Three hours lost to QuickBooks installation — the solution so simple it hurts.

Took all morning to get QuickBooks Pro 2014 installed on my new computer. I have a monthly service payment plan that includes all upgrades and updates, so I thought it would be a breeze. Just download the latest version to the new machine, enter my Licence Number and Product Number and away we go.

Not so fast. The installation routine would not accept my Licence Number and Product Number, noway, nohow. So I spent about an hour digging around online support, but I no longer seemed to exist in their system. Enter Customer Number — no such number. Enter email address — no such email address. Enter phone number — no such phone number. What the @#$%!?

I then spent about half an hour getting through to telephone support. The answer? I’d been downloading the installation file from the US .com site, not the Canadian .ca site. And I’d been trying to log into my account from the US site. That’s what made all the difference.

So, Intuit, do you think you could add a few lines of code to your onlne login forms that would remind a thick-headed bozo like me that I should go to your Canadian site? You know, a little popup that says “that does not appear to be a US phone number, please check your country of purchase.” And “that customer number does not exist in our US database, please check your country of purchase.”

A simple reminder like that could have saved me hours of frustration.