QuickBooks vs Xero Support, QuickBooks Wins Big

QuickBooks vs Xero Support

Background: QuickBooks Support vs Xero Support

My QuickBooks and Xero insider status gave me a unique insight into QuickBooks vs Xero Support and other QuickBooks vs Xero issues.

QuickBooks vs Xero Support – QuickBooks Insider

Here are some of QuickBooks insider credentials relative to the QuickBooks vs Xero Support issue. Xero insider status follows.

• 7,000 QuickBooks newsgroup and forum answers before Intuit had much of web presence
• Pages from my website copied to Intuit’s website, with permission.
• Frequent QuickBooks email support from Intuit CEOs and their best assistants
• Two unique #1 Top Tester award wins, for QuickBooks pre-release (beta) tests
• Served on QuickBooks and Intuit ProSeries Tax charter Customer Advisory committees
• The first and possibly only non-Intuit-employee writing the Intuit QuickBooks Blog
• Many email exchanges with two Intuit CEOs and their top assistants
• Getting an Intuit website for user posts and votes on QuickBooks changes
• Getting QuickBooks changed in 5 days, a week before Christmas
• Helped get Intuit to create award-winning, tech-support-backed, user-to-user forums (increased user satisfaction and saved Intuit money).

This did not impair my independence. Intuit paid $500 for two-day Customer Advisory Councils, plus airfare, hotel, and food. There was unpaid time going from Florida to and from California, plus unpaid surveys, emails, and phone calls. The effective pay was less than $125 a day. CPA billable time is much more. Intuit / QuickBooks and Xero did not pay me to post about their products.

>QuickBooks vs Xero Support – Xero Insider status

Here are some Xero insider credentials relative to the QuickBooks vs Xero Support issue.

• As a very early U.S. Xero user, I moved many clients to Xero at my expense.
• I was soon #1 in U.S. Xero clients.
• Being first on the Xero partner list gave me many Xero clients.
• I often blogged and posted to Xero forums
• Xero CEO Rod Drury exchanged many emails with me
• Rod linked my blog in his posts, for massive reader spikes

Rod tweeted our picture 

QuickBooks vs Xero Support – Xero CEO tweets with Mike Block

• I spoke at two Xero roadshows
• Xero’s CTO reviewed my program clicking OK on matched entries (receivable / payable option; one, some or all bank and credit card accounts; one, some or all clients). It copied account classifying rules to and from Excel, to quickly and accurately compare, edit and create rules.

Xero, unlike QuickBooks, does not let users copy rules to and from Excel, so Brain Dead Xero Machine Learning makes users correct the same mistake in each client.

QuickBooks vs Xero Support – QuickBooks Wins Big

The QuickBooks vs Xero support issue mainly relates to QuickBooks phone support and award-winning, tech-support-backed, user-to-user forums. Intuit has big annual spikes in user calls and posts for support. This sometimes made users wait an hour for an agent. I pushed Intuit CEO Brad Smith to solve this problem in many email exchanges. I wanted excess calls referred to Pro Advisors or tech-support-backed, user-to-user forums. The forums were a very big hit when introduced, letting Intuit win an international award for increasing user satisfaction, while saving substantial money.

Xero uses email and forum support. Its forums show many serious problems with unhappy users. This peaked over Xero effectively hiding many posts from users unhappy about program bugs and 5+ year delays in very popular requests. Xero then removed dates from posts showing these delays, which caused a total uproar.

QuickBooks vs Xero Support – 50+ million  vs  1.3 million Users

Intuit has:

• QuickBooks – 6 million users (3.8 million in the linked release, with QuickBooks Pro, Premier & Enterprise used for many years
• TurboTax – [31 million users] in March 2016
• Mint – 20 million users in April, 2016
• Quicken – 12 million users before sale
• Intuit has 4 times the revenue of Xero
• Intuit has 50 million users, with 3.2 million QuickBooks Online users, vs 1.3 million Xero users

QuickBooks Criticism

I maybe the only non-Intuit-employee to edit the Intuit QuickBooks Blog. This related to my answering around 7,000 early QuickBooks newsgroup and forum questions, before Intuit had much of web presence. Many emails were on questions that Intuit support and I could not answer. There also were cases where users seemed not be properly served by Intuit support. This made me good friends with the head of QuickBooks tech support. Neither this nor my Advisory Committee service kept me quiet when Intuit began charging for separate tax tables for each company using QuickBooks, not each copy of QuickBooks. I whipped up a protests and boycotts, using my successful tax-cut petition leader and political experience (gave my salary back, never let lobbyists buy lunch). According to CNET:

This major victory for consumers of Intuit’s financial products was almost certainly caused by a gigantic hue and cry in the Internet discussion group known as “biz.comp.accounting.” Block, the owner of a Florida tax consultancy, BlockTax… is the moderator of the discussion group and led the battle against the new fees.

QuickBooks criticism result

This may have cost Intuit $40 million. Intuit CEO Steve Bennett knew this when he later let me on a QuickBooks Advisory Council, as he may have become CEO partly due to it. However, while on the Council I boycotted TurboTax over copy protection. Instead of dropping me from the Council, Steve saw my posts about fighting Intuit to make it better, so it could do more for users and itself. He also made (or let others make) many good changes on the first day of my boycott. They included approving my suggested free copy of TurboTax, without copy protection after April 15. I then spent lots of time posting why we should stop boycotting. Steve later wrote that I should,

Keep raising hell when Inuit does something wrong.

Brad Smith arrives

Steve told current Intuit CEO Brad Smith (according to Brad) to contact me, before Brad reported to work. Brad’s first email is on my Our Intuit Friends page. We had a one-hour conference call, with several Intuit staffers, on a public new feature and bug tracking website I wanted. He soon had a three-day meeting of top Intuit execs. Intuit founder Scott Cook said he wanted a system that would let Intuit could follow up with users years after they made good suggestions. Brad soon created my suggested site for user posts and voting on suggested changes and bugs. This led to very many email exchanges.

Major change in QuickBooks Support forums for QuickBooks vs Xero Support

There has long been no email support for most QuickBooks users. Almost all QuickBooks support requires substantial payments. Phone support could take more than an hour. That made me push hard for tech-support backed user-to-user forums. I did so for years directly, with many forum posts and through my Intuit QuickBooks Advisory Councils.

Brad finally got tech support backed Intuit forums. He linked in-program help, users quickly post to applicable forum areas. Surveys show this produced far better (43%) and faster answers. Intuit also cut a seventh of total staff. The terrific tech support change was probably a big reason why Brad became CEO. I told him he would be the next Intuit CEO two years before he was. As the above link shows. He later responded:

Your fantastic Mike! Absolutely fantastic!

The best QuickBooks phone support can be FREE

QuickBooks phone support is a big money maker for Intuit. However, you can easily get the best phone support, fast and free. Simply download QuickBooks Online Accountant. Your phone support will vastly improve in quality, while becoming fast and free. You also will get far more QuickBooks tutorials and videos. You may have to say that you want to study QuickBooks, be a QuickBooks ProAdvisor or start a QuickBooks bookkeeping practice. In fact, all QuickBooks are already really accountants.

You also can get unlimited fast, very high quality, phone support in QuickBooks Desktop (QuickBooks Pro, Premier or Enterprise). You get it as a QuickBooks ProAdvisor. This costs $349 to $549. However, the value of the included QuickBooks software alone more than pays for the entire price. In fact, you actually get the best QuickBooks support, plus all years of included software, so the claimed QuickBooks value is very understated. Xero had no in-program links to effectively tech-support-backed user-to-user forums, from corresponding parts of its program when I gave up on it.