brin_bellway | (no subject)

The QuickBooks official training course has a very deeply ingrained assumption that you're the owner of an accounting firm and are looking to have your firm start using QuickBooks with its clients.

(No, it's not *just* because that link is to the version of QuickBooks aimed at accounting firms and not the general one. The general one doesn't *have* a training course, just a few tutorial videos on individual topics. This is the closest there is.

Besides, that still doesn't explain why you're assumed to be the owner and not an employee.)

This...seems like it would be much less common than my use-case of "new graduate hoping that having some QuickBooks training under her belt will help her bootstrap into her first career-field job". Do people *often* end up *running accounting firms* while being entirely ignorant of how to use QuickBooks?

Well, I'm sure there's *some* useful information buried in here even as someone who doesn't much like the thought of *ever* running a firm herself. And I'll be able to truthfully *say* that I'm officially QuickBooks trained, which in practice is probably the most valuable thing the course gives you.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

How out of touch training is with what’s actually expected at work is always so disturbing.

To a significant extent I *wish* I lived in the world my fast-food training program was set in. We'd probably be even more overworked (having to hire/train/pay more labour isn't *corporate's* problem, so they have little incentive not to require labour-intensive procedures), but we'd be a hell of a lot more sanitary.

Also, I'm *autistic* and even *I* can tell that they completely do not understand how customer/staff non-verbal communication works. Eye contact does *not* mean "hello, yes, I am a service worker performing the baseline amount of emotional labour expected of my society's service workers": it means "I have a question to ask you". Most customers, upon having eye contact made with them, will respond by guessing what question you were planning to ask and answering it: if you make eye contact with them constantly, they'll assume you're too stupid to remember what you were told to do two seconds ago, and if your actions make it clear enough that you *do* know what you're supposed to be doing they'll probably just get weirded out.

Which all makes me wonder how much *else* of the non-verbal-communication training is counterproductive bullshit.

Reminds me of that one tumblr post that was going around for a while about how Allism is a mental disorder with symptoms of being unable to construct explicit models of the internalities of the people around you and the ways in which you are communicating with them.

(WRT the original post: have you considered that their business model relies nearly entirely on whether or not they are adopted by owners, and very little on if employees enjoy learning to use the software? I suspect that produces the bias you're seeing; your complaints have no power to change how they function except in a very distant proximate way where they might slightly trouble a hypothetical boss, but that boss's experience learning to use the tool is crucial to getting them to actually adopt it for a firm in the first place and thus whether or not they get money)

>>their business model relies nearly entirely on whether or not they are adopted by owners, and very little on if employees enjoy learning to use the software

Yeah, there's that. Many accounting bosses are not bosses *of firms* (a lot of companies have in-house accounting staff), but OTOH a single QuickBooks-using firm can convince many clients to sign up for QuickBooks.

That explains not just the training programs offered but the *pricing*. The software is given away to the accounting firms themselves, with the cost being merely per *client*: furthermore, client companies get fairly large discounts on said cost if they buy their subscription through an accounting firm.

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I'm taking the QuickBooks Online course because, in the age of remote office work, that seems more likely to come up than the desktop version, and while I *get* why she's doing it it's still disturbing how hard the lecturer tries to spin "living, breathing software" and "stumbling across recently-added features" as a good thing. (My response was to look at how easy it is to back up QBO files, and apparently the main way of doing so is to hire a third party for approximately as much as the QBO subscription itself costs. $20/month probably feels reasonable to someone accustomed to operating at a company scale, I guess.)

(She also threw in an anecdote at one point about how one of the great things about the mobile app is that it allowed her to handle a client's request while she was *too sick to easily make it over to her desktop*, which is absolutely fucking horrifying and further cements my desire to never run a firm and *especially* not a one-person operation. (Although I was already well aware that business ownership is not for me, especially after observing that Meta-Boss is effectively on-call at all times.))