Tuesday Tuneage
Neil Young & Crazy Horse - "F*ckin' Up"
1990

Intuit has been pushing hard to get accountants off of Quickbooks Desktop and into Quickbooks Online, switching Desktop to a spendy subscription model over the summer and then ending subscription sales on September 30th. But what are you getting with Quickbooks Online?
 
First of all the pros. With Quickbooks Online (QBO), you can share a Quickbooks data file with your client. But with all Intuit products any improvement over what preceded it comes with downsides*. Your client will have access to the data file in the cloud and we all know what clients love to do when left to their own devices: Download bank transactions and import them into Quickbooks. In my twenty-five years of bookkeeping I’ve never seen the importing of transactions from a bank work smoothly. Usually it imports the vendor name IN ALL CAPS followed by bunch of random transaction/confirmation numbers. Worse, clients tend to click some wrong button (or just as likely, Intuit fucks this up) and the transactions get imported twice. So you spend time deleting all the duplicate transactions, which takes more time on QBO than it does on Quickbooks Desktop (more on this later.) And your client may think they can take a stab at reconciling their own statements (after all the commercials used to say that “if you can balance a checkbook, you can use Quickbooks”) and that invariably won’t go well. Because, well, your clients probably didn’t spend much time balancing a checkbook — that’s why they hired you, right?

So that’s the caveat-laden pro, what are the cons? The data entry feature will have you bogged down in no time. In desktop, you type in the transaction details, then hit “enter” on the keyboard with your thumb, and you’re automatically in the next transaction. You get in a rhythm and you start flying through data entry. In QBO, you have to move your mouse and click on the enter button at the bottom of the screen to record the transaction. So instead of doing everything pronto with the keyboard, you have to involve your eyes and the mouse as well. Deleting transactions is a three-step procedure involving a hidden drop-down menu, rather than a quick shortcut keystroke like in Desktop. Then there’s the general view of the software interface. In Desktop, you have your customer, vendor, and banking sections laid out clearly and you can add icon shortcuts for your frequently-used tasks. In QBO, the transactions menus are assembled haphazardly in some stew of nonsense. Entering checks and credit card expenses are in one section, bank deposits are in another. For some reason, reconciliation and chart of accounts are lumped in another section altogether. The reports section is overly complicated and good luck trying to figure out how to assemble a simple transaction detail. Thankfully, the Find function works quite well (hey another pro!) and has many numerous, easy-to-use filters to help you narrow your search. This will come in handy as working in QBO will probably result in errors, especially if your client starts poking around in it.

So Quickbooks Online: all in all, two stars as a bookkeeping software — and that may be too kind as a client once called it a scam — and one star compared to Desktop, which is solid until it isn’t. You long-timers out there know what I mean.

*In the first draft of this piece, I typed “downfalls.”

Tuesday Tuneage
Motörhead - "Eat the Rich"
1987

As research for my new zine/blog Troller or Controller? I dug into the April/May 2024 issue of Forbes, which has a specific focus on billionaires. My goodness. I wrote down four words: Late Stage Capitalism Porn.

Lessee, it starts out with some Steve Forbes opinion pieces. He fully supports Israel’s invasion of Gaza and claims that they have made extraordinary efforts to minimize civilian casualties. He writes that the US should fully support Israel, which reminds me of a news story I read last winter that read like an Onion piece and said something like “US advises Israel to use smaller bombs to minimize civilian casualties.” His other editorial said the US should stop investing in renewable energies and instead invest in new businesses that create jobs. Uh Steve-O: renewable businesses are new businesses, maybe go back to that flat tax long con.

What else is in there early on? A list of upscale eateries that are all in New York City. (I’ll stick with Monk’s Diner.) We soon learn that billionaires are nicknamed “three commas,” then things lead into the main act as the prose coughs this up: “What a year it’s been for the planet’s billionaires, whose fortunes continue to swell as global stock markets shrug off war, political unrest, and lingering inflation. There are now more billionaires than ever.”

There is the list of the fourteen men (yes, they’re all men) who are worth $100 billion. We learn that “The combined net worth of the planet’s billlionaires has skyrocketed by 545% over the past two decades, to $14.2 trillion — quadruple the 111% rise in world GDP.” (The graph that accompanies this is outstanding. I mean, seriously nice work whether you think that unreal accumulation of wealth is good or bad.) I found out that Warren Buffett (number six) got into a beef last year with Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam over the price of Pilot truck stops. WTF? And oh hey: the blurb on Bill Gates (number seven) references Cheap Trick with a mention of “stiff competition.”

But enough about the established big shots. Billionaire newcomers include Magic Johnson ($1.2 billion), who was Sid Hartman’s guy before he was your guy, and TV’s Dick Wolf, who for some reason hasn’t plugged his $1.2 billion into a 24/7 streaming Law & Order channel (he blew his chance to put Homicide: Life on the Street episodes on the air with Peacock beating him to it.) Then there’s Taylor Swift ($1.1 billion), who “became the first billionaire musician based soley on songs and performances.” In your face, McCartney!*

There’s a page titled “Warbucks” that leads off with “Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has wrought death and destruction upon untold millions of people. Yet it’s been a boon, at least financially, for several members of the World’s Billionaires list.” War, amirite? Here we have eight men, three of who are war-profiteering from shipping Russian oil and sending Russia guns. There’s one Turkish gent who sent Ukraine a model of military drone so popular, troops wrote a folk song about it. If there’s one Ukranian folk song I would actually listen to, that one is likely it.

At the end there’s a quite good article skeptical of crypto currencies and their ilk that has a compelling page-long graphic and ends with the warning: “Buyer beware. The lunatics are running the crypto asylum.” Huh, actual investigative reporting and a takedown of the dudebros behind the various scams that are crypto. Bravo, even if it is buried in the back of the issue.

Finally, here’s why I love printed magazines. There’s an Aristotle quote on the spine. It reads: “Inferiors agitate that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior.” I may not make much money, but Forbes gets me.

*A separate small feature shows that Gibson is releasing a version of non-billionaire Jimmy Page’s 1969 double-necked guitar with a mere $50,000 price tag.