First of all I would like to say Adam thanks for the site. I can see that it will come in real handy in the future. Here is my first of many buyer nightmares.
I am a small business owner. I am no way a mean person, but enough is enough. We all have our limits. And I got pushed way past my limit this time.
Back when I started my business
QuickBooks 2004 was the product of choice. I think I purchased it right before the
QuickBooks 2005 came out.
Many probably know Invoices can be emailed inside of
QBs. Well a few months ago that feature quit working. Since they force you to connect to their email system for sending them, I had no way of sending emails.
I definitely didn’t want to spend $200-$300 on new software. There had to be a way around this.
I mentioned this issue to my computer guy and he suggested that I print my Invoices from QB through a little free program that converts them to PDF. Then I could attach them to my emails. The bad thing is I would have to now manually send emails for all my Invoices! But I could now send them!
I did the email thing for about a month. Each month I try to reconcile my bank and credit card statements to keep my books up to date.
Well this time when I tried, I ran into yet another problem. I got to the download screen when it opens my bank’s website and got an error. Then I tried several more times. Now the screen just pops up, but stays blank.
This time my computer guy had no suggestions! I finally ended up doing what I didn’t want to do. I had no other choice and I needed to catch up. I had spent way too much time on this. I had to spend over $200 on QB 2007.
Now that I was FORCED TO UPGRADE, I found nothing to be really new. Just a few things moved around, which by the way was irritating to find, and maybe a few cosmetic things. It was just more money in their pocket.
The bad thing is, the problems I had to start with and caused me to upgrade still didn’t work! I called their support number. Now here is where the fun begins!
I was literally on the phone for around an hour for these simple things that you would think would work now that I have upgraded.
The QB support guy could barely speak English. He continued to ask me the same questions over and over... and over again. I had to finally tell him that my answer still hasn’t changed and I am tired of getting asked the same questions.
Several times he asked me a question, I immediately answered him. Me thinking he was looking something up to help me, boy was I wrong.
I sat there for 5-10 minutes at time. I finally asked him what was taking so long only to find out he was waiting on my answer. If I could have reached through the phone I would have literally smacked him in the head with something hoping to knock some sense into him.
He finally asked for the phone number on my AMEX card, which was the statement I was trying to download. Why, I don’t know. The issue had nothing to do with them. The QB screen for statement downloads just stayed blank. I guess he could not comprehend that.
Well I gave him the AMEX phone number, which again I had no idea why. It is one of those numbers where it has some numbers shown as letters – 1-877-blue-254. By this really confused him.
Again the repetitive questions came. This time it was for the number. I kept telling him that is the number, repeating it over and over, telling him those letters map to numbers on the keypad. I finally had to stop him and tell him to LISTEN to what I am saying and repeated it one last time!
He then began to argue with me that it should be all numbers there are no letters for phone numbers in the “city of California”. I finally felt like I was the one providing support to him.
I had to correct him by telling him there are letters on the keypad, California is a state not a city, and I am not from California.
Finally I gave up on that. I told him I would make life easier on him. I mapped out the numbers on the keypad myself and told him. Still not knowing what this was about, he put me on hold.
Several minutes go by while on hold. Then an AMEX rep magically comes on the line and the QB brainchild is nowhere to be found.
The AMEX rep had no idea why she was there. I basically told her never to buy QB and gave her a quick overview of what was happening, and I wasn’t sure where the QB support guy went and why he even called her. I explained to her this is probably one of the most awkward situations I have ever been in and she agreed.
The QB support guy never showed back up, so I told her that I was going to go ahead and hang up.
Finally after hours and hours of research for myself, I came up empty. I wasn’t calling them back after that whole mess. I then did an update on the QB program to make sure it was current. You figure I had just downloaded the latest version, why would this be needed.
Guess what after a huge update download my problems were resolved. In the end, this whole mess probably cost me about $1500-$2000 all because I was FORCED to upgrade my accounting software. Thank you QB.
I will be sure to allocate time in next year or two to move to another product once I get my money back from this mess.
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