QuickBooks: The Parable of the Generic Muffler

I was still sixteen when I used my hard-earned cash to buy my first car: a ’77 Camaro.  No, not the cool one with Cragars and a 350 and a four-barrel and a four speed…mine was a flaccid old rotbucket with a 250 straight six and an automatic.  My dad’s station wagon was faster.  But still…I was sixteen, and it was my own car.  And I loved it.

When my muffler fell off six weeks later (the car cost $350 for a reason, you know…), I took it to a mechanic and asked how much he’d charge to install a factory muffler.  And while I honestly don’t remember his quote now, I do recall that it was perilously close to the purchase price of the car.

I wound up at an aftermarket auto parts joint, and bought a nice, generic muffler that was approximately the same size and configuration as the original.  But it cost about fifteen percent of what the mechanic had quoted me, and I figured I’d just install it myself.

Thus begins the parable of the Generic Muffler.

Generic mufflers are cheap because they “can” fit almost any automobile…so manufacturers can sell thousands of them.  The hitch, though, is that they really don’t fit ANY automobile.  The average person in a crowded room has one boob and one testicle.  The average doesn’t exist.  Same deal with mufflers.  And I know.  It took three days to install that muffler. 

The same should be said for QuickBooks.

QuickBooks doesn’t really fit ANY business.  In attempting to make a piece of software so bland and broadly appealing, Intuit made something that is the accounting version of tofu.  It has no form, and it has no flavor.  It’s one of those things that has to be massaged and manipulated, begged and beaten in order to make it do anything useful.  It is unfortunate that setting up your chart of accounts and formatting your forms is one of the first things you have to do with QuickBooks, because it’s a task that requires intimacy with a business that doesn’t yet exist, and requires familiarity with software that, often, is brand new.

But it is ill-advised to try and run a business without it. 

Make the sacrifice, take your lumps, and start using QuickBooks (or, if preferred, something else…I’ve never seen another piece of general accounting software that sucks any less) on your very first day of business.  It is an indispensable piece of the infrastructure that holds your organization together.