Hacker News Reader

It's crazy how slow it is to get anything done with Quickbooks Online. The site is slow to respond, it has very limited keyboard shortcuts, if you open it in multiple tabs to cross reference information, it's constantly logging you out of the other tab, and they discontinued the desktop electron wrapper that let you have more than one tab open.

Historically, a huge strength of Intuit was the huge population of bookkeepers and accountants who would recommend QuickBooks to clients, but I don't see how anyone would recommend it at this point.

From quickbooks to TurboTax, Intuit software has been some of the most god awful both to use and to develop against in my experience.

Argocd is pretty nice

My team’s product is mainly built on Argo Workflows, and while the idea of the tool is great, we have learned to massively distrust it. It doesn’t always do what you tell it to, or, worse, it tells you it’ll do something and then does something else.

Can you elaborate? Just started building out a new platform centered on it

Wait, argocd is owned by intuit? It's under the CNCF, is it not?

but intuit started it (I think, they bought the company behind Argo overall, but Argo CD came out after the acquisition). Being a place for companies to host projects they started but want to share is kinda CNCFs thing after all.

ArgoCD is pretty nice when you use the CLI tools. Try opening the web interface when your k8s setup has, say, 300 nodes, even on a MBP with M2 and 32 GB.

Similarly, Intuit Mint has gotten worse and slower over time as well. I used to use it to track all my spending (including manual entry for cash transactions and much manual categorization of all transactions), but I gave up a few years back because it was all taking so much time and was so slow. Now I just use it to see all my account balances in one place, but otherwise don't interact with transactions much at all.

Back before Mint allowed manual transaction entry (!), I was using it in spite of that. Until the day I logged in and suddenly three months of transactions had disappeared. They didn’t care. I’ve been trying to run away from Intuit ever since. But I’ve been unable to get rid of Quickbook, and now they bought Mailchimp, so…

Ugh.

The advertisements that are constantly trying to push you towards their payment processing and payroll services are also really terrible. There's no way to permanently turn them off.

The thing that pisses off the accounting people where I work is how often everything changes.

They’re one step from just using excel because it won’t change on them.

> just using excel because it won’t change on them.

Are your accounting people quite young? Excel moves and changes stuff, though not on quite such an aggressive timeline. Modern Office is not like 1990s Office where you buy it and then it doesn't change unless you decide to change it.

This is fine, the universe's one constant is change, if we fight it we'll lose, but it's worth calling out that there will be change, just some of these outfits are taking the piss.

Many companies have tons of desginers who need to prove they are needed, so they force change for the sake of change - at the cost of users.

It might be like the thing at Google, where people want to get promoted and big changes or new launches are the only way up, regardless of the effect on user experience.

With M$ the bias is towards their certification and training business. They have to change enough to make training seem more important.

That’s just one leg of the stool. They used to be relentless at driving SQL Server Enterprise adoption. Now it’s shifted to M365 E5, plus accessory subscriptions. PowerBI, Viva and Copilot for whatever are the new legs.

> Many companies have tons of desginers who need to prove they are needed, so they force change for the sake of change - at the cost of users.

That may be one part.

But another part is companies that need to demonstrate to their uses that a version change is a big change.

Microsoft is (im)famous for this: as far as I can tell, there has been little need for the constant UI churn in windows aside from convincing users that a new version is big enough to warrant that appellation (as opposed to a service pack/patch).

You’d think that the SaaS Office would change less, but it seems to churn about as much as ever.

Designers alone can't push through a change for the sake of change as their work relies entirely on user research. Even if they do have the research needed to prove a change is required, they also have to get developers on board.

So I don't know where this conspiracy theory comes from, but it's entirely unfounded unless you're talking about a designer like Jony Ive with the power to go through multiple obstacles with ease, in which case the change isn't happening to prove he's needed but because he has a different vision.

> as their work relies entirely on user research

Definitely not the case everywhere.

It's the case everywhere. A designer (in the context of software/hardware) does not work without user research, that is core to their work. Any position that does not require user research in design is titled differently these days.

Unless the designers end up becoming the product managers/owners and stop scrutinizing the designers.

Of course no engineers would ever make bad UX decisions.

They’re probably older, on the contrary, and are still using the non-subscription desktop version instead of Microsoft 365.

Yes, everyone seems to be stuck on 2010.

I'm older. I still haven't gotten over the "ribbon" interface. It drove me to LibreOffice despite all its faults.

Are you a professional accountant?

EDIT: rather than downvoting, maybe you could engage? Following the thread back the question was about accountants using Excel and then someone weighed in that they use Libre/open office. I have never seen an accountant use libre office for accounts work, hence my question. Are you an accountant who moved from Excel because of whatever, or was your comment irrelevant?

I'm sure he's not, I am one and I have to use excel though I also hate the ribbon but I just use excel 2010 + ubitmenu and will continue to use that version or similar until I can't anymore

I had used excel 2003 until I was forced to use win 10 at which point it barely functioned anymore (i.e., it worked great in win 7)

I still miss excel 2003, it has been downhill from there

As for accounting software, they all mostly stink though serve a purpose in larger companies where you need some degree of separation of duties to reduce (at least in appearance as much internal control is theatre) error/theft risk...

I'm not, and I'm sure if I had to use Excel every day I would adapt. But both Windows and Office reached their peak at around 2003 and it's been downhill ever since. I quite liked Windows 2000 Pro as a desktop.

It is already many years ago since that I started to do certain jobs in Libre Office (back then it was still OpenOffice.org) even if I had MS Office. I mean, it was better at certain tasks and costed nothing.

In all fairness, back them I also had to use MS Office for certain other tasks, but luckily I don't need that anymore.

Now there is Confluence instead however to mangle our docs and waste our time.

Excel is distinctly different from the rest of Office for a power user because while you're right that they've reorganized things (though only one real reorganization since at least Office 95, that's pretty good), the keyboard shortcuts have remained the same for literally my entire life. It's why Excel is nonstandard and weird compared to even other Office apps: Excel is the most this-is-for-work tool in Office, and they've been loath to break things for people like...well...me.

And I don't hate the ribbon interface, I think it's totally fine--but also, in Excel specifically, I almost never click a button on it.

QuickBooks's online version, on the other hand, has terrible discoverability and doesn't have standard keyboard controls.

Those keyboard shortcuts (the ones that begin with a slash, at least) date back to Lotus 123.

The Excel UI has changed once significantly in the past 2 decades with the addition of the Ribbon.

The Excel data format has changed once, significantly, in the past 2 decades (which was forced on MS and even though MS has tried to sabotage the openness of the new formats they were required to create, its still much better than the predecessors).

It’s hard to think of any other change that wasn’t just an addition (new formulas, higher column/row limits).

The Excel data format has changed once, significantly, in the past 2 decades

But, importantly, that data format change didn't mean you were forced to stop using the old format.

> Are your accounting people quite young? Excel moves and changes stuff, though not on quite such an aggressive timeline.

Excel UI interface changes but it won't change your spreadsheet content, which is the core functionality Excel users care about.

I've been using 15 year old .xlsx files with no issues across Excel 2007, to 2021, and Excel online.

I've seen companies using files with an absurd amount of worksheets within the file, or with an absurd number of rows (up to the limit), and those haven't been broken.

And I don't remember transitioning from xls to xlsx to be that painful, but this might be untrue for people using some very specific features.

Not at the same speed as SaaS software. Jira seems to change every five minutes.

I use LibreOffice bacause you know what Microsoft.

Are you a professional accountant?

The chrome of Excel changes. The core product is COBOL like in its stability.

The problem with all of these enterprise web applications is that they all suck. I worked for a big government agency that transitioned from a mostly homegrown, mainframe 3270 based accounting system to PeopleSoft. The staff revolted.

We joked about the “Revenge of the Beancounters”, but looking at it, they were right. It took them 4-6 months to train a new person with the old system, but they were hyper-productive. With the new system, they actually needed to grow the staff because you couldn’t build out workflows that the business needed.

They did get some benefits, like improved payments and invoice tracking. (Which drove the business case) But the general financial operations suffered.

this is one of the more annoying things about the Web "apps" and the ecosystem.... virtually no control over what's being used...

I’m a business owner and use Quickbooks online and a couple years ago they just flat out changed how they calculated taxes. When I reported the bug they just kept repeating how I could completely change my process to make it work, like they had released some new feature. But they really just broke shit, and refused to ever acknowledge it. There’s no way I was the only person reporting this. They obviously don’t care

Was this in reference to payroll tax, cause I also got screwed on that from them. I paid for payroll but they didn't file any papers. They paid everything but never ever filed a 940 or 941. By the time government speed came around and the IRS notified me I was delinquent for 2 years. I ended paying 2-3k in fees, dropped there payroll that day. But sadly still suffer through their accounting.

Is that something they can be sued over?

So you are saying Quickbooks is trying to be the next SAP?

(for those who don't know/understand, the "joke" in the industry about SAP is that it's a perfect fit for you, so long as you are willing to change all your processes and workflows to fit SAP. And no, it's not really a joke)

To be fair, I think the 'joke' is that for a regular 7- to 9-figure injection of capital, SAP will do things your way. Until you realize it's easier to just change your whole business top to bottom to do things the SAP Way.

A favorite HN comment of mine from a few years back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21590482):

> Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new pencil that had to be gripped differently for no reason, they'd throw it in the trash.

>

> But in software, we tolerate buggy tools that change all the time for no discernible reason. We tolerate software that simultaneously targets professionals and casual users, serving both segments poorly. We tolerate software that can't be customized or adapted for specific workflows. It's tough to put into words, but if you watch a musician or a painter interact with their tools, there's a very clear difference that emerges, and over time you start to realize how much better all of their stuff is.

>

> In most professional artistic settings, workflow changes only happen because they have a clear benefit -- drawing from your shoulder instead of your wrist, changing your embouchure if you play an instrument. And even in those fields, it's generally accepted that over time people will end up with very specialized setups that are very consistent and refined and that remain constant for years and years.

>

> Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my professional tools should change because change is inherently good. Only in commercial software would an elegant, consistent interface like Markdown that allowed me to build up decades of muscle memory until my computer was an extension of my fingers and I didn't need to think about the way I typed -- only in software would that be considered a bad thing.

The converse story is all the people that complain about $enterprise_software saying things like, it hasn't had an update since 1996!

Those are people who don’t use it judging by superficial things.

There is middle ground between doing significant changes all the time and no changes in ~30 years.

I was working at a software company years back that was doing this significant interface change. I suggested we have an 'end goal' interface and breakdown changes into multiple releases over time, organised it so each version change is easier to adapt to and educates somewhat in the changes as they occur, but this approach got no traction. I still wonder if its the correct approach or its better to get it over with in one go and then try to be stable.

At least in my experience the “one and done” feels better, but make it so the new one is somehow faster or easier or something. (Not salesforce lightning, e.g.)

The other ends up feeling like death by a thousand cuts.

That also speaks to the enduring appeal of tools like vi and emacs.

yeah, imagine if a new version of vim changed keybindings.

Torches and pitchforks. Lots and lots of them.

I tend to work with ERP a lot.

I once offered to fix the tab order on an input form, so the cursor started in the right box. The manager of that team got very excited and asked me not to change anything, the team had got used to the keystrokes!

I've found that once a behavior is released in the wild, even a bug, people will build it into their workflows and rely on its presence. Frustrating but unavoidable.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

That XKCD is hilarious! I've never seen it before:

  My control key is hard to reach, so I hold spacebar instead, 
  and I configured Emacs to interpret a rapid temperature rise 
  as "Control."

Good ol' "M-x spacebar-thermometer-mode".

That’s interesting, catering to an employee(a) over catering to the customer.

Most users and companies I've encountered want to remain on the desktop version. Its faster, gives them more functionality, its under their control and if they want they can pay or not pay maintenance fee. But the software firms are obsessed with the cloud and so are the heads of the Finance teams, they think it makes them look technically knowledgeable to move to the cloud so this pincer movement is forcing the everyday users onto something they dont want or need. Any cost savings disappear in rapidly rising yearly subs, but by then the people that forced the move are gone and everyone's lumbered with an expensive, clunky restrictive finance system.

> they think it makes them look technically knowledgeable to move to the cloud

It's not about looks, it's about locking people to the platform and milking them in a subscription model

That's the software company, I was referring to management.

last few years has convinced me that Intuit is determined to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by:

Is that you, Arlene?

Seriously, everything you list (and more) are things my accountant complains about. You're not alone in being a QuickBooks insider who hates QuickBooks and would love to move their clients onto something else.

> Even the same client that has multiple businesses and has to use multiple subscriptions could have a different look. I don't know what drives this at Intuit but it's confusing for me and I'm supposed to be the expert.

I guess that, behind the scenes, Quickbooks might run each client on its own code base or some limited multi-tenancy on a shared code base. So if your clients span those code bases, they could easily be on different versions. And the heuristics for when a code base is upgraded may depend on factors that you can’t see.

This is just a hypothetical, but that’s where my money is.

I canceled my subscription a month ago and moved to wave. What an awful piece of software and company. Slow, ads and promos and every interaction, slow, not very intuitive, did I mention slow? The only reason I signed up was because of a deal I got but it was not worth the gray hairs that I got.

Edit: intuit and quickbooks

Which software and company is awful? It is not clear from your comment.

This is a well-deserved Intuit complain-fest.

Intuit, tax and quickbooks. In addition to quickbooks online not being great, Just an example: I own the gmail for my name, somebody used it by mistake on turbo tax so I get their emails. I called their support and explained it to them but I have to give personal info on the account but I don’t own the account. It was like that for years until recently they fix it, although I already had created a filter for it. Similar happened with mint.

It's inevitable that Intuit will snuff out the desktop version of Quickbooks. The question is, what will rise up in its place? Will it be QBO or does something else have a shot?

I'm curious what the secret sauce is that Intuit/QB has provided advisors, like yourself, to stay on their platform for the past 20 years. What would it take for another accounting software company to get you, and others in your same situation, to commit to their platform for the next 20 years?

One huge problem with Quickbooks Desktop is that it's hugely expensive to integrate it with anything, be it cloud-based software, or another piece of on-premise software. This inevitably results in it becoming an "information silo", and necessitates stuff like dual data entry (i.e. entering the same information twice, first in QB and then in some other software).

In contrast, QB Online has a REST API.

One thing they are going to start pushing via their online platform is likely things line AR and payments via Melio (their a big investor in the company) and likely push out other vendors in that space as a result. My grapevine understanding is this is less possible with the desktop version because you’d need everyone to upgrade.

That’s what I think this is all about

AR? Augmented Reality? Wtf is Intuit gonna do with that?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounts_receivable

Genuine question: do you find there is creativity and the satisfaction of creating something from nothing in accounting work? It has always seemed so dull from the outside looking in (cue the joes about accountants) but is this the reality?

Many people don’t see software engineering as creative but it certainly can be!

Creative accounting and tax avoidance do exist tho

My sister is an accountant and she genuinely enjoys working with the numbers. She finds it, not exactly fun, but kind of fun? She describes it like every situation is a puzzle she gets to solve, and then maintain. She also likes working with her customers and enjoys those interactions, like she gets a good feeling from helping her customers out. That's enough for her.

Not the vocation for me but it's very interesting to talk with her about her experiences, because they're so remote from mine...

FWIW I share your sister's take. A large part of my job involves accounting and audit/compliance, and few things stimulate me more than trying to figure out "what the fuck were they thinking" and fixing it.

Sounds like some hardcore deep backend software dev jobs (I have similar for more than a decade), but actual creativity is scaled down to few %.

Accountants are extremely limited by rigid tools they use and laws they have to adgere to. Then comes given company's 'way we do things here' limit.

Take any modern programming language, you start with unique big problem/task, have to crack hundreds little and big problems, often with use of stackoverflow and other webs, but ie hard alghoritmic problems I solve mostly on my own since nobody faced those in exact mix of technologies, data and other constraints. There are sone further limits but my alghoritms are my solid creations, nobody ever questioned them nor made me refactor them for any reason.

To outsiders it may look exactly same weird nerd stuff of course. To me, accounting has very little room for creativity, its there but almost microscopic. And the joy you describe is also present, thats there in many jobs that actually create stuff, digital or not

Note your sister doesn't just work with "numbers". She works with a structure of interrelated accounts. In a sense she is working with the structure of the business. She is observing the business-process which is a bit like looking at a simulation.

Very true and well said!

I'm a small business owner and I get a lot of satisfaction from the feeling of confidence that everything is properly counted down to the last cent. Both for business and for IRS I have a confident answer. Kinda like designing a proper DB schema for the use case, using proper data types, optimal queries etc.

I work around financial software, so I met a lot of accountants over the decades.

There is some creativity in defining where to stash this or that number so that everything works out in the best way for the business. As others said, it's a bit like solving puzzles, and it's harder than it looks - it requires a significant level of preparation, and keeping up with constantly changing regulations.

What a lot of them also get pride from is formatting their reports "just so" - so that they're readable and enjoyable by businesspeople, while still being exact, comprehensive, and meeting formal standards. To me, that sort of thing is kinda boring and trivial, but for them it can be career-defining, life-or-death stuff. In a way, it's a hyper-specialized branch of graphic design.

I think it is the naive idea that bookkeeping is accounting.

I am an accountant, I never do any bookkeeping.

Last week a few things I did were

1) worked on a way to get sales rebates to correctly reflect in the product cost. This is half accounting knowledge and half ERP.

2) presented accounts at a meeting where I was trying to use the numbers to make the business take a different strategic direction.

3) reviewed and questioned the commercial sense in other people's plans

4) worked out how to run a new process through the ERP so the accounts flowed through correctly

In other weeks I may be forecasting cash needs, doing an investment appraisal, building business plans, getting funding, writing sql to get data, building a BI system...

I like the creativity and the amazing variety of what I get to do in accounts.

Accountants are like attorneys. The shitty ones go through the motions and create problems. The great ones often solve problems before you know you have one. They get a bad rap from a stereotype perspective!

It is boring, incredibly so. There's no real creativity involved unless you're trying to stretch the rules capture a transaction in a certain way or make it look like you're doing something you're not really. Its not fun and at some point you become aware of what you're doing and you quickly supress the memory in the deepest part of your mind. Its a hugely usefull skill though that helps you with so many other things, like budgeting, raising finance, running a business, investing. The the profession itself is like being force fed cold porridge for eternity.

Accounting work is in many ways similar to a garbage collector in program runtimes (e.g. JVM). Their primary goal is to manage available resources: keeping track of current usage, anticipate future availability and prevent misuse. In that sense, there can be a lot of creativity in the optimization of that process just as software people have from tweaking a piece of code to work better.

At one point many years ago I did tax preparation. I liked to joke the secret to being a good tax preparer was to be creative. But not so creative that the IRS gets angry.

Xero do a similar pricing thing. I have to pay for the $100 a month plan to get multi currencies because I contract to an overseas company. The standard plan which has everything I need but that is 1/3 the price.

Xero's been juicing the lemon more and more aggressively every year...

Point 2 is driving me crazy. Everything moved to places that now seem illogical.

the online thing is one aspect, but even the desktop part is hostile. forced obsolescence when you think you are buying a "perpetual" license. disgusting.

i've not found any local solutions that i like, at a cost (perpetual license is a requirement) that i like. so i moved to xero. it's slow and annoying in lots of ways, but it's very usable. some things are less abstract than QB, ie the method of entry for those is closer to just doing a journal entry, i guess this is good or bad depending on the user.

This sounds like what Adobe and Microsoft are also doing. It seems like they assume that they are somewhat invincible and therefore can do whatever they want.

The sad truth is that they actually are.

Digital feudalism is a real thing.

Why would people not go to Gnucash or Fresh books?

They are just not as good as QuickBooks and not many accountants are familiar with these other packages. The prices keep increasing but the QuickBooks online functionality is the best out there and it is the platform with which most other tools make sure to integrate.

Also, none of the open source alternatives support simultaneous multiuser access.

Users can slowly adapt, but most businesses larger than a sole proprietorship need multiuser capability.

This is a big one. I switched from GnuCash to QBO for a non-profit because of that.

One would think it can't be that hard to put together a webapp to freaking sum up some numbers, but nobody seem to want to do it in open source.

It could be because it's indeed so easy that it's boring, or could be that anyone with the necessary knowledge of accounting standards makes way more money doing other stuff than coding for free.

I'd assume that the overlap between capable open source developers and people who enjoy accounting enough to write their own accounting solution is fairly small.

Quickbooks is currently a necessary evil for me. I have to use it, because that is what my bookkeepers and accountants use.

If you want to change either your bookkeeper or your accountant, your new bookkeeper and accountant know how to use it.

Every time I have to open up QB, I cringe. Painful!

Agree with the points above about updates and $$$ increases. The worse!

Gnucash is hard to use.

I recently attempted to help a non profit setup Gnucash. It turned out to be cheaper to get commercial software (Xero) as they were spending too much time on upskilling in Gnucash.

They took a week to onboard to the new system and are amazing at how quickly they can do everything they need to do.

> “…I'm worried that I'm going to have to try to find a new way of supporting myself…”

What? I work in accounting and I was reading your post with curiosity until this. How do you support yourself—being a QB Pro advisor or as an accountant?