Best Of

Hi Reeta,

I did ultimately solve the problem, thankyou.

Someone else had suggested it, but I wouldn't use an external JSON validator, as it exposes your employees' confidential data to an insecure third party.

Firstly I went through submitting the STP with batches of employees to narrow it down to which one was causing the issue. Once it was narrowed down to one, I could see that he had changed addresses. There was a '-' in the address field - that wasn't an issue as such, as plenty of other employees had that character in their address field also. Apparently though someone had copied and pasted his new address from an email, and different sources/fonts have a different kind of '-' that is not recognized, even though it looks exactly the same. Once that was fixed, I finally got it to work!!

Hello @CYML, I'm not sure if the workaround that I found will work for you. My gmail address is part of a Google workspace account.
I've installed GWSMO (Google Workspace Sync for Microsoft Outlook). It
seems to bypass all the security failures that Google encounters with
Outlook during the setup. I now have an Outlook that is syncing all the
workspace emails and that Reckon will talk to for sending emails out.

Hi Rav,

Thanks for your reply. I realise it is not only Gmail that is affected, however that is the one we use, along with most people I know, not to mention over 50% over the world. I can understand you can't be "all things to everybody", but if you were needing to reduce the number of supported email providers (to theoretically save spending resources on the more "obscure" ones), then I do find it incredulous that Gmail doesn't make the cut.

Could you please enlighten me on the "frequent changes", that Google has made to cause it to be unsustainable to maintain compatibility? From my experience Gmail worked fine with Reckon for 6 or 7 years, until they made ONE change, a year or 2 back, where "less secure apps" no longer worked. Reckon did not have to make any changes themselves to work around this change. We just had to create an app specific password within Gmail, and it all worked again. To be fair, I do not fully understand how the January 2025 changes affect other users, as ours as continued to work fine since then. I can't even remember if we needed to change anything when this Google change came into effect. But my point still remains, it has worked as it should to date - so what recent changes have occurred that mean Reckon can't keep up with the times?

Eric, I find your reply a bit patronising towards Aussie_UnderCover. What is the "admin's info" you refer to? Maybe it would be helpful to provide a link? I have read all the documentation I can find, and have also scoured the community forums, but haven't come across anything that informs us to "be vigilant not to change your settings, and the status quo can remain". Neither have I read, that the email settings are saved in your company file. If this is an issue that likely affects a lot of users, surely this info should be easier to find.

As Aussie_Undercover rightly suggests, if we make any changes (fresh installation / unknowingly change our email settings), this cached info is likely to be lost. And we are stuffed. Forced to use a third party application, as an intermediary for Reckon to talk to Gmail. The fact it is a Microsoft product, is enough reason on it's own to avoid, but I won't go there.

Currently Gmail integration works as expected, so I don't understand the justification to get rid of it due to "frequent changes". If there had been a major recent change, maybe so. But it works now, so why not just leave it in for the meantime??? Even if Reckon did have to allocate resources to maintain compatibility with the world's largest email provider, then why not. Is it really that hard or expensive?

To be honest, this is beyond a joke. I'll tell you what is "unsustainable" for small businesses…. and that is to muck around with 3rd party applications just to make an integral function of an accounting software "work like it should". After other frustrations with Reckon over recent years, this is probably going to be the straw that broke the camel's back for us, and we will now look for alternative options (after 9 years with Reckon).

There sadly appears to be a pattern of reducing functionality, rather than it getting better. When we signed up to Reckon, it used to talk directly to our bank (ANZ, one of the biggest banks in NZ!), but then they decided it was too hard to maintain that compatibility. So now we have to download QIF files and upload them manually. This has come with it's own set of pitfalls, which seem to be a result of niggly bugs within Reckon.

Rant over. I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way, but it truly seems that Reckon is going out of their way to frustrate, and alienate their customers in recent years!