Bloghound

Last year shipments of Macs were up a whopping 32.7 percent, according to Gartner. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has an article, "Apple edges into the mainstream." So why would a company like Intuit ignore this growing market — and, worse, torture Mac users?

My firm switched over to Macs during the holidays without much of a hiccup. That is until we turned to our financials, which we run on QuickBooks.

• First bad news: there is no Web-based QuickBooks service for Mac users, as there is for Windows. Bummer, as many of us work remotely and the Web-based service allowed us all to easily plug into QB.
• More bad news: there is no Direct Connect service between financial institutions and QuickBooks Pro Mac. (But most banks’ customer service reps don’t know this, so many people get mis-information.)
• And more: trying to get Web Connect between financial institutions and QuickBooks Pro can be a nightmare. (Plus Web Connect is no where near as useful as Direct Connect.) My bank’s advice was to use Windows or Netscape vs. Safari or Firefox browser. I had to point out that Windows is for PCs and that Intuit is discontinuing its support of Netscape.

With still no luck in downloading and importing transaction data from my bank into QB after many service calls and work-arounds, I decided to join the QuickBooks Mac online community
I didn’t find answers in the community, but I did experience just how frustrated and downright angry people are with Intuit about the difficulty of making QB work for the Mac. Holy Moly! Talk about an unintentional way to ruin a brand’s reputation among a large and growing segment of consumers.

I don’t know at this point if I’ll shop around for a bank that can connect with QB for Macs,run our financials on my old PC., or install Windows on our Macs. But I do know that I’ll follow Intuit’s actions to see how closely they’re paying attention the growing Mac market trend, how seriously they’re listening to their Mac customers, and how skillfully they use their online community to turnaround angry consumers. (Or not.)

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