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So at the company I work for decided two years ago to switch from the byzantine bookkeeping system the former owners used to a modern point of sale system that would link to the accounting software. Now since the new owners inherited the Quick Books software and had no experience with doing bookkeeping they kept using the Quick Books software the old owners had used. So when they bought a POS system they went with the Intuit POS software that was supposed to mesh with Quick Books.
Now, since I understand electronics and computers far better than both of them combined I was assigned to be point man on this transition. We had as"resources" an accountant who was familiar with Quick Books and claimed to know the POS system, a computer guy we could call who knows Windows and installation of software but had no experience with using Intuit products and an Intuit "specialist" who is supposed to know the software inside and out.
Not a one of them is worth a pile of steaming bull excrement.
Early on in the process the accountant had me clean up the customer database. The software allows you to import and export from the Quick Books database to Excel. You see, you can't work on multiple entries all at once in Intuit products while Excel allows you to take a whole column at a time and move data around which was important. With close to 2,000 entries of which several were multiple entries for the same company one line at a time wasn't going to cut it. The software simply wasn't made for such a massive undertaking. Also the old owners would input data in a random manner. Sometimes the City,State and Zip would be all in one cell, other times they would be spread out over three cells. The address cells would sometimes have an address, other times a contact, other times a phone number. The phone numbers would sometimes have the area code in parentheses, other times with a dash separating them and sometimes no area code. Contact information was sporadic and there was no consistency to allow easy searching. The lady owner would fuss and fight trying to find customers with the search function but without standardization the entries couldn't be found easily. There was no practical way to determine when the customer had last done business with us and the list had never been cleaned up of closed businesses or dead people.
Garbage in equals garbage out after all.
So I exported the file to Excel and spent a lot of time fixing things. I called phone numbers to see if they were still around, verified contact information and deleted a whole lot of garbage lines that had nothing more than a first name. We held multiple meetings with the various "specialists" we had available and developed a plan. I performed multiple experiments with moving files around, finding the best method to import the files back in and in the end we all agreed, including all the specialists, that the best plan was to set up a whole new Quick Books database and Point of Sale on January 1st importing the various databases to the best program and then letting them exchange data making a nice clean fresh start, breaking clean from the byzantine mess we inherited from the previous owners.
So in addition to the database of customers we were slamming through the inventory process, which had never been computerized or even written down. We had to adjust the costs and prices of most of the stuff that had been on the shelves before the new owners took over because the previous owner had no idea how much inventory he had and it turned out he vastly underestimate the value of the stock so to make it all work out on the taxes we had to adjust the listed costs, also the old owners had used a system of pricing that vastly overcharged for most products.
In the middle of this, three days before Jan 1 the Intuit "expert" decided we needed to scrap the plan and piggyback the new data on the old data and merge the databases Since the names had been changed from acronyms and abbreviations to spelling them out in many cases to make them more searchable most of the entries would have to be manually lined up and merged. She wanted us to put the QB contacts file into the POS program and allow them to merge during the data exchange. I told her it wouldn't work, I argued to stick to the original plan but to no avail. So while trying to get the inventory done I had to also figure how to merge the databases. You see, POS doesn't use all the same data as QB so I had to set up a template for conversion of the data it would take in. I got that done and yesterday we did the deed. I massaged the Excel files multiple times to resolve various issues such as POS insisting that a legitimate file needed a full name of a contact, many of which we only had a business name and trying to convince it to ignore blank cells in certain fields but in the end I got it done. Of course it didn't have much of the data that QB would want but we did it anyhow as the "expert" said to do.
the garbage file that was on the QB database imported all the data from the POS and it made the garbage file even worse. The Customer line had populated with the names of the contacts instead of the names of the businesses. Most of the really important data wasn't even there. So we went back to the backup and tried importing directly to the QB side and that again was a nightmare. Yuo see,QB will export a file to Excel that has all the details in the database but to import all those things you can't use the import feature. That will only import a handful of items which you have to cut and paste into a template it barfs up which isn't in the same pattern as the one it spit out so you have to do it column by column. Even then it didn't have places for the data we really wanted to get. You can paste the data in line by line but you need to get the cells aligned properly and the headings QB exported are not the same as the ones they list on the Paste Data page. Not to mention several cells are protected and you can't paste into them. I spent a couple hours doing all this with the lady boss slowly building to a melt down as each process continued to fail in one way or another. Now since the lady boss has no idea how computers or software work her frustration at all this was doubled.
Finally we decided to just use the old database and fix the data on the QB side manually line by line. So she sat down and for the next eight hours manually went line by line on the fifty to sixty customers who had active balances and fixed each entry. The rest of them were marked "inactive" and won't export to the POS. If they show up wanting to charge we will have to deal with that then.
So, after all that now I had to get the inventory list imported to the POS, fortunately the import template on that side worked better but there were a few hangups with blank fields or UPC codes not being the right format according to the POS importer but without too much trouble we got the inventory imported with only 12 items mysteriously not moving over. We declared that good enough and we held a meeting just the owners and myself and decided that everything we ever heard from our trio of experts was to be tossed out and we would only accept as truth those things that we ourselves extracted from using the software. We finished the far too long a day with some pizza and locked up.
So today I am not going in, I am limited by my disabilities to 20 hours a week for both the terms of Social Security Disability and the fact that I simply can't work much more than that without crashing badly. However I will be "on call" for problems that I hope to be able to solve over the phone. Today will be the first "live" day the system will be used. However I will have several hours of tweaking and tuning things until it is really ready to go.
So in short, if I ever meet an Intuit programmer no jury made of people who had to work with their software would convict me of whatever horrible things I might do to said programmer. What a freaking nightmare.
The up side of this, I could tell a customer to go screw himself and they wont fire me. Now THAT is job security.
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