QB 2009. It destroyed my ability to generate PDF files and then proceeded to make both my old and new Datafiles inaccessible! I had to resort to generating HAND WRITTEN invoices yesterday in order to get shipments out. Do not hit that R9 upgrade button unless you have a bunch of repair time and enjoy de–bugging your system!
December 19th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
I have the Quickbooks 2009…had to call customer service to get the software registered…was on the call for 1 hour and 31 minutes…over an hour on hold because I refuse to give a credit card number for the so called service plan…I asked the non English speaking rep to transfer me to a supervisor…she refused…out right refused…thank god there are other programs out there that do what Quickbooks does…you are completely correct….Intuit SUCKS…
December 19th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Just a few comments…I am an accountant and have to agree with all the comments posted. First to comment on t Cabrinha’s post Intuit recent purchased Mint.com (in addition to Paycycle) because they more than likely saw the writing on the wall and in an effort to stay “big” will find a way to charge the end –user for those services. In regards to the recent problems regarding the updates and QB 2009, be sure to stop by my blog (http://www.bricodaily.blogspot.com/) for the latest regarding the continuing problems with the R9 update. Intuit recently released the R10 update, but that still has not resolved all the problems thus an R11 update is on the way.
Their (Intuit) business model is getting a bit old and they are moving toward an online accounting solution like QB Online Edition (thus buying Mint) for all of their service offerings. What most small business owners do not realize is there are quite a few solutions already out there and they should switch to those asap. Right now there is Netsuite, Accountants World’s Accounting Relief, Working Point and others. These solutions allow small business owners to work from anywhere (even on their smartphones) and have anytime access to their data.
My main reason for not liking Intuit is their deceptive marketing practices. Intuit plays both sides against the middle. On one end they sell to the small business owner telling them that their software is so easy that they don’t need an accountant. Then they turn around and come to us accountants and tell us that we should sign up for their Pro Advisor program so that once the small business owner screws up their books we can come in and be the savior all the while Intuit is getting money from both the small business owner and accountants. Sorry Intuit I’m not buying it. I can use your software just fine without purchasing your Pro Advisor membership and still service my clients with the highest level of professionalism and expertise. I could go on and on (esp. about how cloud accounting solutions are cheaper to implement than boxed software) but I digress.
April 1st, 2010 at 11:37 am
Please add me to the “Quickbooks sucks” list. THEY SUCK. I’ve been using QuickBooks since ’96. The so-called “small business” bookkeeping software. I cannot even handle my very very small business. Yes, I have a multi-thousand dollars coporation! Anyway, a few years ago I was having lots of problems with QB. After many many many calls to support I was told that my data file was too big and that the only way to solve that problem was to upgrade to Enterprise Solutions to the tune of $3,000. Unforunately, I bought their mantra hook, line and sinker. After using it (and after converting the datafile)I kept on experiencing the same problems and then talked to somebody different in support who told me that Enterprise Solutions would have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on the pronblems I was experiencing supposedly related to a data file that was too large. Oh, great. Then come to find out that support is something like $800 a year. AND now that I have a new Windows 7 computer Enterprise Solutions IS NOT COMPATIBALE with Windows 7 and, golly, gosh, they had a “deal” for me. It would only cost $2,500 to upgrade to Enterprise Soltuions 9.0. What a deal! They can suck eggs.
April 1st, 2010 at 3:27 pm
Boy, Cindy, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard Intuit Sucks, I’d retire to the south of France. I feel your pain. This is the most commented on blog post on my site. People complain about how crooked the banks and credit card companies are…they should have to deal with crooks like Intuit.
April 20th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
Quickbooks does suck. Yes they may have plenty of features for the money but I have had more software issues with Intuit than all my other programs combined. Anywhere from sending an email, to crashes, to imcompatibility with windows 7, to saving an invoice as a PDF format. I was in the process of trying out Peachtree vs Quickbooks and downloaded both their free trial. For the past 2 weeks I have entered my data into Peachtree with no problems. When I tried to convert my peachtree file into Quicbooks so I can try out Quickbooks (Peachtrees competitor), I had another software issue and called Tech support. After 20 minutes of being on the phone with tech support, the lady advised that I pay a $50 fee for them to convert my Peachtree file to a Quickbooks file! Why on earth should I do that? I am trying out YOUR program to decide if i want to purchase it and you have the nerve to charge me for it? I immediately hung up with her and gave my money to Peachtree. Better customer support and NO software issues. And they dont nickle and dime you.
May 24th, 2010 at 12:28 pm
Got a letter from QB saying I must upgrade to QB 2010 by 5/31/10. Oh and support for payroll would be going away on 6/1/10. So – I get this thing in the mail – It requires a minimum of 512MB of RAM, 1Gig recommended, 2.4 ghz processor and runs only on XP (sp2)Vista or 7.
sooo- I can take my three year old computers and pay for memory AND have one machine also scrubbed ‘coz it’s running win 2000 OR I can go out and buy new computers.
So I’m thinking that I’ll install it on my BRAND NEW laptop – that took me 5 hours to get past the hang-ups.
Just got off the phone with them. Refund my money for 2010 and refund half of my payroll subscription. We’ll see. I will run QB2007 until the cows come home and then I’ll be looking for new software. QB/Intuit have officially jumped the shark. THEY SUCK.
May 24th, 2010 at 1:31 pm
Go get ‘em, Dawn. If you find a software that works for you, I’d appreciate it if you came back here and let us all know what it is. And how you like it after using it.
July 6th, 2010 at 10:32 am
Funny, I just googled why Quick Books sucks and it directed me to this blog. Add me to the list. I recently upgraded or should I say downgraded from QB 2007 Contractor to QB Pro 2010. I had no problems with the 2007 version and only upgraded because software support and email service was ending for the old software. If I had know how flawed the new version was I wouldn’t have done the upgrade. I had a work around for the email thing but I upgraded anyway. It crashes twice when I start it, it crashes if I try to use Help, it has constant and persistent pop up ads for other QB services that won’t go away. When I do backups it corrupts the files, it is a new bug every day it seems. If I had the time I would print out all my transactions for the past month, reinstall 2007 and restore one of my old back ups and then input all new data manually but I figure that would take most of a weekend so I’m stewed at least for now.
July 14th, 2010 at 1:37 pm
QB Online down AGAIN today. They just suck.
August 26th, 2010 at 12:21 pm
I purchased the Accountant 2007 version of QB, it was working find, until the message came up, “Quick Books has stopped working”. So I called tech support, they were nice at first and tried to help, then the clincher. Your OS is not compatible with 2007, upgrade to vista 2008 and buy for $199 I said, no!, I want a supervisor. I paid good money and this should not be happening. To resolve first time took over a day. So install uninstall, set up new admin account. It happened again they couldn’t resolve, so they said my original disk was corrupt. I received a new disk in the mail and called but for any additional support I had to pay $79 now and $39 for each additional month, and I could cancel anytime. This is ridiculous. Is this legal, it looks more like a scam to me, selling faulty, bugged merchandise and then asking for money to resolve issues that are chronically affecting everyone, its defective merchandise. Intuit sucks big time.