Intuit, like all tech corporations constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone, has done a huge revamp of its Quickbooks Online site. And WHAT a mess they’ve made of it!
They’ve made it virtually impossible to enter transactions directly in the “register” — which is easiest for me. Once they get you into the “journal” view, you can’t get out of it. They’ve eliminated the “cash purchase” choice for describing a transaction and expect you to expense all direct electronic payments.
When asked about this, the techs reveal that they don’t know that “expense” (as in “to expense”) has a specific meaning in accountantese, and that you might want to distinguish between an electronic payment and something you expensed.
They knocked WonderAccountant off her connection to my QB accounts. Nothing we did would reconnect her. We ended up having to sit in her office and listen to Intuit’s phone put-off blather while we waited interminably for someone to pick up the line. The fix, as the tech pointed out, was simple: but it wasn’t even faintly self-evident. Or evident at all!
Quickbooks Online is now so difficult and so hair-tearing, I can’t use it. I finally threw up my hands and told WonderAccountant that I was gonna go back to Excel.
Well, o’course she’s seen what I can to to an Excel spreadsheet… “Oh, no!” quoth she. “PLEASE don’t do that. Just bring all your statements over here and I’ll enter the data!!!”
Yeah. That’s what happens when you set an English major loose on Excel.
So now I not only have to pay for Quickbooks, I have to pay an accountant to use it! Thank you very much, Intuit!
Okay, so QB automatically uploads most transactions from your bank, and that’s nice. BUT…often those transactions are inscrutable. What category do they go into? What does this or that transaction actually represent? And checks? Despite the wonders of the technological age, I still do pay the yard guy and the accountant and my subcontractors with checks. The credit union records that a check happened, but it can’t transmit the recipient’s name or the check memo, and so she has no idea who it was written to or what it was written for.
When I record a check in the paper check register, it’s usually on the fly. Often I can’t read my handwriting or I forget to write down the date. So just forking over the check register along with the bank statement is likely to be worse than unhelpful.
Same is true for deposits: The credit union’s statements reflect deposits, of course, but they don’t show who the deposit came from or what for.
So yesterday I ended up consuming a fair amount of my scarce time creating a spreadsheet to record checks and deposits. This, we now have on DropBox.
One of the Intuit guys said that a correctly crafted Excel spreadsheet can be uploaded direct into QB. With any luck, she won’t need to fool with that. I think all that will be needed will be just for her to be able to find the check and see who received it and what for.
What an incredible waste of my time! And what a waste of her (paid!!!) time!
She’s tearing her hair in frustration and confusion, too, and she’s a great deal more proficient with QB than I am. She actually takes courses in Quickbooks as part of her ongoing training activities.
This is very much like the original reason I abandoned Quicken for the PC & Mac. Every couple of years, they’d force you to junk the program you had, which was working adequately, and pay for an “update” that was usually difficult to learn. Each new iteration brought a new pain in the tuchus. If you delayed buying an unnecessary “update,” after a year or so your data no longer could be read and you’d lose years of work.
Finally I thought screw you, Intuit! and went to an Excel spreadsheet. Excel lacks some of QB’s whiz-bang bells and whistles, but it suffices to record your transactions. I’m quite sure that if you knew how to do a pivot report in Excel, you could extract whatever you need to do a tax return in short order. The “sort” function alone suffices, if you’ve faithfully entered each transaction’s “category.”
Matter of fact, there’s a guy who’s published an Excel spreadsheet that you can use to file your 1040! It doesn’t appear to generate a useful report, though, based on a year’s worth of data. I expect it can be done, though, if you know what you’re doing.
Really. I thought Quickbooks Online was the answer to the headaches with the terminal-resident Quicken for Mac. Wrong!
