Degraded Service, on QBO & associated APIs (on two separate companies)
Hi there,
I’m writing this post a little out of desperation. The purpose of this is that hopefully: a) Someone on QB’s engineering team sees this and is able to provide a solution or even just a little insight. or b) Someone who is or has in the past experienced the same issues, and how they’ve dealt with it.
For the past two weeks, our QBO account (UI and API) has dramatically slowed down when handling transactions with stock items (e.g., Invoices, Credit Notes, Bills). What used to take 5-10 seconds now takes up to 5 minutes, often timing out. This has created a backlog and impacted our accounting, reporting, and stock management.
I am the head software developer in the company, and as a first step I completely stripped down our own systems to the barebones to rule out any issues at our end. Finally, after some thought, I tested the same API calls through the request functionality on QBO’s Rest API documentation site: https://developer.intuit.com/app/developer/qbo/docs/api/accounting/all-entities/invoice which was having the same issues.
We have spoken to QBO support multiple times, followed all standard troubleshooting steps, but have been offered (as of yet) no real solution or explanation as to what might be happening. The only feedback we have received is that we have a lot of transactions on our company setup - but when I pushed, support couldn’t give me a tangible answer on how many transactions is too many.
We then went down multiple routes, with the objective of getting a new quickbooks company up and running and migrate only a fraction of our transactions so that would hopefully alleviate any data volume issues we were having. The route we finally settled on was to systematically re-create/import all the required data. Starting with reference objects, such as Tax codes, Accounts, Payment Terms, etc. before moving to Inventory items and then finally the transactional data itself. Through trial and error, we created quite a neat little system and were able to import Invoices, Credit Notes, Bills and some Sales Receipts. These API requests were taking on average 3-5 seconds to complete - so it seemed our approach was sound and moving our systems over to a fresh quickbooks company would work. However, after a brief pause in migrating our data, like someone had flipped a switch, the new company started having the same frontend and backend issues as the original. Now we have two quickbooks accounts that we’re struggling to send data to.
Going through the audit logs, I could pinpoint any other changes that were made in the break - which I wasn’t able to with the original company: I made some changes to the company settings - the audit log doesn’t state which but I do know for a fact I disabled the Service Date option and also some minor changes to the Accounts.
It feels like one of those changes (I know the Accounts setup has an impact) may have broken the way the system is calculating the ledger somehow, making it take (literally) over 100 times longer. I’m wondering if something similar has happened with our original company account and wonder if others are experiencing anything similar.
We have been notified that an engineer is booked to look into this for us on Monday, but I am very worried that the above information won’t be passed on and it will be handed back down with the response that we have too many transactions when, while this may be true, the new company account has a very small fraction and we’re having the same issue.
Any insights or experiences from an engineer/anyone else would be greatly appreciated but please, if I get a response to clear my browser cache and files one more time it might push me over the edge! 😉