Intuit QuickBooks glitch strands recurring credit card payments

Intuit is having a rough week. First, the company's payroll system misfired and now there's a recurring credit card payment glitch for businesses that upgraded from QuickBooks 2008 to 2011.

After my post on Intuit's payroll processing problems, I was flooded by customers noting that I only had half the story. The other half is that Intuit sent emails indicating that QuickBooks 2008 users had to upgrade to the 2011 version to retain merchant services from within the application.

Now recurring credit card transactions from within QuickBooks are broken.

The other option for QuickBooks 2008 customers was to pay an additional $19.99 a month to use a Web portal for merchant services. These additional services are a part of Intuit's strategy of turning on-premise software in more services based revenue streams.

There's a common refrain in the community section for Intuit's merchant services and my inbox that goes like this:

I upgraded to QB 2011 a few weeks ago. I have over 1000 recurring charges. They were working fine until yesterday afternoon when suddenly they all disappeared. Poof !! Gone. This is a nightmare! Intuit better get these recurring charges restored ASAP. It would be impossible to re-enter all of them. The charges also do not appear if I directly login to my Merchant Service using a browser (not using Quickbooks). Some heads should roll for this blunder. They forced me to upgrade and now my business is basically SHUT DOWN.

It's unclear how widespread the issue is and we're contacting Intuit to comment---and hopefully shed some light on the issue. Coming about the same time as the payroll processing problem, Intuit is losing a lot of points with small businesses this week.

The biggest issue is that Intuit needs more transparency on the health of its systems. After all, Intuit is the enterprise planning system for small businesses. QuickBooks is mission critical and services connected to it need to act that way.