Customer Reviews

QuickBooks Customer Manager 2.0

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I hate to be so negative, but I spent several hours trying to make this software perform some very basic functionality, and then waited over an hour on hold (during normal business hours) only to be told that the software won't do what I need it to.

What I needed it to do: I have organizations with more than one address. I have contacts that reside at these various locations. I needed to import the organizations (one unique organization record for each unique organization location, since the software does not have 3rd heirarchy, i.e., organization > location > contact), and then import the contacts and have them link to the organization (e.g., by organization name).

What it can't do:
1. You cannot import just organizations (i.e., a parent record). If you do, it will import the "organization name" to the "contact name" field and leave the "company" field blank, even though you set the field mapping to be "organization name" to "company name!" What you end up having to do is create fields for first and last names in the organization file to be imported, and these names have to be unique or the record will not import. So, you either have to assign a contact name (note, this cannot be a name of another contact that you will import later), or enter some arbitrary unique id. In my case, I entered a #.
2. It cannot recognize and link contacts based on a field (e.g., "organization name"); instead, you have to manually add each contact to the organization record's "related contact" field. However, even then these contacts are not truly "linked" - they are hyperlinked. The difference is that, after linking the contacts, if you were to make a change to an organization's record (e.g., if they changed the company name due to incorporation, changed office suite/address, etc.) the contact records would not be updated (i.e., they would still show the old company info...disasterous for any kind of targetted marketing effort!).

What I ended up with was a list of company records with numeric names, and contact records with identical company fields but absolutely no correlation or true link to the parent record. The tech support rep (which, again, I waited over an hour on hold for, and before that wait I had some customer support rep insisting that I buy a tech support package even though I literally just bought the software) told me that I would have to manually link each contact in the "related contacts" field of the company record. When I inquired further he conceded that it is still not a true link, but merely a hyperlink.

The bottom line is, if you're looking for even the most basic contact management functionality, this isn't it. Steer clear of it and save yourself hours and headaches. If you know of any really good contact software for small business contact management (Mac OS X preferrable, but either PC or Mac is fine), please email me!

I have used Quicken & Quickbooks products since the early 90's. I have purchased several add on products during that time.
Quicken & Quickbooks started out as great products but have declined greatly in the last few years. They also offer extra cost products on many of their "upgrades" which were included in earlier products for free.
Customer Manager is a different issue. I started out with version 1. Description on box seemed to offer a usefull product. However, the program was so limited that it made more work than it eliminated. Like a fool I bought V2 when it came out because the concept seemed good & many improvements were promised. I was wrong. It has more bugs, hardly any real improvements than V1. The feature for sending e-mails is worse than useless. It takes several steps to put it into history and often doesn't work at all. You can see from all the other reviews that there are lots of other issues as well. I have experienced them as well.

As insulted as we were to buy 5 licenses for version 1.0, version 2.0 is still as buggy as version 1.0. Total waste of time, money, and cdrom space!

This is, on paper, an excellent idea and has lots of potential. Unfortunately, it SLOOOOOWS your system down to a crawl -- which is frustrating to the point where I don't want to use the product.

As I said, its a great idea for me. I have been searching for a product that could help me track my many projects without the overkill of a MS Project.

It also has many annoying bugs that need to be addressed.

The program has great potential and if it worked as it claims I would give it 5 stars -- but, it can't live up to its promises and until Intuit addresses these -- DON'T BUY IT!!

Too bad -- I love Quickbooks and am disappointed in this product, especially since this is version 2.0.

The price is good, but I guess you get what you pay for. It works fine for a while then it screws up and you can't use it anymore. You click on it and it gives you this garbage and it won't open. I had to uninstall and reinstall. Inuit was helpful, but it didn't solve the problem. I don't understand how a big company can make such crap. We have no problems with quickbooks, but customer manager is just a waste of our time and computer space.

I am very sorry to say that all the bad reviews are correct. I thought they were being to hard on Quickbooks. I thought that maybe, if you took your time and didn't expect too much, that the software could help you say organized to some extent.
My apologies go out to all the reviewers. I was soooo wrong! I spent hours trying to make this work for me. All I got was messed up customer records in quickbooks & outlook, which took me hours to fix.
Even when using the program, there are problems. Example - I emailed an attachment by clicking on "Email" in the contact's file, he could not open it. If I send the same attachment through Outlook directly, no problem. What's the use in having that email ability if it doesn't work.
When you transfer names from Quickbooks to this program, the address goes under "Bill To" - OK. Now sync to Outlook - hey, there is no "Bill To", so guess what - you get NOTHING! So now I have 1800 names in my outlook with no info.
I could go on, but you get the point. This program would be bad even as a beta version, but this is version 2!

Spare a thought for us international users, who can't even get the slow, unstable and featureless version 2.0 of the product.

I am based in Ireland, and so require the UK version of this product to integrate with Quickbooks. Unlike the US version, this costs 200 euros per person, three times the price of the US version.

To add to the insult, only version 1.0 is available in the UK. The difference is, version 1.0 does not synchronise emails. I know a team member sent an email, but I can't see it. This product has zero value. It is a shared address book.

I contacted Quickbooks support (April 2005), and was informed that they "are not shipping version 2.0 in the UK, because they only started shipping versin 1.0 in September." This out of date version is clearly selling like a dog, but they will wait until the shelves clear before shipping the 2004 version. With luck, that will be out of date by then too.

I purchased this software after extensive conferencing with "Quick Books SALES STAFF, all good and fine, they pick up the phone spend unlimited time with you. Tell you everything is fine answer all your questions

Now when you purchase the product there is the RUB!!!!

#1 the product does not work, in any shape or form. Tey as one might.
# CSR is off shore so you are on hold over an hour. Than they tell you that even though you called the # on package , for some reason ( heaven only knows) they are not the right department ( if they are not the right deptpartment why do they put that # on the box, to call) , Then they say the right dept is # an other # and they transfer you. Well you guessed it, the "other dept" is closed.

If they planned to make you miserable they could not have succeeded better.

Take your money and not give you a thing for it, These poeple should have some serious competetion or maybe this is the American Way now.

Good luck if you BUY anything FRom THEM!!!!

Customer service

UPDATE: I cannot believe that it is 2010 and people are still experiencing the hideousness that is this software. I wrote my review of this product in 2006 and I should have listened to the ones in 2005.

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S HOLY STOP BUYING THIS SOFTWARE PEOPLE! I'd write another review saying how horrible it is but Amazon only allows you to write one. If you just have to find out how bad it is, then at least use it as a stand alone product. If you buy this to synch with QuickBooks you will not be happy with the results. You will only wind up with messed up QuickBooks records that it will take you forever to put right.

STOP! DO NOT BUY. The sanity you save will be your own!



*****My Original Review*****

All of the negative reviews are true. Every last one.

I wish to heaven I had been allowed to research this product before it was foist upon me but I wasn't. Now they're mad but at least I'm not to blame because they chose it without asking me and when I did object that it hadn't been tested they just said the asking price was good so we'd have to make it work. Lesson Number One: You get what you pay for.

I don't know how people ever got to use the more advanced features of this product because we NEVER got past trying to get a decent mailing list out of this thing. There is no way to get anything done in this program without creating a separate project in MS Excel or Word. I may as well have used Word & Excel and typed out each name, address, phone number, email address and transaction for all this has helped me. It would have been faster and more accurate.

Since we are a church we have a master mailing list and then several subcategories such as donors, ushers, chaplains, class leaders. The best thing I can say about this program is that the interface for filtering groups works very well. However one HUGE problem is that you cannot go into the master list and assign people to groups. You have to go into each individual record and assign each person to groups. I didn't find this out until after we had imported over 800 records. It took a month and three Volunteers to assign people to the groups they belonged to.

The initial syncs and group setups went well (if you call wasting a month going well). Any sync we did after the first two resulted in half the names in QuickBooks being changed from our format of "last name of first". That's right I said half. Some of the names got changed, some of them didn't. Even the slightest change in spacing resulted in duplicate entries in Customer Manager, despite using their very tedious feature that allows you to keep records or merge them during a sync. And their duplicate names feature of searching through your entire long list is equally tedious, time consuming and completely unworkable. Mapping was useless. Customer Manager circumvented us every time.

It took me over two months to put all the QuickBooks records back the way they were. Worse, I thought I had done the sync wrong until we called support and they told us that this is KNOWN BUG that may or may not be fixed with the next release. They also said they have had many complaints about the groups issue and it's something that the developers are working on but "you know, it's hard to develop new features".

I finally gave up and told the boss people that I will not be using this product again. PERIOD. I showed them the reviews from Amazon and from another site and they finally agreed that they had been hasty in selecting this product and will allow me to be in on the review process for our next database software.

Meantime I have wasted nearly SIX MONTHS working with this software and it very nearly made me want to trash QuickBooks along with it. Even though QuickBooks is a solid accounting program and works decently, I'm not convinced it's the best program for us because there is other software out there specifically tailored to church management. Not to mention, my experience with Intuit Customer support over this has not been good.

Bottom line: Customer Manager has been the bane of my existence for the last six months and nothing on God's Green Earth could convince me to ever use it again. If you're a church person researching this, look at other products first.

I run a multi million dollar home building business and Quickbooks Customer Manager works great for us. We are able keep all our customers' info in one place. We also use it for our service operations and scheduling appointments. It keeps a great history of what we have done at each customers home. This is a relatively new program and I think it will get better with time as they provide new versions. It is a little simplistic and could use some fine tuning, but all in all we use it with success.