5.54km/h, in the last 310 days I travelled 52,644km and visited 16 cities.
More on my new public Dopplr profile.
One of the common myths about proprietary commercial off-the-shelf software is that because you pay for it, you get a certain inherent quality, reliability, level of features and protection from the worst case scenarios.
My recent experiences with Quickbooks has done everything possible to dispel that myth.
For years I've happily used Quickbooks 2003. It's simple and intuitive, and although clunky in a few places it mostly "just works".
A few months ago the bookkeeper was forced into an upgrade to Windows Vista by a hardware failure and a bad salesman at the local PC store. As a result, she was also forced to upgrade various software packages, since the versions she was using did not work on Vista. One such package was Quickbooks.
Faced with the option of finding a new bookkeeper or upgrading to the latest shiny version of Quickbooks, the upgrade seemed to be the simplest choice.
How wrong I was.
Firstly, Quickbooks 2008 is divided into multiple product lines, coming in "Simplestart", "Pro" and "Premier" editions. Having used the Intuit website's "Which Quickbooks is right for your business" test, I confidently bought and downloaded Simplestart. Unfortunately Simplestart did not support importing from Quickbooks 2003 or Quickbooks 2007.
I ponied up the money and bought Quickbooks Pro, sure that this would be the silver bullet. Yes, it did indeed support importing from older versions of Quickbooks. I rejoiced as I saw numbers flying before my eyes, and thought all was right with the world, until it was time to file a VAT return. Unfortunately, the Quickbooks import and upgrade delivers "more control and flexibility" than previous versions. To put it another way: it badly messes up recorded VAT information. I went from the expected VAT liability of a few hundred pounds to a VAT liability of many thousands of pounds during the "upgrade".
The solution according to the Quickbooks built-in help is to record various information before upgrading. Of course, this solution is posted in the support documentation provided as part of a Quickbooks 2008 install, so there's no way to know this before installing ....
Looking at the website, the VAT situation is so bad there's now an entire section on important VAT information, otherwise known as "Intuit broke your VAT and expect you to spend time fixing it, thank you for buying this product".
I downgraded to Quickbooks 2003 again to prepare the information I needed. Unfortunately Quickbooks 2003 does over-the-internet updates, and my company file is created by a more recent update of Quickbooks 2003. Repeated attempts to update Quickbooks result in errors with missing and incorrect files.
So here I am, with my data in a proprietary binary format that doesn't seem to work well with any version of the software that created it, a classic closed-source trap. I've wasted more time and effort than I care to think about, and I'd be happy to put a financial contribution toward anyone writing (or fixing) an Open Source company accounts package that plays nicely with UK financial regulations.
Now, back to trying to convince Quickbooks to work ... :-(
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