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Intuit has shitty software engineering

Intuit is a company that provides financial and business management software. They're a hundred-billion-dollar company, so you'd expect them to be kinda competent, right?

I've had the displeasure of having to work with Intuit for employment: one job that involved me developing a web service that integrates with Intuit services and another that required me to use it to get paid. This isn't very formal or scientific, but I just want to chronicle just some of the frustrations and appalling incompetence I've run into.

QuickBooks Online

The invoice details page doesn't fit if my window is slightly less than full-width, despite there being plenty of room for it to take on a more compact layout.

QuickBooks Desktop

One time it was making me enter and confirm a password but I forgot to fill out the confirm box, so it cleared the password box.

One time when I had to sign into my dev copy of QuickBooks Desktop to investigate a bug for a customer, it made me *sign in to an Intuit account*, which had never happened before. The one it expected me to use was an old account. And the verification options were my phone number or an old email address I don't have access to anymore.

So I did the phone one. I entered their code. Then it asked me for email anyway! Fuckers!

So I tried to sign into a different, more recent Intuit account instead. It bugged me again about "verify your phone number (optional)", and I thought I'd do it this time just to get one less screen every time I sign in. So I got the code, but their form wouldn't let me enter it! All the widgets were disabled.

Oh and did you know QuickBooks actually uses an embedded Internet Explorer for this stuff?!??!? When i entered the account password it was like "do you want Internet Explorer to remember this password?!?"

I swear, you guys are worse than Microsoft!

Web Connector

Web Connector is a thing Intuit makes to allow integrating web services with QuickBooks Desktop. And oh my god, the amount of problems I've had with it.

The XML-RPC protocol it uses to communicate with web services is insane, but I don't feel like detailing that.

If you don't run the installer as administrator it fails with the confusing error "The installer was interrupted".

If QBWC thinks an application is registered but QB doesn't, the only way to make QBWC forget about it - this is Intuit's official solution! - is to *edit the Windows registry* (and even that doesn't work if QBWC is open when you do it, which the help article doesn't mention).

https://help.developer.intuit.com/s/article/QBD-QBWC-force-removal

While trying to install QBWC one time I was told "You need QuickBooks 2015 or later to install the Web Connector". I was running QuickBooks 2021. Installing an older version of the Web Connector fixed this.

One of the bugs a customer ran into is triggered if you try to add a a separate QWC file for a service that's already registered. The first time it just gives you the error "Unique OwnerID/FileID pair value required" (note this happens when the File ID IS unique). But if you try it again, it gives you the error and *removes the existing registry from QBWC's interface*. Strange as it sounds, I was able to consistently reproduce this behavior exactly as I'm describing it. After the service is removed like this you can't use it, can't remove it and still can't re-add it, with either QWC file. What's Intuit's *official solution* this time?

https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/multi-user-mode/fix-error-qbwc1039/L2WqXx5LW_US_en_US#sh-viewContent-details_without_placeholder_tagscollapse2

Download a separate program to fix their broken shit.*

And what does CP3 stand for? Who the fuck knows. Just boycott Intuit.