[HN Gopher] QuickBooks Desktop moves to subscription model
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QuickBooks Desktop moves to subscription model
Author : miles
Score : 68 points
Date : 2021-09-07 17:56 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.askwoody.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.askwoody.com)
| rietta wrote:
| It kind-of already was for all practical purposes. Businesses had
| to keep buying to keep the payments integrations and stuff. At
| least my perception.
| nickff wrote:
| Almost all the add-ons are subscription-based, and most people
| use at least a few of those.
| fmakunbound wrote:
| Banktivity did the same in the last release... Now I'm looking at
| alternatives.
| Mister_Snuggles wrote:
| I'm in the same boat, I'd love to know what you end up with.
|
| Personally, I'm leaning towards just doing everything in a big
| spreadsheet, but that's not great for many reasons.
| basch wrote:
| https://www.cloudwards.net/best-accounting-software/
| Mister_Snuggles wrote:
| Are there any alternatives that don't involve a cloud
| service?
| ilamont wrote:
| I use Quickbooks Online, an overpriced, poorly designed piece of
| garbage for the business I run (small business, lots of online
| transactions). For instance, the official PayPal app is
| problematic, my accountant says, because of the way transactions
| are recorded on the QBO ledger (the issue is mentioned here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT5zKWBXtQU). This means manual
| processes, which sucks for me in terms of extra time and costs
| (paid to my accountant to manually reconcile these transactions).
|
| QBO is so bad that sometimes the Intuit support people I talk
| with have trouble figuring out answers to simple questions about
| how to use the software.
|
| Trying to undo certain transactions is an exercise in frustration
| for me and my accountant. Once my bank got involved when it
| upgraded its online front end and back end, and certain
| transactions wouldn't sync to QBO. Of course, no one in front-
| line customer support on either side wanted to own the problem
| and it took weeks to resolve (only after I visited the bank in
| person with my laptop to show them what I was seeing, and the
| bank itself was able to get the attention of the integration team
| at Intuit).
|
| I would dump QBO if I could. I only use it because my accountant
| insists. It's the same for most small business accountants in the
| U.S., which really limits the possibilities for new or
| established competitors.
| [deleted]
| stadium wrote:
| Besides banking, what are your other "must-have" integrations?
|
| Any sense as to why QuickBooks is so entrenched with accounting
| firms? I've seen Xero mentioned more often lately, and curious
| how they broke through the QB barrier to entry.
| chorsestudios wrote:
| I manage QBO for a small business and would love to dump QBO
| as well. I have encountered a lot of bugs that required
| support to resolve. My other "must-have" integrations are
| Shopify and Fishbowl Inventory. Xero seems to be the other
| viable alternative, and at least in my case they broke the QB
| barrier by supporting my current business critical software
| as well as several other potential services I have my eye on.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I ended up on QuickBooks because my accountant insisted on it
| when i started my business. About ten years later i found out
| she's part of some kind of insider program. She probably
| thinks it's just cool for her to get special access to stuff.
| But i don't think she realizes it's a plot to lure small
| businesses into the QuickBooks platform.
| nickff wrote:
| The Quickbooks Accountant program isn't 'special access to
| stuff', but Intuit does offer accountants a special version
| of the software (at no charge IIRC), which allows them to
| easily work with many customer files with no complicated
| licensing requirements (as is the case with many other
| softwares).
| donmcronald wrote:
| > isn't 'special access to stuff'
|
| > a special version of the software (at no charge IIRC)
|
| So the accountants get it for free as long as they offer
| up their customers for Intuit to exploit / price gouge?
| That sounds pretty shady to me.
| nickff wrote:
| The plethora of proprietary accounting softwares are a
| pox upon accountants; put yourself in their shoes, and
| imagine that you had a variety of customers who each had
| their own software. Would you (as an accountant) want to
| pay for a license for each software, and have to learn
| how to use it? Do you think your clients would reimburse
| you (for the training and the license)? Would you have to
| set up some complicated and confusing virtual machine?
|
| I think that giving (outside) accountants free licenses
| is or should be table stakes for these accounting
| packages.
| [deleted]
| dawnerd wrote:
| And don't forget they have a similar for self employed people
| which you'd think would be the same app just gated off but no,
| it's seemingly a completely different app that their own
| support people don't even understand and give answers for QBO
| even tho QBSE doesn't support.
|
| Found it cheaper to just hire someone to deal with it than
| having it all messed up end of year by QB.
| brighton36 wrote:
| I switched away from Quickbooks, years ago, to plain text
| accounting. Couldn't be happier. I can do everything better using
| hledger/ledger, git, vim and make. I don't know what value this
| software has at this point for a community such as we have here
| on hn.
| barrad0s wrote:
| I also use QB and it is probably the worst software I've ever
| used. Its clunky, slow and antiquated. I really hate it, but on
| the same boat as others here, can't really dump it.
| mariushn wrote:
| > can't really dump it
|
| Why? Because your accountant requires it? Are there other
| reasons?
|
| Could you change your accountant?
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Good. Hopefully this will cause more people to leave Intuit and
| search out alternatives. This is just one more reason to add to
| the list.
| codegeek wrote:
| It is the network effect. Inuit is very aggressive in killing
| any competition and they are widely used by CPAs and accounting
| firms. My CPA told me flat that if I don't go with Quickbooks,
| she would have a harder time playing with a more "fancy"
| system. So unless the CPAs and accountants are onboard, it is
| tough to kill Intuit.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| It's not just the network effects of CPAs/Accountants, but
| also banks and vendor invoice software. It's also the decades
| of lock in where all of a company's accounting data has been
| in QB.
|
| From what I've heard part of why CPAs/Accountants are
| reluctant to learn some other system that isn't QB isn't
| because QB is _good_ for them, but that they have decades of
| accumulated cruft like Excel macros and similar hacks to try
| to make okay double entry lemonade from QB 's awful single
| entry lemons. It's relearning/rebuilding all _that_ that they
| don 't want to do, even if they don't directly realize a lot
| of their pain stems from the fact that QB is just bad at its
| job (and has been for a long time).
|
| (Disclaimer/source: Way back in ought six, I was an intern on
| Microsoft's attempt at the space in a product called Small
| Business Accounting and then briefly Office Accounting before
| it died. Among other things SBA chased after CPA/Accountant
| buy-in and from what I heard nearly had it, as it was proper
| double-entry for one reason. The takeaway that winning over
| CPAs/Accountants alone isn't sufficient is mine based only a
| peripheral reading of what went wrong with that project and
| what I managed to gather of why that product didn't exist any
| longer by the time I graduated.)
| rietta wrote:
| Have you tried getting a bookkeeper to use GnuCash? Xero has a
| following as does SAGE/peachtree but not the good open source
| options. I did and it failed. No reason except everyone in the
| CPA and bookkeeper business uses and knows QuickBooks. I have
| up and use and pay the kings transom for QBO so i can focus on
| my business and not play transaction level bookkeeper myself.
| pbreit wrote:
| Sounds like an opportunity. Especially since a bookkeeper
| could be anywhere in the world.
| ilamont wrote:
| I'm sure some back-office bookkeeping functions can be
| offshored, but others cannot.
|
| For instance, in the U.S., certain tax filings and other
| types of official paperwork require businesses and
| individuals to give permission to authorities to contact
| CPAs directly.
|
| In addition, tax laws are also very local, including state
| regulations (50 U.S. states + territories) and sometimes
| municipal and county regulations. This requires a level of
| expertise that few overseas-based bookkeepers would be able
| to work with.
| rietta wrote:
| You are also paying for credibility even at the small
| business side. As an s corp owner buying a house was much
| harder than it would be for a normal w2 engineer. The
| letter from our cpa was priceless in the process.
| nickff wrote:
| It's tough to do bookkeeping or accounting for businesses
| in multiple jurisdictions, as tax and accounting laws vary,
| and mistakes can be very costly. In addition to that,
| accounting and bookkeeping are often regulated professions
| with various restrictions.
| neltnerb wrote:
| I have! I ended up having to export my entire general ledger
| as an excel file for them to have any hope of using it. It
| cost me a ton of money and time to massage into a format that
| an accountant could work with, they are too expensive per
| hour to ask them to learn an entire new software program that
| I'm the only of their customers to use.
|
| Now I just use quickbooks. I have never had any issue.
|
| Gnucash is great and works fine for personal bookkeeping, but
| I wouldn't suggest it if you have an accountant.
| chromatin wrote:
| > they are too expensive per hour to ask them to learn an
| entire new software program
|
| Many of us here are way more expensive per hour than our
| accountant ;) -- but to your metapoint that the accountant
| is more expensive than a new quickbooks subscription, that
| probably remains true even in the face of the price hike.
| Artistry121 wrote:
| What are the best alternatives?
| cascom wrote:
| GnuCash is free, and can do most of what quickbooks does.
| https://www.gnucash.org/
| rietta wrote:
| Use it for personal but gave up trying to get my CPA or his
| booking staff to work with it at all.
| avodonosov wrote:
| https://ledgersmb.org/ (a cloud offering for this
| https://efficito.com/)
|
| https://plaintextaccounting.org/
|
| I haven't used these solutions much, just know about thier
| existance.
| mox1 wrote:
| I use - https://www.waveapps.com/
|
| My accountant has access to all the data I put in there.
| Mostly feature parity with Quickbooks.
|
| Mostly free to use (I have never paid a dollar for the
| expense tracking part)
| sumoboy wrote:
| If it could import existing QBO account I'd switch over
| right now.
| basch wrote:
| have yet to see FreshBooks mentioned in this thread.
|
| https://www.cloudwards.net/best-accounting-software/
|
| https://www.freshbooks.com/
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Odoo is also a good option that has an open source component,
| but their paid version is pretty good.
| runako wrote:
| In my first business, I spent a lot of time doing my own
| bookkeeping under the guise of saving money. I've used Xero,
| Gnu, Wave, etc. At some point, I calculated the effective
| hourly rate I could earn building my business. Moving to a
| traditional bookkeeper and QuickBooks was a logical result of
| that analysis.
| astraelraen wrote:
| I am not locked in to Intuit nor justifying their cost increases
| because it hits all users (wholesale/retail) but their eco-system
| when taken as a whole makes accounting and payroll generally
| simple for the small business owner. Of course this is a generic
| statement and there are outliers that don't fit into their model
| for reason X or Y. This does not come without a cost, they are
| definitely moving into the premium offering sphere and away from
| "DIY" users. There will be user pushback and they will lose
| users, but I'm sure they have an army of financial analysts that
| have run the numbers and say they will make more with less users
| under this model.
|
| I have experience working with QB (many variations), Freshbooks,
| Xero, various Sage products and some specialized vendor software
| in the Construction and Wholesale space and probably a few others
| I am forgetting.
|
| Freshbooks is mediocre, overall their integrations are poor and
| without proper setup you end up with poor results, they dont
| offer payroll and require you to use third party services. This
| is fine, but just leads to more setup/sync problems which many
| users are not capable of doing and don't know if the answer is
| wrong. (PS not all users are tech saavy or know what the end
| result should be) Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.
|
| Xero is alright, I wouldn't say it's significantly better or
| worse than QB except they have less scale and throw their weight
| around less (for now) than Intuit does. Sage products have a
| steep learning curve but have a ton of functionality depending
| upon which one you land with.
|
| Many proprietary industry specific Accounting packages have great
| modules but from my experience, their core accounting system is
| not the best (putting it lightly) Most of these seem to have
| built their success around an industry specific pain and then
| realized they needed accounting on top to make the package
| sellable.
|
| All that said, an accounting package should be useful for
| recording, categorizing and utilizing your financial data. That
| means different things to different people and there is no one
| size fits all approach - no matter what Intuit or other vendors
| tell you.
|
| If your professional works best with product X, that may be in
| your best interest to use product X if you value your
| professional's input to your business not just from a tax
| reporting but also financial reporting perspective. If you don't,
| don't use product X. It's really that simple.
|
| Sure all these open source products are great for IT nerds and
| people who love doing accounting (even CPAs!) but if one person
| (you) is the only one who knows what the software says and the
| output does not make sense to third parties then it is easily
| deemed unreliable. You will have a whole host of more complex
| problems than dealing with Intuit if your financial data is
| unreliable, let's start with audit or bank problems and expand
| from there.
|
| Source: Am a small biz CPA, have seen (almost) it all including
| the napkin accounting method.
| donmcronald wrote:
| It's a massive price hike for people like me that are frugal with
| software purchases. I just checked and I paid $171 CAD for
| QuickBooks Desktop Pro 2018 because I bought it on sale. The same
| subscription version is $199, which I assume is USD, so ~$250 CAD
| _per year_.
|
| Now I don't have a PHD in math or anything, but $1250 over 5
| years vs $171 for a perpetual license that I estimate should last
| me to the 5 year mark is a bit of a difference.
|
| There won't be any more sales and everyone knows what happens
| next. They'll start charging addon pricing for features or
| charging "per something" for things where they can and before you
| know it the cost of your bookkeeping software will be getting
| married to your revenue in some way. They'll push until they're
| getting a cut of all your revenue.
|
| I work with a lot of small businesses. They're not dumb. They
| know they're getting completely screwed by stuff like this, but
| there's nothing they can do about it. It's abusive, anti-
| competitive behavior and Intuit should be on the list of
| companies that needs to be scrutinized by the government.
|
| Edit: Re-reading the fine print, it's $199 _for the first year_
| then it jumps to $299, so it 's actually ~$1770 CAD over 5 year.
| That's a 10x price increase for me. TEN TIMES!!
| brighton36 wrote:
| Switch to plaintextaccounting.org. See my other comment on
| this. I highly doubt you need Quickbooks.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > It's abusive, anti-competitive behavior
|
| I think it's abusive, but I don't see how it's illegal or anti-
| competitive. Why can't businesses switch to someone else?
|
| I know migration is not easy, but that's true of almost any
| application.
| donmcronald wrote:
| You're right. I worded it poorly. What I really meant is that
| it's the kind of behavior you can get away with when there's
| no competition. IE: A monopoly.
|
| I've seen lots of the alternatives mentioned here, but Intuit
| has entrenched themselves so deeply in the accounting
| industry that no one else can compete reasonably.
|
| If someone does manage to start competing it'll end up being
| more of a duopoly / oligopoly than real competition. No one
| with the means to compete will forgo the super fat profit
| margins that Intuit's establishing here.
| jhawk28 wrote:
| Higher prices are not anti-competitive. If anything, it
| encourages competition because it is an incentive for
| someone else to come in.
| travisporter wrote:
| "IE: A monopoly" has two meanings!
|
| Is this similar to the Word/Excel monopoly? There are many
| open source alternatives that do 90-95%, but still very
| high demand for it
| ilamont wrote:
| Oh, and they will probably jack up your subscription price,
| too, if my experience with Quickbooks Online in the states is
| anything to go by.
|
| Here's the message I received after paying US$425/year for a
| few years:
|
| _Your QuickBooks Online Plus subscription will increase to
| $755 per year, plus tax where applicable on your next billing
| date on or after December 1, 2019_
|
| That's a 78% increase in the annual subscription price.
|
| After getting this message and consulting with my accountant, I
| decided to DOWNGRADE the account to QBO Essentials, which is
| about US$310/year.
|
| I would dump Intuit and its software permanently if I could.
| They are parasites on small businesses and individuals who get
| tricked into paying for their tax software.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Just by reading the comments here, there seems to be a business
| opportunity in having a frontend for business owners / non
| accountant users that fixes the usability of quickbooks and
| maintains some level of feature parity, but has some way to
| export to a quickbooks compatible format to hand over to the
| accountant, who would be none the wiser, no?
| maximum_stress wrote:
| One of my jobs during high school was working for an engineering
| firmed turned accounting software house. Nobody bought their
| engineering software, but their in-house accounting apps turned
| into best sellers. Since GL/AP/AR is hardly anything new it made
| me wonder what happened and it seems like most of the competitors
| were bought or went under. Sure enough PeachTree which was #1 in
| the late 80s has renamed itself and gone cloud subscription.
|
| There's always GNU Cash I guess, although I haven't heard good
| things from my one friend who tried it.
| client4 wrote:
| I used Quickbooks desktop and found it antiquated; create an
| export and email it to your accountant? No thank you. I then
| tried Quickbooks Online and it was hands-down the worst piece of
| software I've ever used. I ultimately landed on Xero, which is
| "good enough". To echo a number of other comments on this page,
| my accountants were generally slaves to the software. I actually
| had to change firms going from QBO to Xero as my existing
| accountant said they only worked with Quickbooks.
|
| This is all a reminder the current tax system in the US is an
| unnecessary game made unnecessarily difficult.
| nulbyte wrote:
| I also use Xero for a nonprofit. They seem to be trapped in a
| growth mindset to the exclusion of finishing half-baked
| functionality, but still better than QuickBooks, IMO. Their
| support is also a lot easier to reach, compared to Intuit, and
| the folks at Xero seem to know their product better, too.
| Luckily, our accountant was perfectly fine figuring out Xero.
|
| While it's said to see more software go to subscription models,
| I will gladly pay Xero more for better functionality. Or until
| I roll my own, which I keep threatening, but never get around
| to.
| mariushn wrote:
| What would an alternative solution need to offer for you to
| switch?
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