

Wells Fargo and Intuit Join Forces to Ruin My Weekend - blahedo
http://augustjackson.net/2011/08/14/wells-fargo-and-intuit-join-forces-to-ruin-my-weekend/

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there
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.

~~~
shaggyfrog
> 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.

~~~
there
then why do you use it?

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8ig8
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.

~~~
roel_v
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.

~~~
8ig8
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.

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dmboyd
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.

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pbreit
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.

~~~
r0s
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.

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ante
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

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drivebyacct2
How good is Mint in filling the role of these softwares. I would naively guess
that someone could better accommodate these people.

~~~
ante
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.

~~~
sliverstorm
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.

