If you’re an accountant or small business owner like myself there is a good chance that you spend much of your time working with a little program called Quickbooks. I’m sure there have been moments where you day dreamed about punching Intuit employees square in the face. It’s ok – we’ve all been there. My biggest frustration for the last three years has been working with Quickbooks on 64 bit operating systems. I’m specifically talking about the issue revolving around the Amyuni PDF printer driver that Quickbooks utilizes for creating reports and e-mailing forms like sales receipts, invoices, purchase orders, etc.
“Printer not activated, error code -30â€
“Could not print to the printerâ€
These are just some of the errors that you might encounter while working with Quickbooks 2008, 2009, or 2010 on a 64 bit operating system. Whats worse is that Intuit has been selling lies for the last three years saying, “Upgrading to the latest version will fix the issue.” Trust me – it doesn’t. You can only imagine how infuriating it is to purchase software in hopes of solving a problem to only see it pop back up. I can’t even tell you how many hours I’ve spent on the phone with Intuit support or online in the Quickbooks forums searching for solutions from other frustrated users. Usually a fix would work for 2 -3 days, and then it would be broken all over again. Charlie Russel, a Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor even dedicated a section of his popular Quickbooks blog to the issue with different fixes, which I tried to no avail.
After hours and hours of screwing around I finally gave up and said “the hell with it†and setup a Windows XP 32 bit virtual machine to run Quickbooks. For the last year I’ve literally been running a computer within a computer just to do my accounting. It certainly increased the time it took to do business but at least I was able to do business.
Fast forward to two days ago where Intuit released Quickbooks 2011. I have to say that the people in Moutain View California have finally pulled their heads out of their asses. They finally took the time and money to invest in an in house PDF solution that fixes the issue. The awful days of the Amyuni PDF printer driver are gone. Why did it take so long? And why should users using 2009 or 2010 (the only two years Intuit say should work on 64 bit systems) have to upgrade for Quickbooks 2011 to have a product that functions like it should have initially? Especially when Quickbooks so blatantly admits their screw up on their own KB:
From: http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/pages/knowledgebasearticle/1007856
Note: Intuit replaced the.pdf converter/driver function with more reliable .pdf technology in QuickBooks Pro 2011 (for Windows), Premier 2011, and Enterprise 11. Read the Practical QuickBooks blog entry “PDF Printing – Finally Fixed†for an outsider’s perspective. If you upgrade to one of these 2011 products (solution 1), you should no longer experience this .pdf issue.
So here we have Intuit directing people to Charlie Russel’s blog titled “PDF Printing – Finally Fixed,” (Charlie was obviously happy about this as well) and then telling people to “upgrade to one of these 2011 products” to solve the issue. Are you kidding me?!?! Microsoft would never get away with this. I’m happy to get away from using a cumbersome VM to handle my accounting, but Intuit has surely tarnished their reputation with their handling of the situation. They could earn back my respect by offering a free update to 2009/2010 users that fixes the issue, but we all know they wont do that. They’re far too greedy for that.