Intuit Apologist?
I wish people would take the time to read and potentially understand before they spout off.
- This is about QuickBooks NOT Quicken.
- The development teams are independent of each other. The Quicken teams have nothing to do with the QuickBooks teams.
- Credit card processing is available in QuickBooks for Mac 2010. You can even sign up now for your merchant account.
- QuickBooks for Mac was developed independant of the Windows version years ago so the technology is platform specific. Kinda hard to throw away years of work and say tough luck to thousands of loyal customers, don't you think? Better yet, let's do that and charge $700+ for the product again. That'll go over even better!
- If it were so easy to develop a program like this then why are there so few options?
- There are still a few Windows features missing but I am sure everyone has noticed there are fewer and fewer every year?
- Mac users can even use the online version which is exactly the same as the online version for Windows usersoh, because it is the same.
- Intuit has actively supported small business for years and continues to do so, and that includes Mac based businesses.
- Intuit has produced yearly upgrades for QuickBooks for Mac for a several years now and it always comes out about this time (for good reason too). If you are still hung up on the hiatus they took way back when let's talk about all the projects Apple let hang out to dry.
- Copyright date? Really, copyright date? Come on...
All this stuff is on their site folks. Expand your horizons beyond these forums.
Nope, I don't work for Intuit. I use the product. I read the manuals. It works. And yes, I can list shortcomings of the product as well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can read the Intuit QuickBooks "Help" forums all day and read similarly toned apologies.
Yes, QuickBooks is better than it used to be. Heck, 2009 finally allowed me to write more than 256 characters in the Description area of my invoices. Hoo-wee! I honestly think my expectations are so low that I didn't mind paying about $200 to upgrade from 2007 (which kind of blows your, "well they release a new version every year," theory. QuickBooks 2008 was...?...where?).
I run a Mac Consulting Business and I use QuickBooks because the alternatives are far and few inbtween, and I need something my accountant understands. The fact that MYOB is about the only major competitor to QB is NOT a credit to how "challenging" financial software is to write. It's about the monopoloy that Intuit has created in the Accounting world.
Its also about time spent. Ive now got about 3 years invested in this crappy piece of software and just dont have time to migrate to (and learn) something else. So Im stuck. Partly by choice, partly by a lack thereof.
A year and a half ago my QuickBooks 2007 database became corrupt for reasons that no Intuit expert could explain. I lost about a months worth of data and all of my backups were corrupt. I maintain a very clean system and know what Im doing. The only thing they could suggest for the corruption was that it was crashing so much that it damaged itself in such a way that even the backups were unrepairable. I had to upload the database to a site that techs in India took about 3 weeks to repair. Meanwhile, I had nothing to enter data into, make invoices, receive payments and so forth. I probably lost billing on maybe $2000 worth of jobs and dont even talk to me about downtime. When I finally got the repaired database back, I asked the techs how I could avoid this in the future and they said, Im not sure to be knowing. Maybe you should backing up every day.
[sigh]
QuickBooks 2009 still crashes randomly when turning an invoice into a PDF to email to clients. The Crash Reporter kicks in and I type profanities in there and email it all back to Intuit. I mean,... seriously. You cant even write software that wont crash simply in the process of creating a PDF?... How hard is that to figure out?
So when we bash Intuit, its not that we expect everything to be perfect. Its usually that the things that are WRONG with it, are so basic, so fundamental, so elemental that it seems that either the team in charge of the writing code on the Mac version are either seriously retarded, or just dont care. And the speed at which they are adding functionality that has existed in the PC version seems to confirm the latter.
Credit Card processing is finally here? Is it only for Intuits services, or can I use my existing Merchant Bank account with Chase? Probably the former...
The only time Ive written to Steve Jobs (well, we all have at least once, right?...) is to complain about Intuit and to BEG him to set an Apple Team up with a few million to write a truly great accounting program for the Mac. iBooks. I would more happily put up with that evolution than I would with waiting another decade for Intuit to build a Mac version that doesnt crash every time I sneeze. Did I mention I have allergies?
Okay, Im done here. I need to send in another crash report...
