Quickbooks upgrade and sunset policy

I love Quickbooks, it is fantastic software, and I happily recommend it to anyone who will listen. It is far superior to Sage.

But I don't like the way they handle their upgrade policy. Every couple of years, they release a new version and eventually stop supporting old versions. This is perfectly sensible, and we also upgrade every few years, as our version approaches its "sunset" date (the date when they stop supporting it, and stop offering payroll tax table updates).

We prefer not to upgrade to the very latest version as soon as it comes out, because new software (whether from Microsoft, Sun or Quickbooks) often has bugs which are only ironed out once very large numbers of users have been bashing away at it for a year or so. Indeed, Quickbooks itself had quite a serious bug in their 2003 Pro edition when it first came out. Plus there was a complex change to VAT reporting in 2005 Pro which, while not a bug, was difficult to handle and we handled it incorrectly causing us considerable problems later on. This was our fault, but nevertheless is another example of why we avoid upgrading too frequently - we don't want to have to spend time every year figuring out this sort of thing.

But Quickbooks always try and bamboozle us into upgrading nearly a year before our current version sunsets, by refusing to sell us a payroll subscription for our version, on the basis that that version will sunset a few weeks before we have had a full twelve months' use out of that payroll subscription (because we first subscribed in May 2001, so every year we renew in May, but the sunset date always falls in April.)

We then have a little barney about this, insisting they honour their published sunset date, if that means we lose a few pounds-worth of payroll subscription we really don't mind. And they agree, and we then upgrade about a year later. (And I don't think we do ever actually lose out on the payroll subscription, because we roll it into the new version when we do upgrade).

That's all broadly fine. It is obviously in Quickbooks' interest to persuade people to upgrade more frequently, so I don't object too much to them trying to do that.

But I do hugely object to the telephone manner of the "supervisor" who I just persuaded to renew our payroll subscription. She did this very begrudgingly, saying "but you are just going to complain about this in 2008 when you need to upgrade the software. Every time you contact us it is to complain."

Pop quiz: what's the best way to deal with a customer who complains? Blame them for complaining too frequently? Or try and fix the problem?

(plus, it's not me contacting them, it's them contacting me, trying to sell me something I don't really need.)

Printingdirect rocks

We use Printingdirect.com for our printing. I have been reminded recently how good they are by an unfortunate foray into another printing company's world.

You might notice we won an award sponsored by Sage (the Sage Business Awards). As well as fame and honour, that prize also got £1,000 of Sage products. Now we don't use Sage software (we don't, frankly, think it is very good. QuickBooks is, in our opinion, a much better product than Sage Line 50, or whatever they call their SME package these days). So we dithered for ages deciding how we could spend our free money - then Sage kindly pointed out that they also do printing (mainly for customised invoices and stuff, that are compatible with Sage software). So we asked to please do us a bunch of feedback cards and flyers up to the value of £1,000. That was back in October 06.

There then followed a painful, six-week-long process of proofing and re-proofing and me chasing and chasing, and then the items arrived. The feedback card had a typo on it (my name was spelt wrong!); and the flyer was printed on horrid, flimsy, shiny paper.

Sage offered to reprint everything, and it eventually arrived some time in December, a good two months after we ordered it.

Was this just because they were doing it for "free" (not really free of course, they got plenty of publicity from sponsoring those awards)? Or is their service always like that?

It contrasts starkly with printingdirect. We just received some new letterhead from them, and the process was as follows:

- Log on to website
- Find last order of letterhead
- Click "Re-order"
- Arrives 5 days later

Total management time required? About 2 minutes. Total management time required to manage that Sage order? About 4hrs.