Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses with Equifax

Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by CoolGuySteve on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:20PM (#27703330)

I've been using Intuit Quickbooks Self-Employed for my contracting work and it really fucking sucks.

Paid invoices can't be added as transactions. Tax payments aren't correctly imported into TurboTax. The time tracker can't generate invoices.

There are so many sharp edges that can make their way into my Schedule C that I'm worried about being audited. This software clearly doesn't come from the "Have you even fucking tried using it?" school of software design.

And now on top of all that I have to worry about them selling my data to a credit agency that's a boil on the face of the economy.

Is there a better accounting/tax package out there? The only thing Quickbooks Self-Employed does well is scan receipts.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by curun1r on Thursday July 01, 2021 @04:02PM (#27703962)

I remember seeing the Self Employed launch from inside the company. It was somewhat of a skunkworks project from 3 engineers and they got a lot of internal PR for creatively targeting the gig worker market. I guess the plan was to eventually branch out to other self employed people, but the initial motivation was Uber drivers and such rather than small business owners, because that would cannibalize the QuickBooks Online market. It doesn't sound like much has changed in the 5 years since I left. It sounds like you fall a bit in between their product offerings, but I wouldn't count on them handling all your needs because they'd rather people like you just moved to their full QBO product.

I also remember attending a session that Intuit offered on the competitor landscape and being quite surprised that Wave wasn't covered. Intuit just doesn't take them seriously, but their products, to me, seem better than just about every competitor covered in the session, including Xero. They've got a self-employed offering [0] that might be worth experimenting with since you can start for free and only pay when you need the premium features.

[0] https://www.waveapps.com/accounting/self-employed

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by CoolGuySteve on Thursday July 01, 2021 @04:12PM (#27704110)

Funnily enough, Wave discontinued their receipt scanning feature this month.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by fennecfoxen on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:23PM (#27703373)

My understanding from a brief stint in an adjacent industry is that Xero is pretty good and popular for accounting, but I cannot vouch for it as an end-to-end solution for self-employment needs.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by ChrisMarshallNY on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:58PM (#27703902)

I use Xero for my business accounting. Works well. My accountant had never used it before, but had no problem grokking it.

Intuit has my email address from an abortive attempt to use Quickbooks, about a decade ago. It sucked so hard, I ran screaming.

Every now and then, I get an email from them, suggesting that I “reactivate” My account.

The unsub link is worthless. I have to log in with the nonexistent account, in order to unsub. The reset password function doesn’t work (non-existent account). I am doomed to get these emails for eternity, but they aren’t frequent enough to be much more than an annoyance.

But Equifax has a crappy record on data integrity. I expect an avalanche of penis pill spam, soon.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by cure on Thursday July 01, 2021 @05:09PM (#27704910)

> The unsub link is worthless. I have to log in with the nonexistent account, in order to unsub.

Ah, hey, that's the same level of incompetence as British Airways. I'm in the same boat there, but that's why /dev/null exists, of course :)

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by kevin_thibedeau on Thursday July 01, 2021 @04:11PM (#27704079)

> I have to log in with the nonexistent account, in order to unsub

I would consider this a CAN-SPAM violation. You can have your representative and AG apply some pressure.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by ChrisMarshallNY on Thursday July 01, 2021 @08:56PM (#27706787)

Yeah…they aren’t interested in addressing this. Not sure why.

So far, it has only been a slight annoyance.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by buildint on Thursday July 01, 2021 @04:45PM (#27704591)

Xero is massive in Australia. Almost every small business uses it and every accountant supports it.

It has a highly populated plugin marketplace to, which is where I think you need to go for the receipt evening part.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by dwd on Friday July 02, 2021 @12:58AM (#27707946)

New Zealand company, a guy I used to work with in Brisbane is a software architect for them these days in Auckland.

They had a good incentive program for accountants to bring on clients. My account was super disappointed I already had an account and knew how to give them just enough access to it to do their job, but no more.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by MattBearman on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:50PM (#27703757)

If you're based in the UK I'd definitely recommend FreeAgent - https://www.freeagent.com

Disclaimer: I used to work for them as a software engineer, but having used Xero when I was self-employed I can definitely say FreeAgent is better.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by kareemm on Thursday July 01, 2021 @04:20PM (#27704217)

Second this. Been on FA for at least half a decade and it’s great.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by deadbunny on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:55PM (#27703835)

I can 2nd FreeAgent as a user of about 5 years.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by dheera on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:40PM (#27703619)

I just use spreadsheets, if you design them well they work, and they're relatively portable between the few major spreadsheet products out there. LibreOffice if you're worried about corporate eyes on your data.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by dawnerd on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:58PM (#27703892)

Self employed wastes so much of my time. I had to completely redo everything this last tax year.

Switched to godaddy’s bookkeeping which still sucks but not many options out there.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by thinkingkong on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:32PM (#27703490)

Bench works super well for your use case, provided youre Ok with cash basis bookkeeping.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by krisroadruck on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:58PM (#27703899)

I'll add another nod for Bench. Been using them for 6 months now and they are friggin great.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by kayhi on Thursday July 01, 2021 @04:07PM (#27704039)

Is it just like a Dropbox to upload receipts and someone reviews it? Do they tell you what's missing?

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by pkoullick92 on Friday July 02, 2021 @02:17PM (#27714881)

Keeper Tax is very user friendly, but designed for a simpler use-case. It only does expense tracking very well, but it doesn't have income tracking, or invoicing.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by MeinBlutIstBlau on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:58PM (#27703893)

I personally use GNUCash for my budget stuff but I know they've got a lot of business oriented tools and reports. Might be worth looking into.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by hallway_monitor on Thursday July 01, 2021 @04:54PM (#27704724)

I've been using it for several years. I run all my freelance stuff through a specific checking account so I can just import all transactions and I have my p&L for the year, broken out by category etc etc.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by mtm on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:57PM (#27703881)

https://plaintextaccounting.org

Not sure about receipt scanning though.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by nafizh on Thursday July 01, 2021 @04:02PM (#27703973)

Most probably, they outsource most of the software engineering to consultancy agencies known for H1B abuse.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by toddmatthews on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:22PM (#27703371)

just curious, why do you even need to scan receipts? Cant you just use a credit card and import transactions from the card provider?

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by fennecfoxen on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:23PM (#27703377)

The point of receipts is if the IRS ever audits you.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by toddmatthews on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:25PM (#27703391)

is the credit card trail not good enough?

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by kingnothing on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:38PM (#27703574)

I don't think so. You could go buy $1000 worth of gift cards to give to your family on a business credit card versus legitimate business expenses. The receipt shows what you bought, a credit card statement only shows the amount.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by namibj on Friday July 02, 2021 @09:05AM (#27710979)

No, the CC company actually has line-item information for almost all purchases (fall-back transaction processing and really old terminals are likely excluded).

Theoretically you can get your hands on that information.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by toddmatthews on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:59PM (#27703924)

thanks

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by toomuchtodo on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:26PM (#27703411)

For amounts over $75, it is not.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rr-03-106.pdf

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by toddmatthews on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:32PM (#27703488)

that's strictly for reimbursing an employee for an expense.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by toomuchtodo on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:35PM (#27703533)

Good catch. I’ve been audited before, so I err on the side of caution and keep as much documentation as reasonably possible to substantiate business expense claims. Electronic storage is cheap, and audits are unpleasant.

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by toddmatthews on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:59PM (#27703913)

got it, makes sense, thanks

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by toomuchtodo on Thursday July 01, 2021 @04:00PM (#27703936)

Thanks again for pointing out my mistake.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by jacobr1 on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:33PM (#27703503)

Expensify has a really good scanner and sync-to-CC data system. I have only ever used it as an employee, but my understanding is that it has good backends synchronization with a variety of accounting packages.

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Re:Intuit to share payroll data from 1.4M small businesses w... by dheera on Thursday July 01, 2021 @03:46PM (#27703700)

I found Abacus much easier to use. Expensify was extremely convoluted, you had to create reports and then submit them, instead of just submitting expenses with a couple clicks.

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