QuickBooks Desktop moves to subscription model | Hacker News Reader

QuickBooks Desktop moves to subscription model

askwoody.com

76 pointsmiles61 comments

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!!

Switch to plaintextaccounting.org. See my other comment on this. I highly doubt you need Quickbooks.

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.

> 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.

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.

Higher prices are not anti-competitive. If anything, it encourages competition because it is an incentive for someone else to come in.

"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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

> 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.

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.

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.

One that I came across was on a recurring sales receipt because that's the only way to auto-pay with a card, and when the card wouldn't process the receipt status would still say "paid". Had to click into the receipt to see the card payment failed.

After a few years it was fixed, so that it says "paid (failed)".

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.

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.

What would an alternative solution need to offer for you to switch?

That is a great question. Some feature parity would be needed; I appreciate much of the Xero API, though some parts are incomplete. Built-in support for Stripe is great. Both have been beneficial for integrating with some business processes, notably reporting.

More flexible reporting would be a killer feature. They have standard reports, but they aren't flexible enough for a nonprofit, and the reports through the API are pretty lame. I have to pull 7 reports just to automate a proper balance sheet, because a) I don't want to export reports manually and b) the API only lets you filter by a single tracking category at a time.

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.

Almost all the add-ons are subscription-based, and most people use at least a few of those.

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.

What are the best alternatives?

GnuCash is free, and can do most of what quickbooks does. https://www.gnucash.org/

Use it for personal but gave up trying to get my CPA or his booking staff to work with it at all.

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)

If it could import existing QBO account I'd switch over right now.

Odoo is also a good option that has an open source component, but their paid version is pretty good.

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.

have yet to see FreshBooks mentioned in this thread.

https://www.cloudwards.net/best-accounting-software/

https://www.freshbooks.com/

https://alternativeto.net/software/quickbooks/?feature=bookk...

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.

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.

> 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.

If you are not more expensive than your accountant, you should probably do the work yourself. You're not making enough money to pay extra to avoid taxes, and unoptimized taxes are easy enough.

This is only true if you will do the job correctly in a similar amount of time to your accountant.

But I do agree, when I had just W2 income and a mortgage it was no big deal to do them myself. I definitely wouldn't use an accountant if my taxes were simple enough to handle it. They're just not that hard.

Sounds like an opportunity. Especially since a bookkeeper could be anywhere in the world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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?

You are correct.

Any enterprising software developer could take some accounting classes and work as an accountant for a SME while developing the product on the side.

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.

> can't really dump it

Why? Because your accountant requires it? Are there other reasons?

Could you change your accountant?

You keep asking the question.

I'll make it simple.

The reason you wont find the answer you seem is also the reason there wont be a competitor (3rd competitor for xero and qbo) in the space.

There is no 1 killer feature to solve for.

There is a long list of pain points that need to be addressed. This is why any accounting software needs to be built by an accountant for accountants. Otherwise its just another piece of software.

Self-hosting ERPNext is a truly excellent FOSS solution to replace accounting apps like QuickBooks, if you do your own accounting or are at least able to choose the software your business uses for accounting:

https://erpnext.com/open-source-accounting

ERPNext is a full ERP with a bunch of modules, but you only have to use the ones you need and it's easy to ignore the ones you don't. As nice as GNUCash is for offline accounting, ERPNext is much more convenient for accounting if you need to attach files and notes to your journal entries, or provide multi-user access to the books.

Frappe Cloud is the easiest way to self-host ERPNext:

https://frappecloud.com

A third-party Docker image on your own server (or local computer, if you prefer) is the second-easiest way:

https://github.com/pipech/erpnext-docker-debian

This seems like a lot of complexity unless "just spin up a Docker image" is something you normally do and are comfortable enough with to fix when it breaks. Not everyone is a developer, even on HN. Frappe Cloud's pricing page says "simple," but the numbers don't mean anything to someone who doesn't know what all this stuff is and how it relates to the software's resource requirements.

And that's if you're Good With Computers. Most small businesses are not run by people who grew up messing with EMM to get games going.

This recommendation is for people who are willing to use the free trial on Frappe Cloud to gauge how much their usage would cost before switching to ERPNext, or for people who are comfortable with running ERPNext on Docker on their own server or local computer. Sure, the latter group isn't everyone on HN, but I know there are many people on HN who would appreciate a free and open source accounting solution with plenty of features to replace QuickBooks.

The developers of ERPNext also released Frappe Books, a desktop application with only the accounting-related features of ERPNext. It's also FOSS and does not need to be self-hosted, but unlike ERPNext, it's no longer being updated:

https://frappebooks.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23091005

Ive used both Xero and Qb, and QBO.

Xero is the best of the bunch. Far more reliable than QBO. QBO has more 3rd party apps and QB works offline.

Again. QB works offline. Thats the killer feature. Try as you might. It wont crash on you. QBO load times are brutal and crashes are common.

Xero 2FA and unrecognized IP firewalls are becoming a real pain (for someone using a VPN, good luck)

I think everyone is willing to pay $9-$29 for software that works offline, is reliable, and has banking connections that dont die every 10mins.

Solve the above, and watch as you become the next viral app.

If there is an accountant with good UX/UI skills and a solid backend team, they could clean up shop.

Accountants will ALWAYS be late to adopt new software, but if frugal HN founders buy the product because its so damn easy to use to account for transactions (and cheap, for a bootstrapped outfit), accountants will have no choice but to follow thru.

I use QuickBooks Enterprise at work, but I'm not involved in the software license. That said, I do some automation programming in Python using QODBC [1]. QODBC is a great product which makes interfacing your scripts with QuickBooks very easy.

What would be better is something entirely in Python. :) There is an interesting project, django-ledger [2]. It's still under development, but very interesting.

[1]: https://qodbc.com/ [2]: https://github.com/arrobalytics/django-ledger

Banktivity did the same in the last release... Now I'm looking at alternatives.

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.

https://www.cloudwards.net/best-accounting-software/

Are there any alternatives that don't involve a cloud service?

Perhaps one of these?

https://alternativeto.net/software/quickbooks/?feature=bookk...

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.

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.

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