Perhaps I am mistaken, but it seems to me that creating a functional and featured filled Accounting Package should not be this hard.
I’m have cried and moaned over Quickbooks before. My last issue was in converting my Company data file from Quickbooks for Windows to Quickbooks for Mac. Apparently there are people at Intuit who do care somewhat about their companies image, because a few weeks after posting that whine, I received an unsolicited email from a support person inside Quickbooks asking if they could help me. I exchanged several emails with them about my issue, but it all boiled down to them saying “Send us your company file” (not an option) and me saying “Please provide logging and errors codes so people like me can diagnose there own problems.”
See, that was my problem in a nut shell. Quickbooks would not convert, I had NO ideal why and no ideal where to start looking in my 15 MB data file because all the conversation program would tell me is that it “failed”.
Then months later, I received another email from a certified genius named Marc Druijts who suggested that I look for Manufactures Part Numbers in my Items list. Sure enough, I found a single obscure part where someone had put in a MPM. I removed it and the conversion to Mac fired off without a hitch.
I decided to hold off doing a total conversion to QB for Mac until January 1, 2009. It is now almost the end of January and sadly I have yet to make the change.
The issue now is Online Banking and downloading transactions. It would seem a couple of my chosen Finical Institutions are “incompatible” with Quickbooks for Mac. This is shown out by error messages like:
General Error
The message from your bank was:
[ofx.unsupportedClientApplication]Client application or version is not supported by this server.
Now unlike my last error, this one has some nice words that I can put into Google. After reading several dozen pages of posts there seems to be many people having this problem, and a massive finger pointing match going on between Intuit and “X” (Where “X” is the name of any number of Financial Institutions). Intuit claims that the problem is that “X” has not update their side to allow for QB for Mac to Work. “X” seems to always claim that the problem is with Quickbooks. I can see both sides of this argument. But I think in the end I have to blame Intuit, and here’s why…
A Financial Institution’s job is not to write and keep track of consumer accounting packages. I think that if they want to provide electronic access to their customers finical data, they have an obligation to provide such data in reasonable and standard way. There is such a reasonable and standard way already in use around the world called Open Financial Exchange. Which Intuit help start in 1997, and seems to have sense walked away from.
As long as the Financial Institution provides their data in a reasonable and standard way, and does not change that reasonable and standard way, then I feel that it is the responsibility of the software maker to get that data into their application. Now, I’m sure that Intuit will argue about the finer points of the “reasonable and standard way”, and cite any number of reasons why Financial Institution “X” is not being complainant. All of Inuit’s finger pointing and well articulated resonating falls flat on its ass in the face of this single statement: “It works on the PC”.
When you deal with online transitions of any type, be them financial or simply browsing the web, your computer makes a request of a server and receives a response in a highly scripted dialog called a “Protocol”. This protocol is supposed to be agnostic, meaning that two machines, of any type, can exchange data. For some reason, Quickbooks feels a need to tell Financial Institution “X” what version of the software is being used. Why can Quickbooks simple take the SAME data and processed it to fit either Quickbooks for Mac or Quickbooks for PC?
It seems I’ll be staying with Quickbooks for PC for a while Longer….
