Intuit's latest release of QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 2013 was supposed to solve the problems that had affected the product on the upper end of the QuickBooks line. The view seems to be that Release 6 has worked, well mainly. But until that product hit the streets a week ago, users were experiencing such issues as the system crashing.
Intuit has certainly had years with smoother product roll outs. While it's not related, early last month, the Minnesota Department of Revenue warned state residents not to use any of Intuit's four tax preparation software products to prepare taxes and to file either manually or electronically. That warning was quickly withdrawn after Intuit addressed the issues to Minnesota's satisfaction. Still, it cannot have been very satisfying for Intuit to be dealing with tax software and QBES issues at the same time.
"Some people never had problems; some people did. It's hard to pin down exactly why," says Charles Russell, a blogger and QuickBooks ProAdvisor who has been tracking the issues. Russell, who owns CCRSoftware, has been blogging about the problems and the Intuit response on The Sleeter Group's website. He identified 10 unrecoverable errors that R6 was intended to fix, among other bumps on the software road.
Asked for comments about the product issues, an Intuit spokesperson gave this statement: "With the QBES 13.0 release, performance was not at the speed and stability we expected or wanted for our customers. Since launch, and with R6, the QBES team has continued to make improvements in the area of performance."
One of Russell's posts in late March described R6 as "a big maintenance release, with changes to the user interface, fixes to random crashes, improvements with PDF support, a fix for the Windows 8 scan manager, and lots and lots of bug fixes." Russell said another serious problem was how long it took Intuit to deal with the issues.
"I expect them to have problems in the early revisions," he said. But usually Intuit should be informing customers of issues in January or February. "It's distressing that there are many significant errors this late in the season," he continued.
Bob Scott has provided information to the tax and accounting community since 1991, first as technology editor of Accounting Today, and from 1997 through 2009 as editor of its sister publication, Accounting Technology. He is known throughout the industry for his depth of knowledge and for his high journalistic standards. Scott has made frequent appearances as a speaker, moderator and panelist and events serving tax and accounting professionals. He has a strong background in computer journalism as an editor with two former trade publications, Computer+Software News and MIS Week and spent several years with weekly and daily newspapers in Morris County New Jersey prior to that. A graduate of Indiana University with a degree in journalism, Bob is a native of Madison, Ind
