Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Comments on QuickBooks Online Edition

I’ve been eval­u­at­ing alter­nate account­ing pack­ages for our firm for much of this year (we cur­rently run Quick­Books Pro on a PC — we’re a Mac-based busi­ness, but QB for Mac just doesn’t seem to cut the mus­tard), since, as a user expe­ri­ence con­sul­tant and user inter­face designer, I can’t stand actu­ally *using* QB.

I’ve been test­ing Blinksale for a few months and have been thrilled with its inter­face and usabil­ity (it’s actu­ally *fun* to use), but its cur­rent major lim­i­ta­tion (for us at least) is the lack of an export option to QB (send­ing our accoun­tant a QB file at the end of the year saves us money, thus it is of great impor­tance that we con­tinue to do that, even if we don’t use QB for any­thing else). They are fix­ing that soon by pro­vid­ing an API to allow export­ing and manip­u­la­tion of the data, but that hasn’t been released yet (some­one at Intuit should con­tact Firewheel Design and offer some fund­ing to make sure an “Export to QB Pro” option will be pos­si­ble, or maybe Intuit could develop a free solu­tion based on the API — there’s an idea!).

So, when I finally ‘found’ Quick­Books Online Edi­tion, I thought “ter­rific!” — true, the UI needs a *ton* of work to be con­sid­ered “user friendly” or even “usable”, but no more so than the UI of QB run­ning in Win­dows. Nonethe­less, I thought it would pro­vide the easy access of QB Pro with­out hav­ing to turn to a PC all the time (and make it eas­ier to han­dle account­ing on the road), but sadly, the lack of Mac sup­port will pre­vent my firm from trav­el­ing down this path at all.

ActiveX is a poor choice to begin with (I’m sure the QBOE team must be tired of hear­ing this by now), but the big­ger issue is that web-based appli­ca­tions should offer cross-platform and cross-browser com­pat­i­bil­ity. And rely­ing on a browser-specific (and thus, client-side) tech­nol­ogy for a web-based appli­ca­tion is a poor choice, no mat­ter what that tech­nol­ogy may be (it can also be argued that rely­ing on tech­nolo­gies such as AJAX is also a poor choice, but most devel­op­ers imple­ment­ing AJAX real­ize that, and pro­vide some level of back­wards com­pat­i­bil­ity for their users… excep­tions exist — Base­camp and Back­pack for exam­ple — but those choices have been made care­fully, and those appli­ca­tions sup­port mul­ti­ple plat­forms and browsers, so they are far less limiting).

I would beg Intuit to focus their devel­op­ment efforts on mak­ing QBOE a true web appli­ca­tion, cross-browser and cross-platform, instead of con­tin­u­ing down their cur­rent path (I mean, come on peo­ple — sug­gest­ing Vir­tual PC as an option for Mac users to access the Online Edi­tion of your soft­ware is push­ing the limit of rea­son), but I have a feel­ing they just won’t get the mes­sage (although I do hope they’ll prove me wrong, or bet­ter yet, hire me — I’d love to redesign the QBOE UI).

In the mean­time, I’ll con­tinue to wait and see what Josh Williams and the Firewheel team have in store for us when the Blinksale API is finally released, and hope that by tax time, I’ll be able to move my company’s invoic­ing data to Quick­Books Pro with­out too many caffeine-fueled late nights.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Tuesday, November 1st, 2005.

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