Questions on OE Companion Beta

Sometime in late March or early April, we will make the beta trial of OE Companion publicly available. (If you are interested in participating in the beta, sign up here.) The initial beta release will contain primarily the inventory and purchase order functionality of OE Companion.

The remaining features will be phased in over a period of a few months. During this time that the software is in a "beta" phase, you are free to use all the features of the software at no charge. We just ask that you provide feedback to help us improve the software.

At some point in the future, once we feel it is ready, we will move from a beta phase into a commerically available phase. At that point, the software will cease to be free, and it will require a monthly fee. Beta testers will receive a discount for an initial period, to ease the transition. Pricing has not been announced yet, but it will be announced before the beta begins.

I hope this helps to answer some of your questions. Please contact us if you have further questions. We will continue to provide additional information as it becomes available.

The Joys of Developing Add-Ons for QuickBooks Online

One of the really neat benefits of OE Companion (OEC) is that you don't have to worry about any tedious details of making your inventory data work with QuickBooks Online. You just enter your information in one place (either QBOE or OEC), and the software takes care of the rest. It is designed to be a seamless experience.

So imagine my surprise when I was doing some testing on the lastest prototype of OE Companion and found that some of my items weren't being properly updated in QuickBooks Online after I edited them. My first thought of course was that there probably was a bug in the OEC code. So I started debugging and to my surprise saw that OE Companion was behaving properly - it was sending the correct information to QBOE. Yet nothing was happening in QBOE. Weird!

After a little digging, I found this thread on the QBOE developer forums. It turns out that this is a known bug in QuickBooks Online. Even worse, it has been around for over 18 months with no resolution. Wow! Just ... wow! I contacted someone at Intuit, and they basically confirmed that is indeed a known issue and that it probably won't be fixed anytime soon. Hmmmmm ..... OK.

As they say, knowing is half the battle. Now that I know exactly what is going on, I can tell you that this won't significantly affect OE Companion. You will still be able to sync item info with QBOE. In fact we have taken steps to hide this problem from the user, so you might not even notice it. We are committed to making OEC the best add-on for QuickBooks Online. If that requires working around the bugs in QBOE, then bring 'em on. :-)

Status Update and QuickBooks Online Outage

You might have noticed I have been blogging less frequently. That is largely due to a heavy focus on core development work on OEcompanion. Very soon I will release some screenshots and maybe even a brief demo. I want to say again how much I appreciate those of you who have sent suggestions and comments via email. Now is the time for feature requests, as it takes longer to make changes once the app is released.

One other item of note ... you are probably aware that QuickBooks Online went down for a while earlier this week. Intuit has not publicly commented on the cause of the outage. Certainly outages like that are unacceptable. However, in their defense I will say that this is the longest unplanned outage I have seen in the almost 3 years that I have used QBOE. I think a lot of the complaints stem from two things.

First, it took them a while to notice there was an outage. I didn't keep exact times, but I first noticed a problem at least 2-3 hours before they posted anything about it. It would have helped greatly if they had posted a notice immediately on the home page, instead of leaving everyone unsure what was going on.

Second, Intuit has not been very forthcoming about the problem. Perhaps that is due to the nature of the problem. Maybe they don't really understand it yet and will tell us in due time. That's fair. I just hope it was a random hardware failure as opposed to some type of hacker attack.

In any case, outages are an unavoidable part of web applications. The next time your hard drive crashes and you lose all the data on your local computer., just remember how great web applications are as well.