The documented accounts, all on Intuit’s own community pages: a business with over $36,000 held after Intuit closed its account by mistake, admitted the mistake, reopened the account, kept holding the funds, then closed it again when the merchant called a tenth time asking for release. A merchant told funds would be held at least 180 days after the account had already been reviewed and closed. A $47,000 hold placed by merchant services. A $20,000 hold that spawned a thread in which the merchant openly recruits other businesses for a class action, a thread Intuit hosts to this day, alongside a Facebook group organized for the same purpose. Accounts closed for unexplained “business reasons.” A nonprofit describing survival-level cash flow trapped in review. A merchant reporting a rep’s explanation that funds can be held indefinitely under the fine print, and another reporting a support agent saying the job was to document problems, not solve them. And the detail that should stop every reader: community members coaching each other that after the maximum hold period, unreleased funds are turned over to the state, where merchants must file unclaimed property claims to recover their own revenue.

These matters concern Intuit’s consumer products rather than merchant processing, so under our methodology they are displayed rather than scored, exactly as we treat bank parents and Block’s Cash App record. We display them because the corporate entity holding your funds is the same one, and the recurring theme, the gap between what was advertised and what was delivered, is the theme of this page.

Scored on the merchant business alone: no FTC or state enforcement against QuickBooks Payments was located. The deduction is a 2021 class action, Shankar Ninan & Co., LLP v. Intuit (N.D. Cal., No. 5:21-cv-07339), alleging Intuit suddenly ramped up fees on ACH payments, a one percent transaction fee merchants say violated the existing user agreement, without clearly communicating the change to the small businesses paying it, in the middle of the pandemic. The parent-company matters above are displayed, not scored.

Modern paper, honestly credited: published flat rates, no contract term, no termination fee. The deductions:

The lowest score we have issued in this category, and the sourcing is the reason: the record is not hostile bloggers or a rival’s astroturf. It is years of running threads on Intuit’s own support forum, documenting five and six figure holds, unexplained closures, admitted mistakes with unreturned funds, months of escalations that reset with every call, and open class-action organizing that Intuit’s moderators answer with links to the same help articles the complaints already refute. The company responds, which is what keeps this score above zero. What the record does not show is resolution: merchant after merchant documents the promise of 24 to 48 hours, made a dozen times across months, while payroll and rent went unpaid. A hold policy that routinely outlasts the business’s ability to survive it is not risk management. It is the risk.

Full public-company disclosure through Intuit, and headline rates published openly. The two deductions match the ones we applied at Square, because the structures match: the risk criteria governing holds, closures, and the release of your funds are undisclosed and, per the documented record, unexplained even to the merchants living under them; and interchange never appears on a QuickBooks Payments statement, so the margin inside the flat rate is invisible by design. Interchange that is invisible cannot score better than interchange that is merely coded.

Is QuickBooks Payments a good processor? Based on the documented record, QuickBooks Payments scored 58 out of 100 under the published weAudit Rating Methodology, a band reserved for companies whose documented record warrants extreme caution: a fund-hold record documented at length on Intuit’s own community forum, a litigated mid-stream ACH fee, and underwriting that happens after your customer has already paid. The integration is convenient; the failure mode is what the score measures.

A 58 lands in a band our methodology reserves for companies whose documented record warrants extreme caution, and here the caution concentrates in one place: your money, after your customer has paid and before it reaches your bank. Three things to do this week: