FICDS, on the other hand, was spun up more recently and is in much better shape. I wouldn't look at an application like QBO and see much that would inform a behind the scenes service like FICDS.
The more interesting product, to me, is TurboTax. The seasonality of it allows Intuit to basically rebuild it from the ground up every year. It's really a different mindset on the San Diego campus (where TT is developed) and in Mountain View (where QBO is developed). San Diego is much more willing to take (non-security) risks with the product because small changes can add up to big wins. I remember a talk by one of the guys in charge of A/B testing on TT who said that a tenth of a percentage point increase in conversion rate was good for tens of millions in added profit.
Contrast that with QuickBooks, where the difficulty to use is actually a feature. Accountants spend years learning the app and learning the work arounds for those bugs you mentioned. That knowledge and experience becomes a barrier to entry into the field and a job skill that they're compensated for. The result is that QB/QBO is aimed at accountants with years of experience in the product. Their livelihood depends on it and they don't like change. So the teams there do as little as possible that can cause problems and know that they'll still get good reviews if the get almost nothing done so long as they don't cause problems.
It's deeply disfunctional and yet explains why you can put a lot of trust in FICDS. They too have had bugs for years. For example, they don't save cookies between scraping sessions and so are always an untrusted browser to the banks. I have at least two accounts that constantly send me 2FA tokens whenever Mint tries (and fails) to sync. But no one gets fired for not fixing bugs. You get fired for compromising the security or stability of the service, and the easiest way to not do that is to push as little possibly vulnerable code to prod. It's the anti-Zuckerberg environment...move slow and don't break things.
Ha, actually, one more - the only way to change the date format in invoices (from mm/dd/yy to YYYY-mm-dd for instance) is to change the overall Windows OS setting. That's crazy enough, but what's worse is, when you do that, it screws up the dates of many pre-existing, closed transactions in your company files. Fortunately in my case (iirc) it reset those dates way in the future, so I was able to find and fix them manually. But I mean, seriously...
My favorite WTF for QBD: The data upload was literally just using the replication feature of the embedded Sybase database. One of the Distinguished Engineers that I worked with, "I worked on that feature and I probably know more about how it works than anyone and I can't get it to work reliably.
Financial Institution something something Service. It's the internal initialism name for the service that communicates with financial institutions on behalf of the applications that need to pull transactions and other information.
> What does it mean "quickbooks online is decades old"?
The project was started in the late 90s. It's as messy a codebase as you'd expect to find when you've got close to 20 years of commits.
My latest version (Quicken 2016) literally takes seconds to tab between fields and often does not keep a correct tally balance until I close the check register view. I only have a year of data in it (I thought the slowness might have been due to importing my old data so I restarted fresh).
Since I've been getting bombarded with upgrade ads that I can't seem to disable each time I start Quicken I'm thinking of moving to another app like Moneydance. It feel like an end of an era.
Second, even before it was sold, it was like Intuit's vestigial tail. It was an important part of the evolution of the company, but it didn't fit into what Intuit was trying to do and was largely ignored inside the company. Even before they announced plans to sell it, it felt like the kitchen table they keep at headquarters...something that's there to remind people of Intuit's past but feels really out of place with its present.
With that said, security is taken very seriously and most of the stuff I experienced was UI related. So hard to say...
