Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Reckon CEO Sam Allert!

This is quite cool, kudos to you.

Why did Reckon Accounts Hosted move to Amazon? Was there anything in particular that drove that decision?

We have been using Reckon One for around a year now and before that were using Sage BCA and Xero.

Generally speaking, I like Reckon One. The interface is clear and easy to get around. Once you know how it works, it is easy to use and mostly has the features we need.

However, there are some issues that have come up with Reckon One & Reckon Payroll in that time that have caused us problems, as follows:

Navigation: (1) There is no search function in Reckon One. If you need to find something, you pretty much have to know what you are looking for already, as you cannot search, you can only filter on data in a column. (2) The other odd thing it does is that if you need to edit a transaction in the past, you navigate to it and it could be at page 14, say, you make the edit, close it and instead of going back to the page you were on, it will return you to the beginning, ie page 1, or some other location, and you then need to navigate back to where you were. Particularly this happens in Banking transactions and some reports and is time-consuming and frustrating to work with.

Reports: Reports are generated with date, payee, amount only. The Descriptions typed into Bills and Invoices do not display. Our Accountant and Bookkeeper both say this is not normal and there are requests in Community posts going back years from users and accountants asking for this to be fixed. Descriptions should appear in a GL account reports so accountants and bookkeepers can review them without having to open and close each transaction to see what it is. If it is a long report this is not practical. If our Accountant wants to know what a group of transactions are, he emails me and asks me to produce a worksheet with Descriptions for him. I can understand his position. Even if he was prepared to open and close numerous transactions to check their Descriptions, we don't want to be paying him to do so.

Classifications: In Xero and Sage BCA there was a means to split a Bill, Invoice, bank transaction or wages payment into different components and tag each line with their equivalent of Classifications. You could then generate a P&L report on that tag to see the overall position for a category. Businesses use this to track the overall position when that category covers different GL accounts, payments and wages. Reckon has the Classifications feature but it does not work like this. (1) You can only tag a whole Bill, Invoice or pay with a Classification. In practice, multiple Suppliers send us Bills that include items that are across several different sites and staff will work across several sites in a week and there is no means to apply the different Classifications involved within a payment of an invoice or wages. (2) Even if users could split a transaction and tag each line with the applicable Classification, there is no means to generate a single report based on a Classification - in Reckon One, reports on Classifications are separated into one for income and one for expenditure, and there is no way to get a P&L report combining the two. These limitations make the Classifications feature of little use.

Banking transactions: Most banks have a means to do a batch payment in their online banking, ie one debit to multiple payees, but Reckon One has no means to split a single amount that is a batch payment to multiple Suppliers in Banking transactions. Each payment can only be allocated to one Supplier. Many businesses do batch payments so not having this functionality is a limitation. It has meant we either need to not use batch payments and pay every invoice one by one, or do manual entries in a clearing account to split them which is considerable extra work and not ideal.

Documentation: (1) The videos and guides available online to show customers how to operate Reckon One and Reckon Payroll are not complete and some are outdated. It has meant we have had a difficult time finding out how to use it. (2) Tech Support cannot help with a lot of it as they are working from the same videos and guides, so if there is something missing from them, they may not know the answer either. For example, there is a collection of videos and guides on how to operate Reckon Payroll. None of these is a cohesive beginning to end instruction. They are fragmented pieces of the puzzle. For example, instructions on sharing Reckon Payroll with your accountant are missing some steps and instructions on how to allocate payments of wages and super in Banking transactions are not there at all.

Responsiveness: For the issues above, I have spoken to Tech Support and other staff at Reckon to bring them to their attention and little has changed. For Descriptions missing from reports, in Community, there are posts going back years asking for them to be included and it's never been addressed. Where something is identified as missing from instructional materials it needs to be updated as soon as possible, not left as is or users are going to waste time at best, or make mistakes at worst, as they try to work out how to make those entries.

Appreciate there will be different priorities for upgrades for operational reasons, but these are real world things that your customers need. Are there plans to deal with them?

Hi,

I have been using Reckon Personal Plus for years, and before that its predecessor Quicken.

When entering a transaction type in the Num column, there is no option for BPay.

Given that BPay is such a common payment method for many services and businesses, please add that option.

(I have requested this option in the past, but have not received any response or update).

Regards

Ray

Will Reckon Accounts (business software versions) ever include Direct Credit as a payment method? If I want to record a pay anyone invoice payment and avoid the Bank Online functionality, I have to record it as a cheque, as that's the closest suitable option. Cheques are being phased out in a few years anyway.

Hi everyone,

Like some, I have been with Reckon/Quicken for many years. I have been using Personal Plus the whole time. I pay the annual subscription however there hasn't been any development or changes to the software and the annual subscription seems to be for access only.

My question - Since there is a move to online platforms, is there possibility for having a Personal Plus online platform or web-based Personlal Plus? There is Reckon One but that seems to be more business orientated.

Thanks

We're using Recon Accounts Plus - The Scheduled Bills & Deposits (full list) and Bills and Deposits is not customizable. I need to have visibility on transactions e.g., Transfers, but is very challenging to see the Payee in the list.

We'd like to see options FROM which account the payment is going to be made, but also cannot be customized to view this.

It makes it hard not to see the Account that the payments is going to be made from if one need to update a series of transactions. It results in having to go through the whole list one by one.

When we EDIT a transaction in the Scheduled Bills & Deposits screen, it jumps back to the top of the page and then I have to scroll back to the line I was on. It looses focus.

Upgrades - Re-installs. Really? Is there no easier way to have an .exe to do the upgrade?

As some of the other members have indicated: there doesn't seem to be much change in the application for years. We've been using this application since 2011 and love it, other than these 'glitches' that's just never been addressed or improved.

Hi, it would be very useful if downloading of past share/etf prices could down load the last 20 years rather than just the last (about) five days. Cheers! (on Personal Plus)

you can search by more than one criteria in the find window, maybe putting an address or part thereof might help.

Hi Sam

Will one day a user login be able to have two entities open at same time. I have 5 units in my group and would be good to be able to have at least two open under same id. I realise might be additional cost. But if we could specify which units are in the group if would be great to simplify intercoy account reconciliations .

Dear AMA,

I am also a long-term Reckon user and paying a significant subscription fee.

I use the desktop version and do not want to change to hosted.

I recently updated my laptop and have discovered that the new processor technology "Snapdragon" is not compatible with Reckon software. What this means is that I now have to create an individual PDF of all outgoing invoices and outgoing payslips because Reckon is unable to send them because of "Snapdragon". This is extremely time consuming when you have several employees to pay.

I'm told that "Snapdragon" is the way of the future for computers and I am wondering if Reckon intends to rectify this technology conflict/incompatibility?

I need to add one more thing. On seeing all the responses come through over the past couple of days, there is another issue that needs addressing: Reckon has around 4 or 5 different packages. Reckon Desktop, Reckon Hosted, Reckon One, Reckon Personal and some others in this thread that I have never heard of. Yet, the support for them is all lumped into one.

Finding instructions on how to do something often brings up instructions how to do it in another of the Reckon apps that you do not use and nothing for the one you do. I signed up to a webinar held by Reckon on a topic. I use Reckon One and the webinar was conducted in Reckon Hosted, which bore no resemblence to the interface I use, and was of little use. Windows 11 and Mac do the same things, but you don't sign up to a Windows webinar to learn how to use Mac.

If Reckon is to continue to locate all its support and instructional materials for all its software packages from a single hub, then some rationalisation is sorely needed to take stocktake of what is there and what is not for each one, to add the missing pieces and and to give its customers a simple way to segregate search results so that they call up results for the package they use only. There are tags in Community for this at present, but a single post can be tagged to three or four different things as it may have some relevant

Reckon One

There is no Void function for any transactions. It does seem deficient for an accounting package to not have a void function. Only options are to delete (not very audit worthy) or set to zero amount etc.

Quantities entered on items on Invoices do not get transferred to the associated receipts. This means that a receipt created directly through Receive Money retains its quantity as a ledger transaction but a receipt created from an Invoice does not. Another inconsistency within Reckon One but this one is very annoying and prevents us using Invoicing as much as expected.

Hi Sam

I was very disappointed when Reckon changed from selling us Personal Plus, to forcing us to rent it annually. Your competitors, and the source of Personal Plus, Quicken, are doing the same thing these days but with an important difference. Their products offer something for the annual rental. Your company, on the other hand, seems to be simply profiting from a dedicated customer base, while spending nothing on maintaining the software.

This is not a good look, Sam, and would incline me not to recommend Reckon to anyone asking me if purchasing Personal Plus was a good idea. Naturally that would apply to any of your other products, as it is your company's behaviour that is in question, not the software.

So this is not a silly threat, I am just leading you down a train of consequences that arise from your actions. I have evaluated other software, but I have been using yours for years and would like to continue to do so.

Please give us something in return for our, now $220, annual payment.

Kind Regards

Geoff Fairless

I am another Reckon Personal customer for over a decade, also frustrated with development and the Windows Desktop only support. If Reckon isn’t interested developing a Mac or Web based version perhaps sell the rights back to Quicken international and let them develop and Australian Quicken version for us.