Love that QIF export


Dirk L Andersen | email Oct 13 2007, 06:16 PM
Hi Stephane, This product from what I see initially looks fantastic. I would imagine that there are many out there that would use the program mostly for the building, tenant for management of properties but would prefer a bookkeeping program such as Quickbooks for the financial portion of what they do. You could not hope to duplicate in this program what these other relativly inexpensive programs do in that regard. The QIF export is good. I can export to qif then write a little conversion program to convert it to the Quickbooks IIF format to import into the QB program. And maybe someday you would see the value of this format also. Not much different, just tab delimited with certain nuances. I am recomending your product from this point on. We are fed up with the high priced programs that really actually do less than your product. A big Wow, look here, for us in this field.

Thanks
Stephane Grenier | email Oct 14 2007, 11:32 AM
Hi Dirk,

Thank you very much for the great compliments and positive feedback about LandlordMax! These are extremely appreciated. Would you mind if I also posted them on our Success Stories Page (http://www.landlordmax.com/successStories.html) and possibly even my personal blog http://www.followsteph.com

In regards to Quickbooks thank you for the suggestion. We're always very appreciative of all constructive comments and suggestions for the software. For Quickbooks, we've actually been investigating it quite substantially for some time. We've done a major push for full Quickbooks integration feature with the upcoming major release but unfortunately we've had to postpone it to a future version. The problem is that it's not overly complicated to do a simple Quickbooks integration with a very limited scope. The problem is properly integrating it in an easy to use way that will work for everyone (as I'm sure you can appreciate).

If you're interested in how quickly a "simple" feature can explode in scope, I recently wrote about our effort to include email support in the next version of LandlordMax: http://www.followsteph.com/2007/10/10/what-is-scope-creep/ You would think it wouldn't be that hard. The bigger cost is always in implementing it so that it's very easy for everyone to use and understand.

Looking back, we've been actively investigating the possibility of adding full Quickbooks support since 2005 (http://www.followsteph.com/2005/09/16/landlordmax-property-management-software-status-update-2/) There's been decent demand for it, which we truly appreciate. It's just that the cost of properly implementing this feature has so far been prohibitive compared to other highly requested features (which is always a fine balance to maintain). But we're working on it.

As an aside we've also been looking at purchasing a third party component to simplify this such but we haven't yet been able to find one that believe is of the caliber and quality we need.

Regards,
Stephane Grenier
Founder
LandlordMax Software Inc.
http://www.LandlordMax.com
http://www.FollowSteph.com
Dirk L Andersen | email Oct 14 2007, 04:43 PM
Yes Stephane you can use my posts as you wish.

I am quite familiar with how a small feature can end up being a resource hog. I wrote and supported a program for about 8 years during the early days of the micro revolution.

Thank you for your efforts. Your product has more and better features that the program we paid over $1000.00 US for and who now wants $1000 US for their latest upgrade. They do not even have a qif export nor the ability to send reports to a comma delimited text file as yours does.

We just use your program to accumulate our rental deposits then export them out to the qif then run a little self written program to change the data into the IIF format.

You would need to get more complicated with the IIF export if you were trying to export large and various items from your program. Getting your program to work with other programs is what will build you an even greater following. I am absolutely convinced of this.

Thanks again
Stephane Grenier | email Oct 14 2007, 05:00 PM
Hi Dirk,

Thank you for the permission. We'll definitely use it. Your words are very kind and appreciated.

It's good to hear that you're familiar with software development. I suspected so much but didn't want to assume. Having gone through at least 8 years of software development you're definitely familiar with Scope Creep.

And I have to admit that's an amazing price for less features! From what we've come to understand in the real estate software market, there's a lot of inappropriately priced software, both high and low. We're very likely under priced, but we're ok with that. We are looking at increasing the price with the next major release, but it won't be significant (10-25% at most). Our feeling is that as long as we're profitable and people are very happy with the software, we couldn't ask for more. To be honest our growth has mainly been fueled by word of mouth, and we'd like to keep it that way!

That's a very interesting usage you have for the IIF file format. I have to admit it's not what I expected, but as you'll already know, most software applications are used beyond what the original intentions were.

And you're absolutely right that providing more software integrations would help grow the product. We're definitely looking into it. We've also considered offering an XML export feature but that's been pushed back as well.

Right now our major considerations for the upcoming release are email and charting/graphing for all appropriate reports (Quickbooks and check printing have been postponed for now). Afterwards we're focusing mainly on usability. Adding lots of little features that will drastically simplify people's lives. Following that major release, we're going to bring back our main effort to a networked version because this has also been a very highly requested feature, the most requested as a matter of fact.

Hopefully somewhere in there we'll have more resources to allocated to Quickbooks integration and such. Another integration point we've also been looking at quite heavily is bank reconciliation (importing/exporting the ofx file format). It definitely won't be for this coming release, but it's coming. As you know it's all about time versus cost versus benefit versus demand. Hopefully we're finding a good balance.

Regards,
Stephane Grenier
Founder
LandlordMax Software Inc.
http://www.LandlordMax.com
http://www.FollowSteph.com
Dirk L Andersen | email Oct 14 2007, 05:33 PM
Thanks for your reply Stephane,
The most difficult upgrade I ever did with my product was the multiuser network version. This brings many headaches and frustrations into the mix of what you will be trying to accomplish. There are things that you have to take into account that you will not even be able to imagine until you get into the thick of it. I wish you luck in this challenge my friend.

Stephane Grenier | email Oct 14 2007, 09:52 PM
Hi Rick,

Thank you very much for the luck, it's always appreciated.

The good thing about the network version is that we've been slowly working towards it for a couple of years now, preparing the code in anticipation. As well, other than founding LandlordMax, my professional experience has always been working on very large scale enterprise web applications. On one of my later projects I was the lead/senior developer where we had online traffic of over 50 million unique visitors a year. That's not hits or page views, that's unique visitors!

Hopefully with this type of experience behind my belt, along with some heavy anticipation and preparation over the last two years we should be able to make with a lot less pain...

I have no doubt it will be a challenge though, that's a given! That's why for that release there will be no other new major features. It will be 100% focused on the networkability of the software.
Dirk L Andersen | email Oct 15 2007, 10:33 AM
Thanks for your valuable time Stephane,

As we gain experience with your product I will try to keep this post going.

I actually use a foxpro program that I wrote for my own business at natapoc.com but I advise other businesses on software selection and although the customer I am currently helping is only using your shareware version at this very moment they will purchase within the next month.

So, I will talk to you again sometime in the future.

Dirk
Stephane Grenier | email Oct 16 2007, 07:45 PM
Hi Dirk,

Thank you that would be appreciated.

And that's great to hear. May I also refer you to our Affiliate program at: http://www.landlordmax.com/referralProgram.html This way if you refer people to the software you can also get a commission (assuming they purchase it within 60 days of clicking on your personal affiliate link and don't remove their browser cookies). It's all managed through a third party service called ShareASale.com

I look forward to your further communications.

Regards,
Stephane Grenier
Founder
LandlordMax Software Inc.
http://www.LandlordMax.com
http://www.FollowSteph.com


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