Running Quickbooks is like....
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Coming to your IT department to management QuickBooks is like coming to your doctor with some homemade remedy that your cousin cooked up while smoking up last weekend.
At best it is benign and does nothing. At worst you are going to hurt yourself.
No doctor could, with a straight face, call it "taking your health seriously." If you want to do things like that, why have a doctor at all?
Same with IT and QB. At best it's a waste of money (read: poor business decision making.) At worst it is reckelss (read: really had business decision making.) If you want to do completely reckless things like this, why have IT oversight? Anyone can make bad decisions without having IT involved. What do people want from IT? Us to pretend it isn't ridiculous? Would you react any differently than the doctor?
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@scottalanmiller Agree 100%, unfortunately that is what we are running here (decided before they even had an IT person), im pushing them to start looking at better options.
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@brianlittlejohn said:
@scottalanmiller Agree 100%, unfortunately that is what we are running here (decided before they even had an IT person), im pushing them to start looking at better options.
Can't always change things. The important thing, IMHO, is making sure that they understand that IT does not approve and that we see it as them not taking their business seriously. It's one thing to support what we are told to support, it is another to empower bad decision making by making it "seem acceptable."
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I had just said offline..... acting like QB is "acceptable" is a lot like giving out awards for attendance. We would just be trying to act like "not completely failing" was grounds for approval - an attempt to make management feel "special" because we "approve" of their decisions. Once we start doing that, we really are not providing IT any more, and just providing "warm and fuzzies." It's like telling every one that things are okay as the Titeanic was sinking - instead of insisting that they steer away from the iceberg or pushing them into life rafts.
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Yea, I think I will be able to get them to at least look at other options... we have such a mis-mash of software to handle things the QB doesn't do well (I know, there is nothing it does well to begin with..haha). I think I can get them to see the value in moving to a product that does what we need.
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I've never seen a business for whom QB really worked. It is always a situation of "making due" in some ridiculous way. When Microsoft stopped selling SBA, QB's big competitor, they came out and said "all of these products are nothing more than a free template on top of Excel, if you are paying for a product in this category you are getting ripped off."
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QB dominates the market because they make the software for the preferences of the accountants, not the sysadmins. If that's what your accountant uses, as an SMB, that's what you use. You have no choice.
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@Nic said:
QB dominates the market because they make the software for the preferences of the accountants, not the sysadmins. If that's what your accountant uses, as an SMB, that's what you use. You have no choice.
I also don't understand why everybody hates QB, lol. We used it at my computer store for a while, and then we upgraded to the online version that they did. It wasn't the best thing in the world, but it was relatively easy to manage.
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@Nic said:
QB dominates the market because they make the software for the preferences of the accountants, not the sysadmins. If that's what your accountant uses, as an SMB, that's what you use. You have no choice.
Of course you do, you have the choice to use an accountant who also takes what they do seriously. Why would you ever chose an accountant that isn't serious about accounting? That's totally crazy.
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@dafyre said:
@Nic said:
QB dominates the market because they make the software for the preferences of the accountants, not the sysadmins. If that's what your accountant uses, as an SMB, that's what you use. You have no choice.
I also don't understand why everybody hates QB, lol. We used it at my computer store for a while, and then we upgraded to the online version that they did. It wasn't the best thing in the world, but it was relatively easy to manage.
- Cost lots of money for something that is free elsewhere for better features and products. High cost, no return is bad business.
- Core server software that installs on a desktop. It's amateur hour in the software shop. This was ridiculous in the 1990s. It's unthinkable in the 2000s.
- Client / Server architecture. Even if the database ran on a server, the end user client is fat software that runs on a desktop and needs to talk directly to a database! See comment about amateur hour. No self respecting software house would hire developers who thought this was okay even twenty years ago.
- No application gateway. Clients talk directly to a database, not to an application. Yet another "amateur hour" situation. These are literally "high school students learning to write programs" kind of mistakes. From a software standpoint, you couldn't even put Intuit on a resume!
- Database is a file, not an RDBMS! Seriously?
- Database is non-standard. Really?
- Every effort is taken to not just ignore your data but to actively put it at risk and make it difficult to back up for the sole purpose of selling DR services. Your vendor is literally out to get you, you should never let Intuit products in the door for this reason alone.
- Only runs on expensive operating systems not well suited to the purpose. Windows and Mac desktops are the last place you run critical systems. Windows servers sure, but even that would be ridiculous.
It's both totally unacceptable software and design from an IT perspective and cost from a business one. Anyone evaluating from these aspects should rule out the software:
- How the software was made. We just can't take it seriously.
- How the software is deployed and managed. IT should veto it for critical applications (like finances.)
- How much the software costs. Finance and accounting should veto it for being a reckless waste of money.
- Security. The system is designed to put you at risk. Risk managers should rule it out for letting the enemy into the shop.
Four different departments (software design oversight isn't really a department but it is an angle that if evaluated even from a cursory look should rule out Intuit as a vendor completely) that should a veto QuickBooks for different reasons.
From another angle... what about QB makes it "good enough" to justify using it?
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If Intuit was making video games for little kids, we could kind of excuse the low quality of their products. If they were making business software that was non-critical, we'd never let them in the door but it would only be so bad. But making the financial data? It is really one of the most shocking things in the business world that there is a single QB deployment out there. The layers of overlooking the basics that we would never overlook in any other arena and doing so for the company's finances is what is so dramatic.
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If we think about the needs of the SMB market and approach what a baseline product in finance and accounting would look like, we get something dramatically different than QB. Here are some thoughts...
- It should be hosted. The smaller the company, the less that critical software should be running in house. That SMBs would run their financial server in house is a bit crazy as a starting point.
- It should run on a server. Not that every SMB will do this, but that should be their decision to not take their systems seriously, not the software vendor's.
- It should be natively multi-user.
- It should be insanely easy to protect and backup and restore and to egress data.
- It should be cost effective and practical.
- It should be easy to use.
- It should be made in such a way that we are impressed, not embarrassed, to use it.
- It should be made by people we trust and respect, not people we laugh at and despise.
- It should be made by a vendor that wants to succeed by helping us to succeed, not one that exists to trip us up and take advantage of us when we fall.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Nic said:
QB dominates the market because they make the software for the preferences of the accountants, not the sysadmins. If that's what your accountant uses, as an SMB, that's what you use. You have no choice.
Of course you do, you have the choice to use an accountant who also takes what they do seriously. Why would you ever chose an accountant that isn't serious about accounting? That's totally crazy.
Doesn't matter when they have 97% of the accountants locked up.
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@scottalanmiller said:
If we think about the needs of the SMB market and approach what a baseline product in finance and accounting would look like, we get something dramatically different than QB. Here are some thoughts...
- It should be hosted. The smaller the company, the less that critical software should be running in house. That SMBs would run their financial server in house is a bit crazy as a starting point.
- It should run on a server. Not that every SMB will do this, but that should be their decision to not take their systems seriously, not the software vendor's.
- It should be natively multi-user.
- It should be insanely easy to protect and backup and restore and to egress data.
- It should be cost effective and practical.
- It should be easy to use.
- It should be made in such a way that we are impressed, not embarrassed, to use it.
- It should be made by people we trust and respect, not people we laugh at and despise.
- It should be made by a vendor that wants to succeed by helping us to succeed, not one that exists to trip us up and take advantage of us when we fall.
It's built on a 25 year old codebase which is insanely hard for them to update. Again, I'm not making excuses for them, just explaining why.
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@Nic said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Nic said:
QB dominates the market because they make the software for the preferences of the accountants, not the sysadmins. If that's what your accountant uses, as an SMB, that's what you use. You have no choice.
Of course you do, you have the choice to use an accountant who also takes what they do seriously. Why would you ever chose an accountant that isn't serious about accounting? That's totally crazy.
Doesn't matter when they have 97% of the accountants locked up.
It still matters to the businesses. In any field only a small percentage are really any good or take what they do seriously. Most are just there to coast, take advantage of others not looking to do a good job, etc. That most accountants are not very good or don't care about their jobs or their customers is not surprising. That businesses don't care about themselves and keep using them isn't surprising either. But none of that means that IT pros should look the other way and just act like one bad decision after another isn't bad. Once we do that, we are acting just like those accountants.
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@Nic said:
It's built on a 25 year old codebase which is insanely hard for them to update. Again, I'm not making excuses for them, just explaining why.
Can't be that hard. Their competitors did it in no time with a fraction of the resources. In reality, the cost and effort of maintaining software for which there are no skills on the market is far harder. The only benefit that they get is in screwing their customers through fragility and lock-in. If their goals was quality software at low cost, they could migrate easily to a new code base. I say this because their competitors can migrate you to other code bases that are vastly superior with little effort.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Nic said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Nic said:
QB dominates the market because they make the software for the preferences of the accountants, not the sysadmins. If that's what your accountant uses, as an SMB, that's what you use. You have no choice.
Of course you do, you have the choice to use an accountant who also takes what they do seriously. Why would you ever chose an accountant that isn't serious about accounting? That's totally crazy.
Doesn't matter when they have 97% of the accountants locked up.
It still matters to the businesses. In any field only a small percentage are really any good or take what they do seriously. Most are just there to coast, take advantage of others not looking to do a good job, etc. That most accountants are not very good or don't care about their jobs or their customers is not surprising. That businesses don't care about themselves and keep using them isn't surprising either. But none of that means that IT pros should look the other way and just act like one bad decision after another isn't bad. Once we do that, we are acting just like those accountants.
You don't have much choice if all the accountants in a 100 mile radius only use QB. And most businesses are shitty too, so they just go with whatever is handy.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Nic said:
It's built on a 25 year old codebase which is insanely hard for them to update. Again, I'm not making excuses for them, just explaining why.
Can't be that hard. Their competitors did it in no time with a fraction of the resources. In reality, the cost and effort of maintaining software for which there are no skills on the market is far harder. The only benefit that they get is in screwing their customers through fragility and lock-in. If their goals was quality software at low cost, they could migrate easily to a new code base. I say this because their competitors can migrate you to other code bases that are vastly superior with little effort.
We see the same excuses made by custom fitness equipment vendors. They hire a bunch of devs to make their program, then fire them all when they're done. Now a decade later they tell me to lower my desktop resolution to 1024x768 and 16bit color as a suggestion to help their crusty old code run. Boils my biscuits.
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@Nic said:
You don't have much choice if all the accountants in a 100 mile radius only use QB. And most businesses are shitty too, so they just go with whatever is handy.
Accounting is one of those things that has no reason to be local. We changed accountants over this, it's not an idle threat. Even in the poorest, remotest regions there are accountants who want to make money and do their job well.
I'm not saying that I'm surprised that Intuit has a market in working with crappy accountants to screw businesses that just don't take the effort to run well. I'm just saying that as IT we should never act like it isn't ridiculous on many levels and that businesses that do this can't honestly expect anyone else to actually take them seriously.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Nic said:
You don't have much choice if all the accountants in a 100 mile radius only use QB. And most businesses are shitty too, so they just go with whatever is handy.
Accounting is one of those things that has no reason to be local. We changed accountants over this, it's not an idle threat. Even in the poorest, remotest regions there are accountants who want to make money and do their job well.
I'm not saying that I'm surprised that Intuit has a market in working with crappy accountants to screw businesses that just don't take the effort to run well. I'm just saying that as IT we should never act like it isn't ridiculous on many levels and that businesses that do this can't honestly expect anyone else to actually take them seriously.
You can't just pretend Sturgeon's Law doesn't rule the universe
