Your Guy on the Inside
As a new product manager for QuickBooks Online, I have spent the past few weeks devouring as much information as I can to get up to speed on literally every aspect of the application. I’ll be perfectly honest—my knowledge at this point, although expanding at a healthy clip, is about as deep as a hummingbird feeder. But I am not yet panicked, for I have discovered a secret weapon to aid me in my insatiable quest for product understanding—you, our customers.
For someone faced with a seemingly endless array of options for enhancing QuickBooks Online (cue “The Candy Man” from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory to get a sense of how amazing this is from a product management perspective), your feedback and comments are my CliffsNotes—they cut to the chase to provide me with invaluable, real-world insights that could conceivably remain undiscovered by yours truly for a very long time. As much as I wish I could research and test every conceivable addition or modification to the product that comes to mind, the reality is that your collective wisdom is far more accurate and profound than a lifetime of educated conjecturing on my part. For this I am truly grateful.
I have worked for quite a few companies, both large and small, over the course of my product career, but I have never encountered an environment as attuned and responsive to customer needs as Intuit. To a person, everyone I have met during my time here is deeply committed to creating the best possible product to satisfy your needs—and with any luck, occasionally put a smile on your face in recognition of great design, seamless functionality, or something just plain cool. When you tell us what you think about the product, we really listen.
As for my role on the team, please consider me the Lorax of QuickBooks Online. Only instead of the trees, I speak for you.
Lance
December 2, 2009 at 5:16 pm
I am glad that you are helping with expanding the usefulness of QBonline. One of our frustrations is that you have only 3 custom fields for invoicing. There is plenty of room on the invoice for more fields. Our company is required to put to/from dates of service, PO#, Project#, etc. We need anywhere from four to eight custom fields. I was told that this was impossible. This request does not seem unreasonable. Also, each contract may require different custom field information, but if you change the field in setup it changes for every invoice regardless of the customer. We work with the government so invoicing must be done to their specifications exactly. This is a big problem right now. I have to bill in EXCEL spreadsheets and then just make a phony bill in QB…double work just to use this product. I hope this is an easy fix. Thank you for being concerned about your customers.
December 3, 2009 at 8:00 am
They will get right on it – I have been requesting more custom fields (a super duper simple thing to give there important “customers”) for no lie here – years and years and years. They have had 3 custom fields from the beginning of the product launch and they will continue to have 3.
Fantastic request by the way – very simple thing that would be ultra useful for so many!
May 16, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Has this been set up yet? I cannot figure out how to add additional custom fields to the invoice in QBonline, nor can I find help screens to guide me through the process.
December 3, 2009 at 7:54 am
Dear Lance,
Best of luck to you in your next position!
If you get the same support from the compnay that this product gets – you will be looking for another job in no time.
Seriously though – the dismal record of upgrades and feature modifications to this product is embarassing. You have one hell of a challenge on your hands.
Regards,
Michael Touby
December 3, 2009 at 7:55 am
PS, I am one of the original users of this product and converted from the state of the art at the time (Oracles Netsuite).
December 3, 2009 at 8:08 am
Anyone need to issue 1099′s at the end of the year? Probably a few – thousand customers more likely. We cannot e-file our 1099s with this system and have not been able to since its inception. Therefore, we have to manually create all 1099s, wasting lots of time and energy and resources, because the Intuit team cares so much about its customers, and the environment, that it feels automating 1099s (or many other OBVIOUS deficiencies) is not worth the investment in the product?
How many others out there are in similar predicaments I wonder?
December 4, 2009 at 10:47 am
Dear Lance,
I hope you can get them moving on the custom fields for the invoices. We need a few more ourselves that would improve customer readability. I hope the blank line feature gets added to the invoices as well.
Another item that needs addressed is the lack of information in the new Customer Center. I need to be able to view the “memo” from each transaction. This is currently visible in the customer register and is very helpful.
December 24, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Hi Everyone:
Thanks very much for the product suggestions. Rest assured that I am now the keeper of the “master list” of potential improvements for QuickBooks Online, so hearing about the features you want in the product helps me prioritize that list. We work against a regular release schedule that is planned several months in advance, which makes introducing additional content a bit difficult for the short term, but I will work toward fulfilling your requests as soon as I can.
Please keep the suggestions coming!
Best regards,
Lance
March 5, 2010 at 12:53 pm
Hi Lance,
I’m a CPA with a CPA firm in Atlanta and would like to share with you a “Management Dashboard” report that I’ve developed for use within our own firm as well as a # of our clients that they love and cannot do without. This one-page report would be complimentary to your Company Snapshot report with the same goal of giving the business owner a quick but comprehensive view of his/her entire business. While the Company Snapshot focuses on one key area/metric, our dashboard gives you a view of all your key data – financial and operational – on one page. It’s kind of like your Company Snapshot on steroids. We really believe this report could become a huge differentiator for your product and could generate new business and increase customer retention. Please contact me if you’d like to discuss in more detail.
Kind regards,
Michael
March 5, 2010 at 2:10 pm
I think that would be awesome. I hope QB contacts you
December 26, 2009 at 8:50 am
As an infrastructure manager of a small business, I’m glad you guys decided to make Quickbooks Online cross platform, allowing Firefox and Safari. That had always kept us from using this. With a Macs, that is definitely a requirement without having to deal with virtualization or terminal servers. If only Firefox will not require Windows, that would also allow any X11 based desktops. Because Safari often crashes in Quickbooks Online, I do look forward to your team to complete the beta test.
December 31, 2009 at 1:41 pm
I have been using QB since 1999 – desktop and now online version and it’s been great to see everything evolve. And with the offering of payroll, worker comp insurance, etc. . . since QB has a passion for “the Small Business” guy and one stop shopping . . . how about a QuickBooks small business health insurance program! And with that, I’ll try not to get political! Happy & Prosperous 2010 to everyone!
January 11, 2010 at 5:22 pm
Lance-
A few features that I think should be added and I’m sure a lot of your customers would agree, is the ability to show a balance due on invoices and when all payments have been received the invoice should be stamped “Paid”. As of right now there is no workaround to show an invoice paid.
Also, I would like to be able to customize the look our invoices much more. We are a graphic design firm and like for everything that we send to our clients to reflect our creative side. At a very minimum I would like to be able to use our own background image, but it would be great to be able to use a layout designer and customize every aspect of the look.
Thanks for you time.
Nate
February 11, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Hi Lance, I placed this on a previous post but I believe that it would make a lot of sense to have options for users of PayPal who process payments and SalesForce.com for CRM to have some data integration options other than third party developers. Even if these options were simply a CSV or XML import.