Customer Service Spanking: Intuit
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Ok, true, there’s not much that can be considered entertaining about accounting software, especially if that accounting software is QuickBooks. On the other hand, many of you own or run your own small business and may be no stranger to this horrible piece of software. Intuit deserves a special place on the Customer Service Spanking list for a number of reasons.
First off, did you know that Intuit offers NO unpaid support for QuickBooks? Seriously. Although Intuit made $622 million from QuickBooks last year (up 6% from the previous year), they have decided that customers no longer deserve ANY unpaid support. Not for a year. Not for 90 days. Not for 30 days. Not even for one day. No. Unpaid. Tech support. Period.
This is a horrible, ridiculous policy, especially considering the 80% market share they enjoy in the small business accounting category. And even more so when you consider how poorly designed their software is. Hit the clicky thingie to read more…
Take for instance the problem that I was having recently with one of my company files: I wanted to remove the password, because QuickBooks forces you to change it every 90 days, which causes problems when my accountant needs to access the data, especially if people from their office can’t get ahold of me to get the latest password and they’re working on something time-sensitive. Should be a simple enough task, right?
Wrong.
Of course, the QuickBooks documentation claims this process to be an easy fix. Just go in to change your password, remove the password from both password fields, and that’s it.
Except it doesn’t work.
First off, as with many password systems, there’s a challenge question drop-down. You have to change this back to the default <select> in order to progress pass this screen. Many users might figure this out, but even this isn’t the real problem, because when you try to click through to save your user account without a password, QuickBooks throws up an error that says “The new password is not complex. Please try again.”
Intuit claims that they don’t offer any tech support for QuickBooks because everything you could POSSIBLY want to know can be found in the help file or online in the “community forums”. Usually when a developer points people to the community forums for support, they have people monitoring those forums and, sometimes even, providing answers, especially to common issues.
Doing a search for remove password in the QuickBooks forums yields over 12,000 results…I’d say this is a common issue (sure, some of the results aren’t specifically related to removing the password from a company file, but it’s clear that many of them are). Some of the messages have info about a password reset tool that Intuit provides.
Ok, let’s stop here for a minute. Really? A password reset tool? For a file on your local computer where the password is actually stored? How about this instead: Make the process for removing the password actually work! And the worst part is that after downloading the password reset tool and waiting for the unlock code to arrive via e-mail, the password reset tool ALSO DID NOT WORK. It just said “There was a problem removing your password” and pointed me to a list of reasons why that might happen. None of them had anything to do with me. None of them said “This software sucks” either, which I found odd.
Anyway, since I was so frustrated with this idiotic situation, I got a lowly tech support person on the phone at Intuit and pretty much made her help me. She kept telling me that there was no included support and I told her I realized that, but the solution to this problem in the help file was wrong and nobody answered my question on the community forums. So she proceeded to tell me that I don’t know how to use a computer and that I’m obviously doing it wrong (I may be exaggerating this somewhat, but she did in fact tell me that I’m obviously doing it wrong).
So I let her share my screen, and after about five minutes, she was literally cursing my system because, of course, it didn’t work for her either. At one point I asked her if there were any features in QuickBooks that would cause the password removal process to not work…something that was requiring me to have a password, but the error message simply wasn’t telling me so. “No. There’s nothing like that in QuickBooks,” she assured me.
Finally she escalated the case (at no charge) and had me upload my file to Data Services so that they could remove the password. Yes, now at least one other person at Intuit was going to be wasting their time, simply because their idiotic programmers never thought to implement a simple “Remove Password” button with a confirmation dialog. Nice.
A few hours later, I received an e-mail that the work on my file was done, that they’d successfully removed my password, and my file was ready to be downloaded. The e-mail informed me that they had created a new password for the file, for security reasons, but that I’d be able to remove it in the normal way once I downloaded the file.
Except I couldn’t remove it. Seriously. Same error message.
At this point I was ready to pull out what’s left of my hair. I started going through all of the various menus in QuickBooks looking for anything that seemed related.
The Solution
Under QuickBooks’ Company menu is an option that reads Customer Credit Card Security…
Clicking on this lets you disable this feature. This feature requires that all users accessing the company file have complex passwords that must be changed every 90 days.
I disabled the feature (since I don’t store customer credit card data in QuickBooks anyway), went back to the change password dialog and whaddya know, it worked! Finally. After hours of support phone calls to at least four different people at Intuit, none of whom knew this the Customer Credit Card Security feature had to be disabled before you could remove your password.
And, again, there are THOUSANDS of people who have this same issue.
Companies like Intuit give software devs such a bad name. QuickBooks looks like it was designed and programmed about 15 years ago, visually speaking, with none of the visual niceties of modern Windows software. It’s not even easy to “follow the money” in QuickBooks…something that should be pretty darn easy to do in an accounting package, especially one with an 80% market share in its class. What I mean by this is that if you’re reconciling a bank account and you have trouble locating a payment, for example, it takes a ton of clicks through to different parts of the program just to find what you’re looking for.
But to add insult to injury, Intuit offers NO unpaid support for QuickBooks, and their tech support staff are uninformed as to the functionality of the product’s features and how to work with them.
So here’s your customer service spanking, Intuit. I hope it stings. A lot.
UPDATE: After finally solving this problem, I posted a link to this article in several threads at the Intuit support forums, so that other people with this same issue who hadn’t received accurate help from anybody (including Intuit) would finally be able to get rid of their passwords. Now, I will say that an Intuit employee in the forums, going by the forum name payrolljen, did in fact thank me when I posted this to my own original thread. However, another Intuit employee, a community host going by the forum name AskAmyK, REMOVED some of my posts from other threads and sent me an e-mail telling me I was “repeatedly posting the same information, regardless of the relevancy to the issue being discussed” (which wasn’t true, since I only posted to other threads in which people were complaining that they couldn’t remove their passwords) and then she went on to cite some of the forums’ legal agreement, outlining in red sections on imploring readers to take actions intended to furhter a personal purpose and linking to competing sites with the intent to harm the flow of information at Intuit’s community.
AskAmyK did, in fact, at acknowledge that she recognized that I was trying to be helpful, which I appreciated, but I still think it’s ridiculous that she removed some of my posts, since, again, I specifically posted them to threads in which people were complaining that none of the information or tools provided by Intuit had allowed them to remove their passwords, or threads where people had posted that they were having password issues and no responses had been posted.
It’s just annoying that there are people at Intuit spending time / effort on stuff like deleting relevant posts and citing legal agreements, rather than helping the many customers having issues. It reminds me of those stories about how AOL would employ many more people on staff to dissuade customers from switching to another ISP than they did actual tech support or customer service people.
June 25th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Thanks so much for posting this little known fact about the inability to remove the password from a file if the Customer Credit Card Security Feature is enabled. That is great for people to know if they are getting the invalid password error when trying to convert from the desktop version of QuickBooks to QuickBooks Online.
You are correct in stating that the desktop verion of QuickBooks does not offer free support of any kind however, QuickBooks Online does offer free, unlimited support in at least three different forums. They have an 800 support line number you can call (800-286-6800), online chat support, call back or email support as well.
June 25th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
Call me wacky, but I’m not a huge fan of storing my company’s financial info online on another company’s servers. Banks are regulated at least…Intuit is just a software company (and, in my opinion obviously, not a very good one).
July 2nd, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Thank you. I have been trying to remove the password log in since upgrading to 2009. Who would have guessed it was because of the Credit Cards. If I remember correct it was just a questions of “Do you accept credit cards?” I answered yes as we do, but we do not process them thru our Quickbooks. Sorry you had so much trouble but you saved me a lot of aggravation.
July 15th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Thanks for posting this. I did a Google search to solve this problem since searching Intuit’s site is a waste of time and was fortunate to have found your article. We actually have paid Quickbooks support but I avoid it like the plague. I’d rather get a root canal that call their uninformed techs in India.
July 16th, 2009 at 8:19 am
Heh, I hear ya. Glad you were both able to find this as I obviously know how frustrating it is!
August 23rd, 2009 at 1:26 am
Intuits customer service personal are very friendly people; I was entertained for three hours by the level 3 tech before being treated to the level two’s “white Glove” experts. I came up with a way to rapidly move my client files off my hard drives as the “White Glove” techsperts had determined that a complete file purge was in order allowing a fresh start. The tech in charge attempted to remove the the remaining program via remote control and left me with file fragments spread through out my hard drives and was unable to complete the fix. I can no longer run, reload or remove Intuit; I’ve had to use another computer to process cilent’s Intuit files. If anyone knows how to remove protected, archive, read only, hidden and otherwise locked files with a good search destroy program, please respond. Zippy
August 23rd, 2009 at 9:22 am
Ouch! Sorry to hear that (but not surprised)
September 4th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Once again Thank you for that very important info I hate passwords!!
December 22nd, 2009 at 11:43 am
another thing Intuit does not make clear is that you must use the name that was used to originally register the software (in addition to the phone # and zip code they have on file)
December 26th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Could not agree with you more, Jill. I have been whining about this program for years but unfortunately I still use it. Just installed version 2010 and it took me 22 minutes!!! just to get the damn thing registered and be given a Validation Code! Wish there was something better out there.
March 30th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
thank you so much!! that stupid password was a pain
December 28th, 2011 at 8:50 am
I found the “Customer Credit Card Protection” tab, but when I click on it the “Disable Protection” button is grayed out not allowing me to click on it. Is there a preliminary step I’ve missed?
May 22nd, 2012 at 4:15 pm
I have been struggling with this issue for 2 years. Some of my clients have it set up for a password change every 90 days and some dont. Imagine the frustration , especially during deadlines. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE ANSWER. SUPPORT AT QB even if you pay for it , I know more than they do because I have using Quickbooks since QB 3.0 Maybe you should start a consulting business for QB support 🙂
November 11th, 2013 at 2:58 pm
This issue is much worse than posted here – a lot of users have the “Disable Protection” Grayed out.
1. It is Grayed out because it thinks you are connected to the credit card service, even though you may have cancelled.
2. As of 11-10-2013 I found a message from QuickBooks in that they are aware of this problem and working on a solution.
3. Some people are creating a new company and moving there data to such to get around this (not me)
4. Also you may have moved your credit card processing to another QB company and the old company cannot get rid of this nag.
5. I have not tried this but go to “Company” “Advanced Service Administration” and try to connect to the service – it connects it may then allow you to “Disable Protection”. QuickBooks says the “Disable Protection” feature should work if the QB company is linked and connected to the service.
I am leaving mine as is for now (11-10-2013)awaiting a future fix.