The way I look at it, okay, so if you're here today, you either survived St. Patrick's day or the first round of tax day. So in the comments, tell us which one did you survive? You can say both. How you doing so far or that on the 18th, are

you making it? And that's why we wanted to keep this one a little light, this this, power hour. So we're just going to be talking about things that you really don't get yourself into in the accounting profession is really troubleshooting QuickBooks, because, you just want to be. The accounting professional in this, relationship, but sometimes it turns into you're an it person or you're, you're doing all sorts of things that you never imagined doing. So I wanted to share some of the things that I picked up while I was working at Intuit that, that might help you maybe be able to answer the question that comes right to you from with with your client or. When, dealing, if you do have to make the call. To, to Intuit. So today we're going to be talking about bugs, glitches, and you, or user error best practices in troubleshooting QuickBooks. It's

never user error. Would you ever know?

My name is Dan DeLong owner at Danwith and School of Bookkeeping worked at Intuit for nearly 18 years. Talking to some, if not all of you at some point in time co hosting today, also at the workshop Wednesdays over at schoolbookkeeping. com spot.

Hello, everybody. Matthew Spott Fulton here of Parkway Business Solutions and the Facebook group, QB Community Live. I'm also a survivor of Tax Day and St. Patty's Day, but I didn't, my dog doesn't pinch me, so I'm fine, so I survived there. Yeah, it's been a, it's a good start for the week. Nice and energetic, happy to be here guys. A

little bit about the QB power hour. It's every other Tuesday at noon Eastern. Our upcoming episodes and topics are on the qb power hour. com website. We are eligible for CPE, but through, earmark, as you may have heard Blake talking about that before we went live here. They, we do have our own channel on on earmark, typically five business days after the live webinar, they'll post the replay up there so that you can then take those quizzes there and get your CPE credit. We will have some poll questions, but they won't count for the live CPE because we don't do that with with the power hour. A little bit about the housekeeping. If you have specific questions about the things that we're talking about today, please put them in the Q and a if you have general comments, put those in the chat. And then of course, I think we. Did put the landing page that we have the handouts. If you're watching on YouTube or in the Facebook group, there is a QR code there as well. One thing we did want to mention before we get too much too far into the content here today is we don't want this to be a griping session about about Intuit or their service or lack thereof. This is, we, work with them and, they are there. And we want to use them if, at the best of our ability, but everybody has some good experiences and not so great experiences. And we don't want to just doing a dog pile of, oh, yeah, I had this bad experience. Matthew, do you have any thoughts about that?

Let me tell you about some of my bad experiences for last week first, but yeah ultimately you guys get it. We're here to, help educate and give some, knowledge and ideas of the things we're going to be talking about today of how to troubleshoot these things. It actually translates across all the different apps that are out there. So it's, a logical process. It's things to think about when you're starting to have issues. So you don't have to go down that road of, let me call support. And I hope. Before you even do that, you're going to one of the two groups to ask your peers for assistance on things first. So

we also do have the the Kibbe Power Hour store. So if you need a temperature changing mug or a pink hat,

beautiful hats. Amazing. I love your hat.

Thank you for photoshopping it on my head. So let's talk about what we are going to talk about today. We'll talk about the troubleshooting flow, and using an IDEAL workflow as an acronym, that, Intuit instilled upon my folks like myself that did work there. As far as MO breakdown, what that actually stands for. And then as you're working through these things, various issues narrowing it down is very important. Because if you ever tried to catch a spider you don't want it to get behind you. So that's that's the whole idea of narrowing down the root cause of the issue. We have some more acronyms to unpack about what those what those might be. And then we'll talk about some real world examples. And if time permits, we may just talk a little bit about the tags. Update here, but let's start off with our first poll question just to get a good idea of what version of QuickBooks you support for your clients because as we start to unpack some of these things, we will find that, where you begin in the narrowing down process might differ from QuickBooks online versus desktop. We'll talk a little bit about that. Now, Matthew, are you solely? QuickBooks Online. When was the last time you touched a desktop?

Just a couple days ago. So actually I've been doing a lot of migrations from desktop to online. I have one client left that's still desktop centric and, motivating them to make the change. But I just had an interesting idea. Have you ever gone back to these different polls over time to capture the answers and see like a chart from your viewers of like the transition of change? Here's a big fat homework assignment for you, but yeah, that'd be interesting, right?

Yeah I should do that. I don't know how long Zoom actually holds the The reports in there, whether I've actually downloaded them but I do look at them.

We're seeing, we've got a majority of people there that have answered here. So it's still

typically in the past. I have seen about 11 percent of our, active viewers are about solely QuickBooks desktop. So seeing that at 4 percent today is, definitely a. Trend on the downside, but maybe the topic was bug glitch user error is what brought all the QuickBooks onlines. And there's, no such thing as a bug or glitch in desktop. So I don't need to show up. We're

not going to go this way, buddy. Okay.

All right. So let's go ahead and end that if you want to share the results there, Noah. Let's first go unpack this whole idea of an ideal workflow. And, when I was going through the troubleshooting training, working at add into it what I realized is that every call, and this could be like Matthew was saying, this could be for any. Technical application or, anything like that they, all boil down into three main buckets. How do I do something, I, want to do something, but I don't know how to navigate to do that. They would refer to it as a business. Business acumen, but business usage, those were the, how do I types of questions, people that just didn't understand how to do one thing or the other, I did something and then there was an error doing it, where there's a big pop up or. QuickBooks closes or you can't log into QuickBooks. Those are, errors where there's something that that QuickBooks is saying to you that could ultimately be used as a way to find a, find an answer to that. And then this thing called an unexpected result. Like I did something and. Something happened that I, didn't expect to happen. That could be an error, right? And an error could be an unexpected result because you would not expect that to happen. But it could be, I did something and I now can't find said transaction or something unexpected happened to that. And the unexpected part is where. Troubleshooting really comes in because how do I, you, should be able to use the end product help, resources should be available for figuring out how to do these things, errors same thing, right there, there should be now. As, we'll unpack and spot us, put some screenshots in there. There's, some pretty poor errors. The what was it? The, sideways melted ice cream.

No, it was the shoelace untied was my favorite forever. Of course, that's not an

error, that's just a screenshot of an unexpected result, right?

Now, real quickly, before you go on from this, there's one other part of the, how do I. And I think most people understand this, but when we're supports responsibilities to help you figure out issues with the software, not to teach you how to do bookkeeping or accounting. That's a key fundamental with any kind of a software. It's like their job is to support you on the, in how the software is supposed to work, not the legal ramifications of, if you do something a certain way or

yes there are two keywords when, it comes to how do, you do something that I always stressed to people it's I can tell you what you can do, not what you should do. If you have a should question, then I would refer. refer you to contact your accounting professional and you could do either right like you can put your all of your purchases to cost of goods sold quickbooks is not going to say hey that's a problem that's a problem it will allow you to do that but whether you should or not then that's where that's where we get into a little bit more of a you know that gray area of that sort of thing. Now, if the accountant says, Hey, I need, I should track this as inventory. Then I can tell you how QuickBooks allows you to track the inventory, set up inventory items so that it should get tracked appropriately. So here's an example of those three kinds of buckets, right? I'm going to use a deposit. I want to receive a payment and have it go record directly into the bank, right? That would be an example of how do I do this sort of thing, right? So I can show you how to do that. I can tell you how to do that. Or In the error, I recorded a deposit and I got a message at the top that said something went wrong. That's a, that's an error, which is also an unexpected result. But, the other example of the unexpected result bucket, I made a deposit and I don't see it in the register, right? So now there's some kind of troubleshooting that we, need to do to, find out what happened. And to your point Matthew, here's some of those. Oh, so useful error messages, right?

Yeah. These were just over the weekend as we were prepping for this and I was going through some stuff. These, I'm like these are timely little screenshots I can pull up and put there. But I will also say to prove the point, sometimes it's user error. I was trying to figure out earlier where a certain journal entry went to that I put in. I'm like, who deleted my journal entry? And I was getting all flustered about it. Then I went and looked at the other company and saw I put it in that one.

He's admitting to user error. Wow.

Yeah, actually I did the right thing in the right company. I just look for it in the wrong company. So again there's, great examples of that. But like these were situations where, trying to make edits on multiple, having multiple monitors, you can be going through and trying to go too fast at times. So another example, potentially of user error, if you have too many tabs open in. In the software and you're trying to do too many things at once in one area, you may get some of these things, but there are also times where you're just focused on one thing and it's not refreshing correctly. It's not writing back to the database fast enough. It can be the challenge, I think. Let's one of the

one of the errors like this that's in desktop is an unrecoverable error. You typically you'll see this when you're doing something in QuickBooks and then you get this screen that says we're sorry we had an unrecoverable error and it has all this detail about what would what you would think you would be able to maybe search on or do things like, find your answer. There's codes and, things like that, but an unrecoverable error is, QuickBooks is way of saying, I can't do that. And I'm going to

break the rule real quickly here for the people watching in the comments, but make it funny. What's the funniest or like best quick story you've had of an error or glitch or something put in the chat. I'd love to see what people would say, but we're doing it for fun and humor. Not to.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Good idea. All right. What we want to have when, we're talking technical issues is having an ideal conversation and stands for five sections of this conversation. And, when I started doing training there and into it, a lot of people had some, Qualms or questions about the difference between the two. So there's identify, which is identifying the problem which is typically what the person will say when, they first, start to reach out to you, but defining is where you would define the desired outcome. What is it they actually are wanting to do? And then exploring is where you explore those solutions to accomplish that goal. And you've probably had many examples of that, and I'm not sure if there's any showing up in the, comments now, but where your client or someone has, called you or said, and what they've said is not what they're trying to do. And you just have to unpack, what the hardest part, what they were actually solving for. So that. Maybe what they started with what what they thought the problem was is not really what the problem is, you just have to, take that layer back. And I think I talk about a little later, but it's turning what they say. Into what they mean,

That's true in all of our practices always, right? So I have a little saying that kind of goes along with this It's really easy to forget what you had to learn and what I mean by that right now is Sometimes when the client is coming to you and they're having an issue They are free like we know and we take for granted step one two and three of how to get something done a certain way And they're just trying to jump straight to three Instead of doing the other pieces first, so identifying the challenge is really the key part of it because you can't solve anything or help if you don't get to the real crux of the issue, right?

And then acting is when you actually take steps to correct. The issue, if you're correcting what they initially said for gospel as the issue, you might be barking up the wrong tree. And then the last step, which nobody ever does, looking back and making sure that issue was resolved, a lot of times. And I've seen this on the, on, on both of our Facebook groups, man, is Somebody will post a question. It's pretty vaguely worded, or there's a typo or something like that. And the first comment or response is a solution. Wait I, don't know if that's actually what we're trying to, what we're trying to solve for here. And then you'll see somebody else offer a different solution and then it, just ends up being this wall of possible actions to take when we don't even know what it is that they're trying to do. So that's really where where we want to look before we leave, right? Because we often think we know the answer before the question is even finished. And then acting before you understand what the goal is or that desired outcome as this woman, we can see what she's going to, what's going to happen here. But we've all it's, a it's, human nature, right? We, What looks and sounds and smells like a duck, I can't, can you remember all the things, all the sensory, right? You hear this thing over and over again. And then you're just by, by muscle memory, you say okay you just got to clear your cash and cookies or whatever it is. And then of course that doesn't that doesn't help. I love dog bird and this was a common thing, right? Where's dog boards, tech support. Hello. I shut up and reboot, right? Like that. That was his his answer for most things. And there's a reason that rebooting your machine will take care of a lot of things. But as, he's saying there at the end, it's like my call time is improving because he didn't even listen, but this is where you move from what they say to what they mean, right? This particular post was a potential client has 26 QT 2019 files. What is the best way to put them online? So there's a, lot of vagueness here. One, there's a typo, right? And I assume we're going to have to assume that QT means QB and that it's 2019 files, but really what is the best? That's a very subjective word in. If you go and find this post, you'll see a lot of people answering the question without understanding what it is that they are looking for, right? And in the best situation, they are talking about the best price to put 26 files online. All right. So that's really what they meant by best in that particular post, not necessarily. You could, bring it up to 2023 or 2024 and has account in addition, and it has the batch import or batch migration tool. That would be the best way to get it. I'll get them all into QuickBooks online, but that doesn't solve what they're, asking for.

One of the most important questions that wasn't even clarified there, PC versus Mac.

Yeah. Cause that changes

the world dramatically on that.

So let's go with with our second poll question is where do you go for help with QuickBooks? And you alluded to it, right? Go to the Facebook groups, ask in your, community, where do you go? Thanks for answering.

No, just kidding. Okay.

Where do you go for help now that you just took a drink of

Oh, where do I go? It really goes back to community because it's going to be all the different people I've been fortunate to connect with. And there's certain people we know are powerful in different areas. So I really lean into my community on things. I'm, over. I'm not wasting time trying to figure certain things out myself. I'd rather connect with somebody who maybe knows a little bit better. So we'll pay it forward. Like we help each other out as much as we can and go back to it. And then YouTube.

Yeah. Yeah. And, people are mentioning, yes, this should be a multiple choice question. I guess what I was asking is where do you go for first, like, where's your, what is your go to to area, obviously you could do all of these things, at the same time, for some. But what's your go to place for

good answer. I like that one.

Nice. Yeah. And it's funny because sometimes I'll get stumped and I'll go ask a post in the Facebook group and it seems like people are afraid to answer. Because I, honestly need help sometimes

same here, guys. I'm just as stupid as everybody else. I, there are many times I need help out there on certain things. Like over the weekend, you may, some people may have seen my post about PayPal being a cluster, something. And. It's just nice to be able to do two things. One, give validation that it's not just you. Two, to get somebody after validating, it's not just you to help you have you thought about looking at this way? Because just one little question can help you really understand how to, just fix it, get past it.

It looks from the the poll, it looks like Google is the It's the top top answer. Hopefully it leads back to those Facebook community groups, but I guess you can't

feel right. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Now let's talk about narrowing, it down. Once you've defined that goal as to what it is that the that, they want to what, they want, what they're looking to actually do and especially when it's an unexpected result, is narrowing it down to find the root cause. And the best way that I can explain this is picking a card, right? The magician, tells you pick a card, any card, right? That there is a finite number of cards in the deck, right? There are potentially 52. Answers to what card did you pick? And you could just start going. Is it the ace of spades? Is it the two of spades? Is it the three of spades? So on and so forth. But that is going to take an exorbitant amount of time. Just to finalize and get to that answer. You might get lucky. And yes, it was the ace of spades that was picked up. But There are ways to actually eliminate a lot of the issues or a lot of the possibilities before even starting, right? And so the example here is the card red or black, right? So if the answer to that is black you've eliminated, 26 possibilities, right? So now that you know that the suit is black, you can ask these binary questions of, is the suit spades? Yes or no. Gives you the same amount of, possibilities. Because if they say no, then you know, it's,

So you're saying it's like the game, guess who? It's do they wear glasses? Exactly. And the hat on. It's Dan. Okay.

Yeah. And then if this the spades if it's not a spades and it's a club, and if ace this question now that now, when you start to get. Really close to the potential solution, you start have to asking questions, especially when they're binary questions of yes, no close ended questions of tests, right? If, ace is high, so I had to put that as a, as a qualifier in the question because if you just say, is the card higher than seven. If they are assuming that ace is low, ace is a one, the ace could be the answer, but you've let it Out of the box, so to speak by not putting in that specific, qualifier in the question, right? So those three tests or those three questions now have reduced the possibility of 52 down to 6, right? And then it's a matter of then, you can just do is it this is it that So you've only got six more things to, to really

find. So I think where the challenge comes into play when it comes to working with support teams on this is They forget to explain to us at the beginning What, why they're doing this, right? Just if you're, you've got an employee, you're asking them to do a certain task, if you give them the bigger picture of what they're trying to do, we're probably willing to pull more cards a little longer. If they say, look, I'm going to ask you some questions that may seem a little obvious. But I need to help whittle this down and narrow it down because I've got this big decision tree in my brain of pro of things that it could be So we're gonna go through some of the stuff to get it down and fine tune it to get you really the help you need. And I think that gets forgotten too often.

It does. It does. And that's, again backing up part of that that ideal workflow where you've got the def the define, it's a shared expectation that part of the conversation is definitely important. So here's some, methodologies that we would use at add into it. They came from so spud was a quicken terminology. So dating ourselves definitely, or UDOS is what I was trained on. But they are the areas of potential. Problems, right? And the idea of these of these acronyms or terminologies was to help us, eliminate most of the problems with, by, by, narrowing these, things down and, where that root cause could actually be and spud stood for system program user or data. So those are potential potential where the root cause could actually lie. And then UDOS was, that's the same thing, but in a different order. The idea was that the first thing would be where the largest potential root cause could be. So user, not, blaming anything on, the users, but, maybe not missing a step doing things, maybe not understanding where to, go to do all these things and then data. Application and system. Now this is where desktop was was king in my world learning all this stuff. I don't know where QuickBooks online organizes the possibilities of the hierarchy of solutions. I would imagine. System would be and then system is environment, right? So your windows operating system, what browser you're using, what whether you're Mac or windows those types of things. I, would imagine that system is probably the higher of the two, because the immediate answer is, did you clear your cache and cookies,

but so I'm, going to kick back there for a second. Because if you think about it, I actually feel like system should be one of the last ones.

Yeah.

If you're building a cloud based application that is supposed to be accessible by all these different platforms, the system portion of it should be a little bit lower, further down. User in front, guaranteed. Application, then data, then system, I think would be my order of them.

Utes.

Yeah, it's not a very yeah

it doesn't, have a catchy spud or and the thing that they would tell us is that if you don't use UDOS, U D S, and that's what would happen if cause you would end up getting that spider behind you because you wouldn't narrow it down in that particular fashion. So we've used some, there's some tests that would help to determine the area, does it happen in a different browser or incognito or on a different computer, right? If you have the same thing happen in, in a different browser slash incognito mode on, a different computer, then yes or no, right? These are, closed ended questions and closed ended tests to help you narrow it down, right? Asking open ended questions. That, elicit more of more than a one word answer. It's certainly a way to not narrow it down. That was I'm sorry, that was horribly worded. You can definitely let it get out of the box if you ask. Open ended questions. So these are close ended questions to help, test binary.

Yes. I have a quick close ended question for everybody here. Be honest, how many times you've called support and you knew, you forgot to actually try to clear your caching cookies first, but then you got on a call for support and you're like, yes, I tried it. I've done it too. So be honest, did you do it or not?

All been burnt.

Maybe. Okay. I'm sorry. Keep going.

Program application, right? Does it happen in a different version? This is more for a desktop solution. In a different because you really don't have that option in, in, in with QuickBooks Online.

Yeah.

Is it a widespread problem? Is there a known issue, which I know we hear that more than we should, right? If they knew all these issues, why aren't they fixing them? This is the next response, but we'll talk a little bit about the product investigations later. User, what steps are they doing? Does it happen with me? And this is very important to get the steps to duplicate because you can't fix what you can't duplicate. So if you don't see the problem. That doesn't mean that it's still not a problem. It just means that those steps to duplicate aren't duplicating the problem for you, right? So if somebody says I'm, creating a deposit, where do you go to do that deposit? Cause where I may go to take a deposit might be using the right tool, shortcuts. That I have bookmarked and they may actually be clicking on the plus new button going to deposits, right? Understanding the exact steps that they're taking to be able to duplicate it to see if it's something that the user might be doing and then data. Does it happen in another client? Maybe in the test drive file? Or in desktop, if you use a sample file or some other demo file, you want to talk a little bit about tossing your cookies, man.

Yeah. Cause one of the things we were just mentioning, the whole idea of clearing your cookies, clearing your cache. I don't always want to have to go through and clear all of my cookies in my browser history, because it means I'm going to log out of. Everything I'm gonna have to re log into everything again, but there are ways that you can go when you're logged into QuickBooks online. You click on the little button towards the left side of the URL and clear the cookies just for the site. You're on in comparison to going to your settings and I'm. Talking Google Chrome here. So if you're Safari or somebody else, sorry, you have to find it on your own there You can go and delete all of your browsing history and get everything cleared out and on a recent support call I had done the clear the cookies, but I still made me go through and Clear the entire history, everything out completely. And then I had to go log back into a whole bunch of stuff, including my password protector and such. Understanding the differences there. But I was, in the comments, I didn't know WriteTool has a clear cache button. I'm going to have to go look that up. I didn't realize that.

Yeah yeah, because that is that's one of the reasons I think that most people don't want to do that. Yeah. So that going through in the In the chat or the comments there is that when you are clearing your cash and temporary internet files, then all of those MFA codes and online banking tokens and those types of things end up getting part of that. And then that is more of a nuisance, especially when it's just a testing step of to do that, of doing that. That's why I will typically. Go into incognito first or use another browser or dare I say, use the desktop app, right? Because that is something that is completely independent of the browsing experience that you're using and we'll. Also eliminate the the extensions or anything else that might be getting in the way of the online experience that you're having. So those things are things that I would take steps first before, immediately. Tossing my cookies.

We've got some smart people in the comments here that are all mentioning how they actually set it up to clear their cache and cookies all the time. I use another software called CCleaner. So it's C cleaner. So two C's. That is nice because it'll clean some mess stuff up in the registry that's almost always on a desktop realm when I have issues if I start using that to clear through things we'll boot things back up right away.

And then yeah, so we, again, incognito mode, or as I love to call it in burrito mode, because I'm always thinking of burritos. That is the private browsing session inside of Chrome. Every other browser has its own take on that. Firefox will have in private browsing or Safari as well. But then also just using another browser is, a good thing that you don't normally do. Yes, you have to do the MFA code again and all that stuff to, to get to QuickBooks online, but using a different browser. All together is a good idea to to do that as a test, as well as the desktop app. It's a great place to go. It's not always perfect. But the big thing about QuickBooks online versus desktop is there's nothing to download, install or update. So knowing that, if you can't get in to, QuickBooks online that's going to have a huge impact on doing anything. But if there are. Usability issues or on, different areas of QuickBooks or issues of those, of that nature, it will be on this website as well. And you can see the historical one, so you can stop asking or try trying to figure it out if QuickBooks is having a, known outage. Now, when there is an outage it is and this has a green light. Is saying that everything is back up and running. It's not as instantaneous as just turning on a light switch. When there is an outage, there's all sorts of redundancy checks and things that they, have to do to make sure that it's back up and running. So something may say, yes, it's back up and running or the outage is over, but you still may have a lingering aftershock of, of, a lingering issue, even though the status website says, it's, clear you're in the clear Matthew any thoughts on that?

So there's one other place that I will go and look at things, and this is a little bit more extreme, but I, spend a decent amount of time in the Intuit developer area, and I will go look at where their known bugs are there, and these are the long term fixes, things they know that maybe they have to change code on. Quite a bit of detail that's there, but you have to sign in. You have to log into that area to see it. I stay on top of that to recognize what's coming up. Such as they're about to do a a revision to their minor updates. They're going to do a new minor update, which means the old ones won't work. So when certain apps start going down and not connecting correctly, you can really see it there is a big part of it to the interconnectivity.

Let's talk about some real world examples. And if I chose you as a, as the example, don't feel bad about it. Cause I think I did see Renee in the chat. It was upgrading simple start to essential. So she had a client and her QBOA was using simple start. They're using essential they were on Essentials, but she downgraded them to Simple Start still listed as the primary. So they'd like to switch to the primary user to them and then move the billing to the client. Simple Start only has one user, can't upgrade them. When you try, or when she tried, she just got a blank screen, regardless of which browser she used. If I could if I can keep them in some start and then add the client as a company admin, does that kick kick me off as a primary? So there's a lot of information there. So this was really a well crafted question. Cheers to, to Renee for putting all of this information in the question, because there was a lot, a lot of questions answered before. We started to explore, right? So identifying and defining the issue, trying to transfer the primary admin. That's the ultimate goal here, but still stay in simple start. She needs to upgrade in order to do that, but in order the, unexpected result here is that the blank screen. When upgrading, right? So the choice of being able to upgrade there are two choices, slim and fat when the when the screen's blank and you don't have that ability to even try to upgrade, right? So we looking at the, some of the comments in there, just trying to narrow it down, right? And ruling out possibilities and a lot of them she answered in the, post itself, right? Is she doing the proper steps, right? So I assuming knows she's done a downgrade. So she knows how to, change the subscription. I would, assume based off of that and be pretty confident that she knew the steps to upgrade. So is there some, go ahead.

Real quickly, like in my head, because I always like to try to solve issues in a sense, trying to clarify what I see is the challenge here is because they were the primary admin, like they said, only one user in a perfect world, what would have happened, of course, is you would have already switched over the primary user, since you can only have the one person you can still be on as the accountant, but since you're on as the primary user and the accountant, how do you make this change? When you're in both places because you can't toss it back over to somebody else and now it's stuck is the whole point, right?

Yeah. So they needed to be able to upgrade to essentials at least for a day so that they could add another user as a company admin and then do the transfer of the primary admin once that's done. And she would no longer be the primary admin. She would be a removed off of the manage users altogether. And the only be in the accountant firms section, which is fine for simple start, if you are already that way, right? So the client is already the primary admin to begin with. They can bite you, or you can even create the QBOA or create the simple start subscription and tell. QBOA make my client the primary admin and then they automatically become the primary admin. You're the accountant user. Kumbaya, all is right with the user world there. But because she started as the primary admin and didn't add them before downgrading then that, that's where this this problem took place. So they need to get it upgraded in order to add another user. There was like, yeah, again, no slim and fat chances of getting another user added to to a simple start subscription. So data, is there something in QuickBooks online prohibiting this process? No that, that's that eliminates a lot of problems in this particular situation downgrading on the other hand might be, potentially causing these things. If they're in inventories turned on their own plus, and they want to downgrade to, anything lower than that that will stop them. But the, result that she was getting of. Blank screen would not be the result that she should have gotten if there was something in the data, right? Application something wrong with the subscription who knows right? So this could you know, there's very limited issues of the Application itself unless of course there is some kind of known Issue, right? Of all of this happening and then of course system browser, temporary or files those types of things. And that's what it ultimately turned out to be. She had tried other browsers. She tried incognito. She tried everything else, but she didn't try Firefox. And when she did try Firefox, it worked so. There is no install

five new browsers, so I can use a software we're not, it

didn't seem to make any reason why, they wouldn't or why it wouldn't would do this even in incognito or using edge or whatever browser that she did use, but she finally did use. Another Firefox and, it works.

I also wonder, it sounds like it's already solved, but I also wonder if there's maybe a timing thing, right? If, because you're doing the downgrade, maybe you had to wait X amount of time for it to buffer and do whatever and then try again, but, that is nuts.

There's another example. They were reconciling after migrating to QBO. So first bank reconciliation in QBO just migrated clients from a desktop. It's terribly wrong. The deposits match, right? So we're, Visualizing what's, happening there. You can see it now you can, based on what they're what she's describing here. Okay. She's in the reconciliation screen and the deposits match. But the expenses is almost triple, tried to find other posts. The only of the issue I've seen some, but she's trying to search. And it says reconcile first. Anyone know a fix for this, right? So identifying and defining the issue. She's trying to reconcile. Expenses are overstated on the reconciliation screen. Just as far as exploring or digging a little deeper, where are these expenses overstated, right? So I'm visualizing, she's looking at the reconciliation screen and the expenses at the top, of, the reconciliation screen is. Three times what she's seeing on the statement. That's an assumption that I'm making. This would be, something that I would want to clarify. And again, narrowing down the issue, right? Is she doing the proper steps? Is she on the screen that I'm visualizing in my head? Are there duplicate transactions in the register? These are things that I would ask about. Is it something data related? What's the reconciliation of those stats, status, stat, I statuses, what is the plural of status? And did they connect to the bank fee, right? So that's one of those things that I've been burnt by before. Everybody has is once they've reconciled or connected the bank feed and it does that opening balance, look back reconciliation time, but that would be The opening balance will be wrong, right? So that would have, come up in this question as the opening balance is not what I expected to be. But that's it's, worthwhile to ask that question, right? Is this happening for other clients? Go ahead.

I'm, flashing back to doing the weekly sessions when there'd be, we'd pull up different questions and try to answer them. And my immediate response always into all this stuff is to just want to be like, Oh, have you tried this? Have you tried this? Have you tried this? But what you're saying is really, powerful. We need to look at this from the perspective of how do you actually troubleshoot. The scenario first instead of just maybe you can do this and do this I think for us accountants, it can be hard to do that at certain times. And thank you for the reminder.

And especially yeah we're doing this, especially on the Facebook community groups, you're doing this while you're helping your clients and you want to be helpful. And maybe you just had this same problem and that was the solution. So you want to share that. That one solution that, that was, Oh this, could be a nugget for, somebody else. And then of course, system could be a browser, temporary internet files, right? I'm trying to remember. Oh, it was future dated transactions. That was the solution here was that they had future dated transactions. They didn't have the the statement ending date that were cleared or reconciled because when you move from. So that's one of the things that should have come up in narrowing it down. What month are you reconciling? Are you reconciling historical? Are you reconciling from the, moment on? Those types of things. That's what, happened is she had some future dated expenses that were already reconciled. I'm not sure how they got that way, but, they didn't have the, Okay. Close off at the statement date turned on. So it was automatically checking those off in the in the reconciliation, thus open overstating the expenses. So we hear a lot of times, I've seen on the posts and whatnot that when you do end up talking to Intuit, they'll tell you about a known issue, right? Which we can debate probably a whole hour, whether that is a way to appease you, get you off the phone or if there actually is a known issue but I, wanted to talk a little bit about product investigations and escalations, from being on that side of the fence, so to speak. Every time that you call a case is created, and you're typically given some kind of case number. You will get a follow up email or you should get a follow up email. Asking, how your experience was because that case is created and that case is going to be the, resolution of that case because they, they do want to strive for first call resolution is that case is either going to be a closed. Or escalated if it's it's not resolved, then the close the case gets escalated and that case will then get assigned to a product investigation. If there is already 1. Available, and that's typically where you would hear, oh, this is a known issue. Now the case number that you get. Is different than the product investigation number you'll see in the screenshot here. This particular investigation was INV 90173, right? And that then gets passed. To the supportability team who if you like office space, that's, those are the people who speak to the engineers, right? So they start working with all of the cases that are attached to the, product investigation and pass that information on to the, the, engineers to, in hopes that they can find the root cause of what it actually is. Pausing it. And I've talked about this before where QuickBooks and any technical application is really all the code is a ball of rubber bands. And if you imagine QuickBooks being a ball of rubber bands, they have to then determine which rubber band is broken, right? Is it on the inside of the ball? Is it on the outside of the ball? Is it somewhere in between? And once they find that ball or find that rubber band that's broken, they have to fix it and they can't fix it if they can't duplicate it, right? So they know they got to get to the bottom of what is actually the underlying problem of that. And then they have to put the ball back together in the order that it was creating it, that it was there with just that one thing fixed. That's a pretty tall order. Because the last thing that they want to do is fix one thing to break another. And then, but that happens, right? We, We're all here because of one thing broke or another, right?

I use a similar analogy, but I will use the, it's a pile of hay. And because the hay is all on top of each other and you're like, okay, I need to just take this one little nice, neat, clean scoop out and move it over. But you're always gonna have stragglers and weird stuff. But more important, I need to speak up on behalf of all the accountants in case somebody is listening. The area where we get frustrated is. I hate it when I'm calling and there's an obvious issue and I'm being told There is no record of this ever happening before. Oh, we don't have any known. We don't have any known cases of this So this goes back to a comment that was mentioned earlier that if we actually had a really A clean place like in the develop area where you can go and see the bugs that are an issue they listed the different type of Support tickets the number they can still be like Private information can be hidden we could go reference there and see if there's an issue and then help reference back and say it Looks like I'm having the same issue as this ticket here. Can you help me figure out and see what's going on? Because when we're like when we actually make that step to make the call and spend the time on the phone It is so frustrating to do all that and then just to be told. Oh, you're the only person that's ever had this my

yeah, it, yes it's, definitely a, what's a, where you have to prove your case to, to, because they are the gatekeeper of the next step, right? Of actually getting this escalated or not. And then just like anything else in product investigations are subjective and based off of, potential looks like a duck and sounds like a duck. You may find that your, case gets associated with the wrong product investigation, right? Because it's, it really just boils down to. This last bullet point, right? It's got to be reliably duplicatable. And that means that anyone can follow the steps to get this, to have this have this happen. And that's why you find that clearing cache and cookies and trying to incognito and browser is typically the first response because. Things are so intermittent when it comes to unexpected results in, QuickBooks online, because there are so many things that could potentially be interfering with the, online experience. And I always would say in a vacuum, everything sucks but in a vacuum, it works right. Like they test all this stuff before they roll it out. Their setup is not going to be the same as yours for sure. There's always going to be those temporary internet files and extensions and, browser updates that may or may not be on your machine. So it does need to be reliably duplicated and that duplication steps need to be documented and, passed on. So either it's not information that have or. Maybe it wasn't sent along in the right way. So I do want to call out, do a shout out to myself, if you don't want to talk to it and you want some quick answers and you want to work with me over at school bookkeeping, you can, we have chat, email support. There's day options, monthly, annual options or you can bundle it with QuickBooks online subscriptions. You can check it out there. And I don't put you through all of the heartache of. Describing who you are because you just log into the system and start chatting. It is one of the nicer ways to maybe get some answers without unless you need to talk to him to it. I'll tell you, definitely appoint you in the. So our last polling question, did you find it useful information or did you learn something new? Any thoughts final thoughts there, Matthew?

The only other thing that it's hard to show here having worked with so many different app companies, when you start to work with the developers a little bit more, sometimes they'll have you like record your screen. If you do a screen recording, you can share with them the different details. Regardless of what the app is that helps them for sure and truly one of the best things the best way to control your own future is to help give feedback in a positive manner. So if you're having issues or challenges or difficulties, work with them from a positive point and you'd be amazed how you can connect and make better relationships. It's how I now have different connections within the company to help us with stuff. I would suggest people doing the same.

All right. We appreciate you joining us here. Hopefully this was a light, QB power hour after the, St. Patrick's day and, tax deadline or they kick the can extension deadline, whichever, whichever way you look at it. And we'll see you next time on the power hour. We're going to be talking about daily sales summaries next time on QB power hour, and hopefully you have a. Great week and week ahead and we'll see you next time. Have a great day everyone.

Bye guys