While I haven’t had this version in a long time, nor have I moved my data yet, I am excited about many of the new features this year, especially in Enterprise Solutions. This version seems to address several pain points that have been problems for quite some time, some big, some small. But many little ones can add up to maybe make this a worthwhile upgrade. This article focuses on Pro / Premier. We will talk about Enterprise next time.
Income tracking has been vastly improved with the new Income Tracker, found in the icon bars (left and top), as well as in the Customer Support Center. While you can see similar transactions on the Transaction tab in earlier versions of QuickBooks, you don’t see totals, filtering is limited, and transactions are performed individually. In the new Revenue Tracker, you can view multiple sales totals, you can filter on multiple fields, and you can take “actions” on multiple transactions.
Save time with powerful banking sources – The Online Banking Center is now the Banking Sources Center. And if you use the online banking feature in QuickBooks, you’ll not only love the updated functionality, but you’ll also be able to enter transactions into QuickBooks faster.
You can easily code multiple transactions, create rules, select an action, and even group multiple (eg add / approve).
While QuickBooks in the past has renamed and sorted for you, the new Rules feature gives you more control and options on how to handle common downloads. Once you learn how to use it, I think you will really like it.
Payroll Center is more organized and useful. Rather than trying to squeeze everything onto one screen, the payroll center is now more similar to the other centers in terms of navigation. There is a tab for each function (employee pay, obligation pay, and tax form filing). On each page, the organization is the same with the main activity at the top, the status of the relevant activity in the middle section, and useful documentation, reports, and other activities at the bottom.
Improvements for those who cost work
- Many of you have multiple sales representatives for a certain customer, but perhaps only one sales representative for a specific job. Now you can designate the sales representative for the particular job.
- FINALLY, you can filter by job status! For those of you who keep track of jobs, how many times did you want to be able to view only certain jobs based on status, such as pending, awarded, in progress …
- There are additional job cost features this year, but available only on Enterprise (such as committed costs and WIP summary reports).
The bill pay stub shows everything. One complaint for several years has been that if you paid a vendor bill in full with a credit (or multiple credits), it would not show up on the stub. Now both the invoice and the credit will appear.
Simplify billing with time and cost classification. You now have the ability to sort billable time and costs when you use the Add Time and Costs feature (and you can even resize the window!). Just click on a column heading in the Billable Time and Costs window. The arrow indicates both the column you used and the sort order (ascending or descending).
This same sorting capability is available in Premier when you use the Time and Expense Invoice feature.
Consolidate correspondence adding multiple attachments to billing. In the past, you could add an attachment, but especially for those who bill for time and expenses who need to show documentation, this simplifies that process. Just click Attach file and select the files you want.
E-mail sent Ever wish you could view correspondence with a customer when they sent the email from QuickBooks? Now you can! There is a new tab in the Customer Support Center for sent email
Handling bad checks is now simple. Hopefully, you don’t experience this often. But I find that because it happens so infrequently, many don’t remember how to handle it. Now you don’t have to remember: QuickBooks does it all for you with a click of a button.
More functionality on the home page – Although they are not momentous, these are good changes, I think you will agree. At the far right of the menu bar, you will see 3 icons.
- The first is if you share your file with your accountant; now there is a Customer Collaborator.
- The middle one will indicate if there are maintenance alerts. This is not just for upgrade patches, but also if QuickBooks thinks you need more RAM or hard drive space, etc. It could be very helpful.
- The third icon represents your to-dos and tells you how many. When you click on the icon, it takes you to your “to-do” list.
Seen control balances. If you use the icon bar on the left (personally I don’t), you can choose which accounts you will see under View balances. Right now that’s not an option if you use the top icon bar (damn!) With the accounts on the right, but hopefully Intuit will change that.
Company information has changed to My Company (in the drop-down menu). But now it’s a lot easier to navigate once you adjust to the new look. Your product information, contact information, etc. show on the first screen. When you click the pencil in the upper right corner, you can edit the information. Instead of fitting everything onto one screen, you now have sections. Just click on the appropriate tab on the left to access the section you want. Note that you can also edit the information that you want to appear on your payroll tax forms.
So is this a worthwhile upgrade for you? If you are using version 2011 or earlier, I would recommend it so that you are working on a compatible product in addition to all the new time-saving features that have appeared since your version.
If you have version 2012 or 2013, take a look at what’s new and if these features are beneficial to you. I find that people frequently underestimate the time it takes to multitask (and I group myself in this group), as well as the cost of inefficiency (labor is expensive). So all those “little” improvements actually improve productivity and lower accounting costs, which justifies the cost of the upgrade.