Oh QuickBooks…. you will never stop driving me crazy will you?
I lose a few brain cells every time I have to deal with a QuickBooks issue. Maybe I’ve been lucky and haven’t had to deal with QuickBooks online before or maybe people don’t like it enough to use it very often… Who knows?
Anyways, I’ve seen some posts about this error online, but the majority them deal with the full desktop version of QuickBooks. If you aren’t familiar with QB Online… Intuit now has “Better”, “Smarter” business tools for YOU. Yes you. Don’t use their Worse, Dumberer desktop based software… Get their all “cloud“ based software.
If you run a domain and lock down end-user access (like any sane Admin), then you probably know the pain points of running QuickBooks in your environment. At first glance it seems that QB online is not much different. They have a “webapp” you can install on your PC that appears to be built off Chromium. Run the installer and it conveniently dumps 550+ files (220+ MB) to the end-users local appdata… hooray for “cloud“ software!. If you’re using roaming profiles, hopefully you use a third-party solution that allows you to include local appdata locations (sorry Microsoft people).
The good news is that you do not have the be a local administrator to run the installer, hooray!
The bad news is that it requires Visual C++… which requires administrator access (not a big deal I suppose…)
I kinda rambled on there about QBO. As I mentioned earlier, if you lock down your environment, you may be familiar with the following Group Policy option:
Locking users out of the registry is a good idea, but apparently Intuit doesn’t think so… Because if you have this enabled you may see the following error:
You may be saying, but I already installed VC++! Me too! I installed it four times and rebooted three times… it didn’t help… trust me.
If you disable ‘Prevent access to registry editing Tools, then QBO magically opens up. So unless Intuit decides to stop using their barbaric method to check if Visual C++ is installed, you may need to disable this GPO option for those users.
I’ve heard that Intuit has an all browser based QuickBooks Online website, but I have to assume they released this webapp to provide additional functionality. Otherwise why would you have two ways to access the software?