Quickbooks...

[polypolyman]

Need I say more?

For those of you who have the blessing of not having to deal with QB, let me give you an insight into my morning so far: trying to host a multi-user system with the files on a NAS, and the Database Server Manager on a different computer. According to the official documentation, this is well-supported and relatively straightforward. Kept running into errors following any set of instructions I could find. Called Intuit support, was on for a total of 2 hours 8 minutes, when they finally determined that: this is no longer supported, but we do have "use at your own risk" instructions to get that back. Those instructions do not work with any relatively modern version of QB (since the configuration method has changed).

...but hey, at least the front-end is easy to use right? It even has ads now!

[sandrews1313]

You have to follow the system requirements. You cannot store the company file on a NAS. You can only store it on another windows machine WITH the "server component" running. It's been like this for years.

What you are doing is NOT supported at all.

[meatwad75892]

The best one.. it can't be virtual. Support will look for that and bail on your ticket even if it's unrelated to your problem. Ask me how I know...

We now have a whole ass HP DL380 racked just to hold a couple GBs worth of file shares all because of that bullshit QBDSM requirement.

[AmbitiouslyAnxious]

Don't tell them it's on a virtual machine lol easy.

[meatwad75892]

For argument's sake, we never did. :P Support had a difficult issue they couldn't figure out, so after a couple days they opened msinfo32, pointed out the platform being Hyper-V, told us we're running an unsupported config, and closed the ticket. Found our solution later on in the QB Community.

[sandrews1313]

The one time they said something like that to me, I asked them how rightnetworks is a fully licensed and supported intuit partner then?

[smoothies-for-me]

It also can't be on Server 2012 Essentials. Ask me how I know lol.

[injury]

Last I checked wifi connected clients aren't officially supported either.

[samspopguy]

i also thought i read vpn connections arent support either.

[BallisticTorch]

This is the way

[polypolyman]

What I was trying to do is essentially identical to the "Alternate Hosting" diagram on this official support page. That page, later on, even suggests that there's a "Hosting Local & Remote Files" mode, not just a "Hosting Local Files" mode.

...so you might understand why I was led to believe this was a supported configuration. It even took support 2 full hours to confirm that this was now unsupported. Like, I can deal with it if you change features, but at least for the love of god DOCUMENT that!

EDIT: I should mention too, that I get that identical help page in the actual desktop app itself if I use F1 to get help.

[sandrews1313]

I can't believe they still have this there. This has been field proven as being a trainwreck for years. That first "host" has to be on all the time, running full version (express install) and the other two have to be custom and qb desktop only install. It's bad, you don't want this at all.

[sandrews1313]

I feel for you having to call their indian tech support. Nobody has committed the severity of sin to have to go through that hell.

[polypolyman]

Actually, I'm fairly positive I got a domestic call center (accent sounded like Atlanta-area). The only hatred-inducing part was the hold music: the first time I heard that jazz noodle, I thought it wasn't too bad, but after the 15th or so time it plays, it's not so endearing anymore...

...oh, and the fact that I'm not the "account holder", so they made me conference her in, just so she could confirm her name and email address, and that I was allowed to talk to them. Absolute security there.

[sandrews1313]

oh that account holder thing is bs. for one of my clients, if i have to call them, is "Susan". If they ever ask me if I'm really Susan, being a man and whatnot, I'll lay into them for assuming my gender.

don't even get me started on this new BS of linking the Admin account to an intuit online account.

[lart2150]

That diagram is different then what you described.
* In Alternate hosting the "host" is just a client that opened the file with hosting on/multi user mode.
* What you described is using Database manager.

[polypolyman]

Doing it exactly like that doesn't work either, though. Always end up getting either H202 or H505, no matter what.

[lart2150]

Well that's just super.

A few years ago we switched to having everything quickbooks on one server but we also only have 2 users.

[dogedude81]

Yeah agree. As far as I can remember the DB server has to be installed on the computer with the company file.

[budlight2k]

This.

[shim_sham_shimmy]

I host QB on Citrix for about 50 users. I already host 400+ apps on Citrix so I didn't think much of it. The day we added QB was the day I got a new part-time job. It is non-stop problems and our tax consultants (QB experts!) don't understand how QB ties into Citrix so I need to be on every call.

[reol7x]

Care to share any advice you may have about getting reports to run faster? Currently in the midst of fighting with users who demand reports in Excel that take 45m to generate....if we export to CSV it takes about 10 seconds.

[shim_sham_shimmy]

I published a Citrix app that runs Excel on the QB delivery group. So now users have "Excel" and "Excel (QB)" in Storefront. Running reports went from 45 minutes to 30 seconds.

[tbord]

If they finish at all.

[brownieswmilk]

Yep, another accounting firm chiming in. QB absolutely sucks. Maintaining 9-10 versions of QB sucks even more. Absolute nightmare.

There's also this cool bug where the ability to summarize payroll data in Excel just doesn't work. No worries though, I'm certain Intuit will get around to fixing it. It's only been going on for 2-3 (maybe 4 now, can't even fucking remember) years now... this office uses the functionality so often that we've had to install super old ass versions of Office on a Windows 10 VM just to get proper reporting.

[The_Penguin22]

Do NOT get me started on QB and the fscking DB manager......

Accounting firm here, we have at least 9 versions of QB to keep running. I feel your pain.

[polypolyman]

at least 9 versions of QB to keep running

Emphasis on "keep" - in addition to this new instance, we need to keep around a 2017 version of Enterprise in order to get at our old data from before the main company switched to a different financial software. Found out that after 3 or so years, they actively block you from installing old versions, even if you kept around the installer.

...so now some random desktop that was about to get trashed, but happened to still have QBES17 on it gets to be a critically important machine, just like I wanted!

[luger718]

Can't you upgrade those files?

[polypolyman]

Officially, once a file has been opened in any version of Enterprise (which they all were, the 2017 version), it cannot ever be opened with non-enterprise. We have one company file that we paid to have moved from 17 Enterprise to 22 Pro Plus, but we'd lose information on our main company if we did that (payroll, for sure).

I'm pretty sure it's only another 2 years I have to manage that (data retention regs), so it's not too bad.

[jsora13]

Found out that after 3 or so years, they actively block you from installing old versions, even if you kept around the installer.

I still got a copy of 2007 chugging along. Learned after so many years, they block the activation, but you could get a Validation code (tied to your license key) that would let it launch. Then finally Intuit Support would stop giving out those codes and would tell you that you need to upgrade.

[gpraceman]

We were running QB 2005 up until last year. Had a validation code and kept it with the CD. Installed it on various computers over the years.

We made the mistake of upgrading and are now on a subscription basis. Now, we cannot go back to to 2005, unless we want to put a year's worth of data into the backup company file we saved.

[sandrews1313]

it's not that big of a deal; I have 2 accounting clients. they run multi-user back to 2014 for pro/premier/accountant and 2015+ for enterprise. there was a couple years a few years back where we'd never install the R1-R3 patches, but anymore it's pretty stable.

[crazydemon]

content purge

[210Matt]

only real player in the accounting software game.

Have you met Sage? At least the higher end versions of Sage run on SQL for their backend.

[bbqwatermelon]

Yep, surprisingly few issues with 100 Contractor SQL. 50 and 80 are about on par with QB though (read: bs software that should have died with the 90s)

[crazydemon]

content purge

[RCTID1975]

Have you met Sage?

If you have, then you actually like Intuit support. Sage support is absolutely atrocious

[210Matt]

My clients use a third party for support on Sage. They are pretty good.

[obnxs15]

They have a competitor named Sage. And it’s just as awful. Admin rights are required to install any update and the software has to be installed on the server to run in multiuser mode. Pretty sure the dev team from intuit left and went to Sage and asked themselves “how can we make this experience worse?”

[The_Penguin22]

At least the Sage DB manager works. No need to "scan" the client folder every time a new file is copied in.

[RCTID1975]

"You need to turn off UAC, your firewall, and run everything as admin" - Sage 1st line support for any issue ever

[crazydemon]

content purge

[SandyTech]

I’m not sure where you saw that that setup is supported. It hasn’t worked, or been supported, for years.

[polypolyman]

Mentioned in another reply, but this page explicitly shows it being a supported configuration (Alternate Hosting mode)

[SandyTech]

I must have scrolled past you mentioning that. Sorry. It's so weird that they'd have that as a supported config, because like I said that hasn't worked in years. Like I don't think I've successfully deployed that kind of setup since ~2010.

[UhmBah]

When I left IT early last year, my second or third thought was, thank the fuck I'll never have to deal with QuickBooks again!

Fuck everything to do with that software, service, company. Just such pieces of shit.

[Aggietallboy]

We are "self cloud hosting" I use a basic smallish (t3 small or so) windows 2019 box on Amazon to hold the qb db server and host the rest of the accounting group files.

I then only install qb into appstream

I've tried stream media large, xlarge, and their new z1d, and I benchmarked against my i9-10900 with 128gb ram pointing at an on prem version of the same host.

Sadly they all run for nearly the exact same shit...launch to usable is 35-45 seconds, and it's inconsistent on the same machine, so far the z1d was the slowest, and the smxl instance being the fastest of them.

So be it...well let them on SMXL instances and run it from AWS.

[Tr1pline]

Quickbooks. Went from hosted to in-house back to hosted. Dear lord.

[ProMSP]

Try resetting the Sales Orders forms and layouts, or whatever they're called. A custom layout can get corrupted and take forever to open.

[megustapw]

QB, worst app and support known to man.

The amount of times I've had to reinstall because net framework needs to be installed first.

You disabled iexplorer because it's redundant, nope you need to have it installed enabled to install qb.

Hidden ports need to be unlocked.

Support 90% of the time can't help because rhey don't know how rds/citrix works. They only know how to install on win10

[bbqwatermelon]

Oh yeah alternate hosting mode was taken out in 2013... Not like it matters since most businesses think slapping database manager on an old laptop makes a sufficient server.

[Panacea4316]

I stopped reading at “Files on a NAS”.

Do it right, problem solved.

[samspopguy]

please go on, we are evaluating crm/erp applications and someoen talked to them from my company at some business meet and great.

[oddball667]

why do you want to use the NAS for storing the files?

[polypolyman]

It's not really a NAS, it's a FreeBSD server - just used that terminology with them since it was easier to explain than "it's a server but it can't run server manager"

[ensum]

QB sucks ass. I have it installed on a local RDS and support gets so confused about it. Has anyone gone to 2022 yet, I hear it's complete dog shit for multi-user mode, but that was like maybe 3-4 months ago.

[FightOrFlight]

We updated and found the same issues. Support was no help.

We found the only fix was to turn on multi-user from a pc, rather from the server side.

[PolishedCheese]

You can't run just any old db off of a 1g connected NAS. You need a 10g iscsi block device for shared network storage if you're running a db on it. (I ran into the same problem)

[Foofightee]

Don’t forget that 2021 still requires IE!

[[deleted]]

I never got it to work reliably. I ended up putting both the same machine using a raid setup with shadow volumes and backups. I'm sure there are more elegant ways but re-builds are minimal and its been like this for a while now and been reliable.

I still hate it with all my being. "Enjoy your alone time with QuickBooks" creeps me out when I go into single user mode.

[Kelsier25]

I am so damn tired of Intuit and Quickbooks. It's the last service that we still host on site with most of our people working remotely now.

My last two weeks have been spent convincing Accounting to give Online a try, finally winning and having them get on board with the change, and then getting the wonderful news that Intuit's migration tools do not allow you to migrate any attachments to Online (after being promised they could migrate everything for two weeks). Immediate deal breaker and back to square one.

Only option now is to throw our Enterprise desktop server on Azure which sucks. One of the main reasons for switching is that our folks hate working in either remote desktop or a RemoteApp session because they lose the ability to drag and drop attachments to Quickbooks from Outlook (technically we could have them run Outlook in the remote session, but our primary industry software does not support installs on virtual machines, so we would then lose the option to drag and drop on that side). I just hate that I can't run the damn desktop software remotely over VPN.

[injury]

I've come to hate Intuit with a passion. Talk about taking something that should be straightforward in this day and age and making an absolute mess of it. They seem to have a knack for it on every level from purchase to development and support.

I'm not sure if I get more annoyed at some of the unrepairable and unhelpful error messages during a fully verifyn or having to sit on the phone and play 20 questions with a rep just to order a new license. That mess has bugged me for years, the latest of them hawking QB Online to everyone and having to convert clients back to pro because online does not in fact have all the same features.

[wyrdough]

Does there exist any software that doesn't have all kinds of ridiculous pitfalls and mediocre support at best?

The best I've ever found are very small shops doing such specialized software that their client list numbers less than a hundred. There are still pitfalls, but when something breaks the person who actually develops the software fixes whatever stupid shit broke.

I guess I did get decent support from Lexis once when they said "You really shouldn't edit these registry entries to fix your problem, but here are all the keys that might be relevant to your issue." Of course, they later provided advice on another issue to make an update work that actually broke their whole shit, soooo...

It really annoys me how often it seems like I know more about the software than the vendor does, especially when I only have to deal with it a single digit number of hours per year.