Quickbooks users BEWARE

[John Matthews]

So, this is a two parter – 70% Rant, 30% Tip, feel free to skip down to the tips section…

RANT:

So I’ve had a busy year, went from 0-8 houses, and I’m definitely feeling the growing pains, but the biggest one is with Intuit. As a result of my growth I got started with quickbooks as I wanted to track everything correctly and use their invoicing feature to bill my tenants and receive rent electronically. Things were going smoothly for the first 4 months or so. Tenants were paying their bills online and my books were transitioning (slowly) from red to black.

Two weeks ago I saw a strange bill in my bank account for $21 dollars. I received no notice from any company saying what it was, and had no receipts with that dollar amount. So I naturally called my bank to see where it was from they couldn’t tell me, just that the description was “[My business name] svc fee [My business name]”. The bill didn’t match any other recurring bills I have setup, so thinking it was fraud I disputed the transaction. Just for clarity, typical charges from intuit look like this: "Withdrawal ... INTUIT * QB ONLINE ..."

Then I get an email saying one of my tenants paid an invoice, great. Immediately after the funds cleared, the same amount was withdrawn from my account. This time the description read “[My company name] returns [my company name]”. This time I called intuit, the customer service rep “looked into it” and said it wasn’t on their end and to call my bank. So I go to my bank, they tell me that it’s definitely on intuits end. I should pause at this point to mention that I’ve received no email or notification from quickbooks that the payment didn’t go through or that it was reversed – I just happened to notice a matching withdrawal on my bank account. The invoice even showed “paid” on my quickbooks account. Anyway so I called back - 2.5 hours later, here’s their story:

My account is a risk to them, so they closed it. At the beginning of last month a tenant paid a water bill using quickbooks. Then their bank rejected the payment. I never saw this, because it happened before it hit my account. Then at the end of the month, the same tenant paid an invoice (mentioned above) and again their bank recalled the payment. I saw this happen once on my bank website, but evidently this happened three times, twice before it got to me. So 4 times, my tenant initiated a payment and then their bank cancelled the payment. So then intuit billed me a “bounce fee” and collection fees for the other invoices that were going through just fine, to the tune of $21. I thought this was a fraudulent charge since there was no record anywhere (and still isn’t nor can quickbooks provide a record / receipt) so I called my bank to dispute the charge. After this 5th failed transaction they revoked my payments feature for that account – permanently.

After explaining to them the fatuousness of the whole thing, the rep agreed but ultimately can’t do anything about it. All said and done, I now have to update my system, tell all of my tenants that they can no longer pay that way, and find another way to pay. The part that frustrates me the most however is that I have spent hours upon hours setting up my quickbooks account, getting my chart of accounts setup, recurring transactions, etc. and now most of that time is lost. Sure I can export my chart of accounts, and import them into a new system, but likely that’s a more than a few hours process to get it all setup correctly, particularly when it wasn’t my fault, I had no warning it was happening, and thus couldn’t do anything to stop it.

TIP:

Too many declined transactions will revoke your merchant services account. If you use quickbooks payment feature, and you see anything shady going on with bill payments, contact your tenants/clients immediately to verify that they aren’t trying to pay multiple times with the same information. If they cancel the transaction once with their bank, they can never use that bank again as their bank may refuse every transaction from that source going forward without anyone’s knowledge. A single tenant can break your entire quickbooks online setup.

Am I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous?

[Account Closed]

John, this is EXACTLY why I try to discourage using an online service that intermingles with QuickBooks or any financial software anyone may have.  

Time is of the essence in our business.  And we certainly don't need all the stuff you have just gone through.  It's a good thing you are smart and followed up.  

But QuickBooks is not the bad guy here.  It is using anything that intermingles with QuickBooks verses you manually doing and handling all transactions in QuickBooks yourself.  

People offer all these fancy stuff to make things easier for other people, like tenants and customers, that works with QuickBooks, but don't realize the spot they put us (Landlords) in when a tenant submits a bad check, or puts a stop payment on a check or payment. Or when they deposit their payments directly into our bank account.  

If things go wrong it takes a long time before we know about it, or if we know about it at all, like what happened to you. Bottom line, is that we never know about it until it's too late.

So please don't give QuickBooks a bum wrap, because when you use it by itself, giving you Full Control of your own finances, it just doesn't get any better than that.  But when you have to rely on a third party to do things correctly, don't hold your breath. 

Be in control of your own accounting.  That is my motto.  Nobody touches my bank account or "stuff" in QuickBooks but me.  

Nancy Neville