QuickBooks (online) isn't 'Bug Free'

Typically when Insightful Accountant publishes a story about 'bugs' and QuickBooks we are talking about QuickBooks Desktop, but recently I started hearing about 'bugs' associated with QuickBooks Online.  You say, "what, QuickBooks Online has bug?"  I can only say that it appears that way from the research Caren Schwartz did for us.

When Caren first contacted me about this, she was asking if I had ever heard of some of the 'strange behavior' she had been encountering when working with her clients in several of their QBO files.  I told her that I had seen some people reports in various forums including the QuickBooks Community some 'oddities', and that they had almost always reported that Intuit Support told them it was 'just transient in nature'.  You know the old, "just sign out and sign back in", or "try a different browser", or "go ahead an clear your 'cache' and 'cookies', and then log back in" responses.  The typical QuickBooks Online support recommendations. 

Caren assured me that it was more than that, this was just 'transient' behavior, but thinks that it could be consistently reproduced.  So here is some of what Caren found.

One of the first oddities I observed occurred when I would create a sales receipt and save it,  “suddenly” the amount would be zero. Initially I didn’t have time to examine the situation closely but I was able to track down the cause. After speaking with Intuit's QBO Support staff, I confirmed that this is indeed an issue that others have experienced. Support told me that this problem is “being worked on”.

For some of the issues I had discovered, I was told they had been corrected, but judge for yourself. It doesn’t matter if you are logged in to QBO via a web-browser or via the QBO Windows App for these first few.

One of several 'variants' of the Sale Receipt issue can be seen in this example:

  • If you go into QBO and create a Sales Receipt, like the one shown below...
  • and then, change the Date...
  • like magic, BAD MAGIC, the amount is gone (it's back to zero)!

"That looks like some 'Hocus Pocus' going on to me!" (Murph)

Another oddity occurs when you are editing the client's information on a Sales Receipt. After making a change to the Sales Receipt, the amount changing isn't the only 'bad magic' to take place.

Look carefully in the picture below, should should see that the name is duplicated in the Billing Address of the sales receipt from what it was when the Sales Receipt was initially created, as in the first picture above.

  • Not the biggest bug on the face of the planet, so since I noticed it, I just deleted the duplicate line.
  • When I clicked 'Save', guess what?  The duplicate line I had just deleted was posted back in my Sales Receipt.

"I'm surprised, technical support didn't tell you that your computer was 'haunted'..." (Murph)

I found that if you edited other areas of the address it was possible for QBO to hold the changes once you saved them.

Believe it or not I found similar irregularities when editing Vendor related transactions.

I'm still researching other QBO 'oddities'.  For example, there seems to be some issues associated with merging customers and sub-customers when using the QBO Windows App, and while I can recreate the problem with 'merged' elements showing up the next time I logged-in using the App, I didn't get the same result when using QBO within the Chrome browser.

Intuit Support also says that 'not all of these issues impact every user'. I got the idea that some of these issues maybe associated with the QBO-Accountant platform as opposed to QBO in general.

Caren not only passed her 'write-up' along to us, but she was wondering what 'we' could/should do to help get these problems resolved.  Well, really there are two things. 

If you have experiences these, or other bugs, perhaps even some haunting of QBO:

  1. Be sure to not only report them to QBO Technical Support, but to use the 'send feedback' option to insure they are recorded 'over and over' again.  (They say that 'repeating the incantation over and over again is the key to a good reversing spell'.)
  2. Post a 'comment' to this article. Insightful Accountant will not only publish your comments for our readers to be aware of, but from time-to-time we will compile a list of your comments (bugs) and ship them off to the 'power to be' at Intuit.