Wells Fargo and Intuit Join Forces to Ruin My Weekend | Hacker News Reader

Wells Fargo and Intuit Join Forces to Ruin My Weekend

augustjackson.net

34 pointsblahedo18 comments

if he's so angry at intuit, why did he give them more of his money? there are plenty of alternatives out there that work on a mac and can download OFX transaction data; ibank and gnucash being two off the top of my head.

back in 2005, i spent $200 on quickbooks basic to do invoicing for my software business. i had a dedicated windows machine just to run the software, and it was terrible. the interface was confusing, it wouldn't do what i needed it to, and it had a ton of things that i didn't need. worst of all, i was constantly bombarded with messages in the application advertising intuit's other products and services like check printing, payroll, and online data backup. at one point i needed to prepare an estimate, only to get a popup message telling me the $200 version i just bought didn't have that feature, but that i could easily spend more money and upgrade to a better version.

at that point i gave up and made my own web-based billing system (http://corduroysite.com) to do what i needed, and then turned it into a SaaS.

> if he's so angry at intuit, why did he give them more of his money?

Because he's just trying to get some shit done in the short term.

I use GnuCash for my business accounting. It is very painful software. And I run it on my Win 7 virtual machine because the OS X support stinks -- and that kind of musical OS chairs is one thing he is trying to avoid.

then why do you use it?

If he's trying to get some shit done then he shouldn't be using a Mac for business. It's that simple.

I went with Moneydance (http://www.moneydance.com/) when I got fed up with the Quicken for Mac situation a few years back, and I've been mostly happy with the switch. It's a Java app, and as a result looks out of place amongst my mostly native apps, but it's pretty reliable and gets the job done.

Looks like they support importing from Quicken Essentials for the Mac [1]-- might be a good alternative for the author.

[1] http://moneydance.com/blog/archives/434

I've been very happy with my switch to Ledger (http://ledger-cli.org). Quickbooks was a blackhole to me. I was never entirely sure what was going on behind the scenes. Ledger has helped me _get_ accounting.

Be careful though because many of the things that Ledger advocates muddy the water between cash and accrual accounting, and it offers 'features' that are natural to the way a programmer thinks but that are against proper accounting practices. Ledger is fine when you know accounting and want a text-based tool to take out the drudge work, but it's not good to learn accounting from.

Thanks for the heads up. Admittedly my finances are pretty easy. I do everything on a cash basis. My statement about _getting_ accounting was a bit broad. Ledger simply has helped me understand how money flows and I'm more comfortable managing it because Ledger feels transparent to be. I can debug it if needed.

Another reason to go for open source software. I use homebank and the files work seamlessly across platforms (linux mac windows) and they accept qif, csv etc imports. GnuCash is actually a pretty decent clone of quicken if you are more used to that.

Small business accounting remains a wide open category for new entrants. However, I'm not sure web-based solutions are the right approach. For whatever reason, it feels like accounting should be a piece of client software. Perhaps because there is some UX richness that is still lacking in the browser. Perhaps because because it feels like the data should be local.

Also, I think it would be difficult to do a lousier job in putting forth standardize financial data formats than what Intuit has done. In most cases, a simple CSV file would have sufficed. But Intuit with all of it's complicated, multi-dimensional data formats, one for each product with many becoming outdated. Yuck.

As a small business bookkeeper, I agree that new blood could really improve things.

I think it could be web-based though, as long as security took top priority.

You probably should have known better. Mac support for Quicken and Quickbooks have always been terrible. Here is their official word on the subject:

   http://quicken.intuit.com/support/articles/getting-started/upgrading-and-conversion/8207.html

If you want to experiment, here's a link to the pre-release of Quickbooks 2011

   http://web.me.com/quickbooksmac/2011/pre-rel.html

I wish there were real alternatives but there's really nothing on the market which does the job as well as qb/quicken

How good is Mint in filling the role of these softwares. I would naively guess that someone could better accommodate these people.

Well, if he's pissed off at Intuit, then Mint might not be the best choice for him - it's also run by Intuit.

It's not geared towards business owners (invoicing, vendors, cutting checks, double entry book keeping, reconciling, etc)

Mint hits that sweet spot with single individuals, maybe married couples, with multiple accounts who want to get an overview and bottom line.

Agreed. As an individual, I switched to Mint from Quicken precisely because Quicken was too much tool for the job.

Mint works for tracking your spending, Quicken (and related products) are more sophisticated.

Mint removed features about a year ago where you could do more granular filtering of transactions, and started pulling the description of transactions from different fields than they used to.

So for instance, it was impossible to filter my car from my mortgage as both were tagged FINANCIAL and rulesets wouldn't catch either.

There is a LONG running support thread about this (http://satisfaction.mint.com/mint/topics/use_statement_names...) and no response from anyone at Mint.

Lets be honest: Mint was a lead generation tool on top of Yodlee's backend. Great UX, horrible experience. I'm back to using Wells Fargo's web based tool, which is OK.

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