We have a small business and use Quick Books Desktop to perform our accounting as well as our client billing functions. We wanted to track our interactions with our clients better, so we decided to add Salesforce. After some additional research, we discovered that we would need another piece of software to connect Quick Books and Salesforce, and we chose DBSync to provide that integration. We let our DBSync sales rep, Shivani Rai, know our decision, and 8 days later, she sent us a contract. When doing our initial research, we had a hard time finding pricing for DBSync, so when the contract arrived, we were a little surprised. The license fee was $2400/year/organization, and the initial setup fee was $1540. These fees were on top of the fees for Salesforce itself and the fees for the 3rd-party consultant we needed to hire to customize Salesforce to work the way we wanted it to.
We had spent several months figuring things out, so we felt committed to implementing Salesforce and connecting it with Quick Books, so we signed DBSync’s contract, despite their pricing. We then had to pay their bill, all up front, before they would schedule our project to be worked on. DBSync wanted us to provide ACH access to our bank account, but I wasn’t comfortable with that arrangement. I offered to pay with a credit card, but they wanted to charge an additional 3% fee. Ultimately, I sent them a check. It took another 13 days between when I sent the check and when DBSync activated our account. Once they received our check, we were told “a resource” would be assigned to start working on our account within the next 10 business days. During that time, my wife and I started to have second thoughts about adding a new piece of software and a new workflow to our already very hectic schedules, and we decided to cancel our contracts with Salesforce, DBSync, and our 3rd-party consultant.
Salesforce and the consultant canceled our contracts and refunded our money without any issues. Ms. Rai asked me if we could schedule a call to talk about our canceling our DBSync contract. I sent her an email that day with my availability, and I called her and left a voicemail. She did not reply. I sent another email, and she did not reply. Two weeks after my original voicemail and email to Ms. Rai, I received a phone call from Anu who was apparently the “resource” assigned to start working on our project. I informed him we were trying to cancel our contract, and he told me that, since no one had started working on our project, he thought they should be able to cancel our contract and refund our money and that Ms. Rai would get back to me with an update. 2 weeks later, I still hadn’t heard from her, so I emailed her again. This time she replied saying she had copied her Global Sales Manager, David Sudheer, and that he would give me a call. A week later, I had not received a call, so I sent a follow-up email to Mr. Sudheer. He responded the same day and told me he was meeting with his “Services team and CTO” and would have an update “by the EOD tomorrow.” A week later, I had not heard anything, so I sent him a follow-up email. Two days later, he replied and informed me that he would not be able to refund any of my license fee and that he could only refund a portion of my setup fee with the remainder having “been deducted for the meetings with our services team.”
Overall, I chose DBSync because I enjoyed my conversations with Shivani Rai. She was very warm and helpful, and she worked hard to track down answers to all the questions I asked her along the way; however, once I signed my contract, I felt like the entire process slowed down and there were significant delays from step to step to step. The delays seemed like they got even longer once I asked to cancel my contract, and it felt like I needed to make a consistent, repeated, proactive effort in order to get the company to find a resolution. Unfortunately, ultimately, I did not feel the resolution was fair. I did not think it was reasonable for DBSync to have kept our money, considering we never actually used any of their products or services.
When we are ready to start using Salesforce again, we are going to look for another software vendor to provide the integration functionality.