QuickBooks Connect is a web application found in the Intuit Apps Marketplace and is designed to allow some basic remote functionality surrounding Customer information.

 The web app works with Intuit Sync Manager which provides bi-directional syncing between QuickBooks (Windows) and the web application. You can create new and view historic: Invoices, Sales Orders, Sales Receipts, Purchases  Basic Customer information, Invoice, Payments, and Sales Orders. View/Edit basic Customer informaton is also a feature.

Sounds great, but  in the 60 minutes of evaluating the QuickBooks Connect, I found it disappointing.

It’s a great idea but implementation is very poor at this point. This is a very rough web app. I would have expected so much more from Intuit, who knows that the need/expectation for the cloud has been here for a while and will remain and has the greatest resources and technical knowledge of QuickBooks.

Here’s what’s wrong with the existing feature set’s functionaity:

-Cannot set new Customer Sales Tax defaults (rate or Tax Code), nor does it pull from QB desktop’s new co default. Only after it takes a round trip via sync mamager, then a manual refresh of the browser does the default sales tax code & sales tax item show up.

-Service Date column on an invoice created by QB Desktop will not show on QuciBooks Connect (QBC) Invoice (just blank) even though the template was uploaded and is being used in previewed QBC Invoice.

-Uploaded QB Desktop template does not get set as default (even though it’s uploaded). How to set any default template? Must select each time. Royal pain. Easy to forget.

-Textboxes added to a custom template do not show on the invoice QBC creates.

-Missing Mr/Mrs, First Name, MI, Last Name fields and Contact fieldswhich make it really tough to know who you are calling or emailing (the phone number & email fields are there). That’s essential info.

-Connect web app seems to lock up when saving (maybe when a sync has just happened and you are in the middle of a browser transaction (updating a customer).

-Customer Center Customer List looses customers sometimes and I hade to refresh browser. (after going in/out of a customer’s transaction screens).

-Sometimes transaction can’t be save. the error message doesn’t say why…that’s not helpful to know what to do to resolve it.

As a Intuit Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor, I’d really like to reccommend this to three customers that really needs this right now, but I don’t think it’s ready for a customer’s use…too buggy.

I hope development continues and it becomes robust & feature rich app.