I’ve been doing a significant amount of QuickBooks automation recently using their REST API. As part of that development work, it’s necessary to regularly validate that the automation behaves correctly by checking the results in the actual QuickBooks Online interface. For the project I’m working on, my application connects to multiple QuickBooks company files, which means I frequently need to switch back and forth between companies.

It had been several years since I last used QuickBooks, so I turned to their official help documentation to find where to switch company files within the same account. Much to my surprise, the documentation for such a critical and commonly used action was simply wrong.
 
According to their help article, the steps are as follows:

However, when I navigated to Settings -> YOUR COMPANY, there was no sign of a Switch company under that heading.

As shown in the screenshot above, I eventually found the command but it was located under PROFILE, not YOUR COMPANY.

While this may seem like a minor issue, incorrect documentation like this can be incredibly frustrating for novice users. Even for experienced developers, it results in unnecessary time spent hunting through menus. Personally, I believe switching companies should be a first-class action: easily accessible and not buried three, four, or five levels deep in the UI. Several competitors already handle this far more elegantly with a simple dropdown on the main interface.

Actually, one of the things that strikes me most about QuickBooks Online is how many clicks it takes to get anything done! Everything seems buried two, three, even four layers deep. The interface is definitely in need of some love. It’s one more reason I appreciate automating things through their REST API as it lets me skip the interface entirely!

I’m also worried because of the fact that if they can’t get such basic things documented correctly, I suspect many other pages will have inaccurate instructions as well.

Now the next challenge is figuring out how to notify Intuit about this documentation error and seeing how quickly (or slowly) they respond.

I may post more about my experiences automating QuickBooks in the coming weeks. The process has been both rewarding and frustrating especially during the very frustrating initial setup phase but ultimately enlightening once things start working as expected. It was super simple to initially get functional in Development mode, but switching to Production was a challenge to say the least!