QuickBooks Desktop 2019 will be released on September 17, 2018. With the release of QuickBooks Accountant we’ve gotten a sneak peak at the amazing new features.
If you haven’t already, check out the previous blog post covering mid-year releases in 2018.
New Feature: Pick, Pack & Ship!!!!
Can you tell we’re excited about this new feature? Lack of pick, pack, ship is one of the main reasons our clients leave QuickBooks Enterprise. This feature is specific only to QuickBooks Enterprise Platinum and not available for Pro, Premier, Gold, or Silver.
QuickBooks Enterprise Platinum has added the ability to Pack and Ship. Let’s go to customers and Sales Order Fulfillment Worksheet. This has a little different look now similar to the Bill or Income Tracker screens.
With the change, now you can select multiple sales orders and do Batch Actions – in September last year it was one at a time.
Let’s create a sales order to the customer Unusual Things for a single Champagne Flute. Back in the Sales Order Fulfillment worksheet you’ll see the sales order that we just created.
I will go ahead and send this order for picking. I can choose the site here – it will tell me once I choose the site if this ticket is fillable from that site. And hit next and select the warehouse user who will be responsible. Now I see I have something more to pick – I will pick my sales order, choose the item I picked and the quantity and say finish.
Now in the SO fulfillment it will alert me that I need to update the SO. Once I update the SO – now let me look at the actual sales order and see it says sent for pick. When I Revert (or refresh) it now says picked.
Then I can send it for packing.
It does have a place here where you can say create package and insert the weight and dimensions. This currently does not flow through to the integrated shipping with Fedex, USPS, or UPS.
And I have to hit the reverse arrow key to be able to select Done. And then finish!
Here is my receipt and tracking information. I can send this to the vendor or customer, and keep it on hand for my fulfillment team. It will also give me the option to print a shipping label right from QuickBooks!
- We don’t know what the long-term vision is for the product, but we do know:
- September 2017 Sales Order Pick was released
- February we had PO receiving on a device and additional scanners added.
- Now Pack and Ship is being released.
Who knows what will be released next but be sure to keep an eye out for mid year releases by following Fourlane on LinkedIn and looking out for future webinars.
New Feature: Permission Management Changes
In QuickBooks Enterprise you can set higher permission levels. But there were a few gaps between being able to see transactions versus what you can see on reports. Now if you go in and set up a role, and you specify that the user has access to payroll liabilities but not paychecks, if you give them access to the Employees & Payroll reports – when they run any payroll reports they will only see the transactions they have access to.
This is also true for non-payroll related permissions. As an example if you use invoices and sales receipts to record sales. If you do not allow a user to see the sales receipt transactions, when they run sales reports their total may not tie out to the financials because they will be missing all sales receipts on their report.
QuickBooks Enterprise has added a call-out using asterisks on the reports so you can see who has FULL access to everything. So if you give the user access to Find All Transactions – that means they can find ALL. If you do not give them access to find all transactions then they will only have access to the find the transactions they have access to.
The Accountant & Tax Detail report, company & financial detail report and Custom transaction detail reports will allow access to view all transactions. It may be worth it to do a permissions audit to be sure people have the proper permissions that you expect them to have.
New Feature: Transfer Credits
Now this is a big one that we get asked for all the time. I know there are going to be several people who want to move to 2019 just for this feature. We now have the ability to have a credit memo on one job and utilize that credit memo against another job.
.I am going to create an invoice at Moms Garage Sale for Garage 1 and then another at Garage 2. I am going to Pay the invoice on job 2. I am then going to create a Credit Memo on job 2’s invoice. Now of course when it pops up and says apply to an open invoice there are none to apply to on this screen.
However if I go to receive payments on job 1 – not the customer as a whole, then I can apply payments. It does give me a warning that the only way to undo this is a Journal Entry, but because the only way to do this historically was a journal entry that is ok.
Once I hit save, the program actually creates the two journal entries and runs it through a clearing account. That account is inactive naturally on the chart of accounts but if I go there, you can see that account here. Because the first time you do this, it creates an account on the chart of accounts – the user doing it the first time will need to have access to add accounts to the chart of accounts.
As with any balance sheet account, QuickBooks functions better if it is reconciled and because this account can be seen and modified we would recommend reconciling it to zero every month. It should be easy, unless of course there is a balance sitting in that account.
Exciting change – especially for those big box wholesale and distribution partners out there. Home Depot payments just got a little easier.
New Feature: Better In-Product Condensing Options
This year has been a huge year for Fourlane in terms of working with clients to condense their file size. We have a repair and condense process that is proprietary to Fourlane that uses tools outside of what Intuit uses and can do a proper repair and or condense. Sometimes, however the data is too corrupt and we will need to start a new file.
As I hope everyone on this call knows, the condense option inside of QuickBooks is never recommended. So if you go to File>Utilties>Condense Data. However this year they added a tool (which we have not been able to test with any large company files yet but will let you know!). This tool will remove the audit trail to date from your file. So you see here I have a second option – which is really listed first. It also tells me how much my file size should decrease if I run this tool – which is helpful in making the decision. This is a patch, not a fix to the database but it should speed things up.
So before the modified condense of removing the audit train my F2 box showed a file size 49MB. This was in a sample file and my audit trail was 1400 pages long when I printed it.
After the condense my file size went down to 17MB. My new audit trail was 274 pages long.
A few things to note however, my total transactions, list items, targets and links quantities do not change. This is why I say this is a patch – if file size is a concern we need to plan for condensing periodically. Purging the audit trail on a regular basis is not truly condensing your data.
All databases need maintenance – I don’t care how DIY Intuit tries to make QuickBooks – so please let us know if we need to create a plan to keep yours more safe and stable.
New Feature: .IIF File Import
Ok here is another big one – hold your seats all you .IIF file importers out there. As you all know too we strongly recommend NOT using .iif files to import into your QuickBooks file. Prior to now, the old .iif file would parse the data and push it into the database directly. They were quick yes, but they caused problems like crazy with customers long term. The old process had few validations happening and there was no assistance with knowing what did or did not import.
The first change is that .iif files can now be imported in multi user mode. Let me pause there for a minute while everyone raises their hand in the webinar to move up to 2019 so they can import their payroll data without kicking everyone out. No more single user mode to import .iif files! That’s huge!
The second change is that the data now flows through the SDK like other programs that access QuickBooks. The SDK does validations on the data being imported and corrects it where necessary. Now because .iif file imports will be going through the SDK they will be slower. Slower is good – it means the data is being handled better which should mean less or no corruption resulting from these imports. Finally!
The third change is that there is an error log now created to show which lines did not import and what the reason is.
New Feature: Invoice Status Tracker
This feature will be available in Pro, Premier, and Enterprise.
On an invoice, Intuit has added a hyper link to click in and see the invoice history. If you are emailing from QuickBooks and in particular if you are allowing your customers to pay you online through credit card or ACH, you will be able to see the status here instead of having to click the history tab like we had to do before.
In order to see the viewed status you will need to use webmail – like Gmail or Yahoo, or outlook. Outlook 2010 has an API limitation that Microsoft will not let us see the viewed status so it will not be there for those customers.
New Feature: Checks To Pay Bill
Another improvement is to help prevent double accounting for your expenses or COGS. If I go in to banking>write checks and enter a vendor that has outstanding bills – it will tell me I have open PO’s first and then next it will tell me I have open bills. Now previously when you went to pay bills from this screen it would show you all open bills for all vendors.
Now when you click Go to Pay bills, it will take you to bills filtered by the vendor you were writing a check to – this makes it faster to tell if there is already a bill in the system and helps to eliminate duplicates.
New Feature: Inactive Items On Inventory Report
There is now a filter that will allow you to show inactive items on inventory reports. I will go to reports >inventory and run the inventory valuation summary report. And the balance sheet. These inventory valuation summary report should be the sub-ledger to verify the balance on the balance sheet. If these two reports do not tie out you need to do an inventory audit. Please let us know if you need help with that.
New Feature: Sick & Vacation Default Improvements
A lot of jurisdictions, including Austin, where we are based, are now making employer-provided sick time mandatory. So perhaps because of this Intuit is expanding what you can do and creating more options in Payroll.
Previous to QuickBooks 2019, you could only calculate sick or vacation to a maximum quantity of time. Meaning max they can accrue is 40 hours at any given time.
Now you have a choice – Max hours at a time or Max hours for the year. So if I go to edit>preferences>payroll>Company>Sick & Vacation
For Maximum hours at a time this means the total hours someone can save at one time -similar to before. They will accrue hours as long as their balance is below the max. They may have accrued 80 hours during the year but never carried more then 40 hours max at a time.
We also have Maximum hours for the year – which means you accrue 80 hours during the year and will not accrue any more until the next year no matter if you use those hours or not.
New Feature: Easy Upgrade
Although we always recommend testing your upgrade first, QuickBooks has made the process to upgrade your software easier then ever. To prevent accidental upgrades on multi-user environments, this is currently only available for single licenses of QuickBooks Pro Plus, Premier Plus, and Enterprise.
Basically when the new version is available, prior to opening your file you will get an update notice, similar to when a new release is distributed. However this process will be only three clicks where you select upgrade now, you select if you want to leave old versions loaded on your computer and then you open your file in the latest version. They handle everything including installation of the latest release available. This process will not do the network configuration for you.
New Feature: Move QuickBooks File Easily Between Computers
Along the same line with easily upgrading the file, you can now move your file much easier. So you go to File>Utilities and Move Quickbooks to another computer. Your new computer does need to be connected to the internet and you will need a USB drive – on the first screen it will tell you how much space you need available on that USB drive. You will also need admin rights to the computer on both the system you are leaving and the computer you are transferring the file to.
You will put in a one time password to be used on the computer where you are moving your file.
Then you select the USB that you want to use for the move.
The process transfers the file easily to the USB and when you plug that into the new computer, it should begin to run automatically. If not you simply double click on Move QuickBooks.bat file on your USB drive. This will install the software on your new computer as well as the latest release and load your file.
New Feature: Intuit Data Protect
Another change is additional communication when using Intuit Data Protect. This service automatically backs up your file to Intuit servers. The service comes with Pro Plus, Premier Plus and Enterprise but can be purchased by other desktop users.
With this release there is better communication in product on which Intuit account user name should be used to get the free account included with the subscription of your software.
There is also better communication via an email that will tell you the status of the backups and any reasons why you have not been able to complete the backup – like not enough disk space etc.
Feature Overview
Our webinar’s results on which features they are most excited about:
Next up, we’ll cover the re-release of QuickBooks for Mac (and what features to expect), as well as increased accessibility. You can always access the full slide deck from our webinar on our LinkedIn.
Don’t forget that any purchase of a QuickBooks product today will automatically receive a free upgrade on 9/17. So take advantage of low pricing now and get access to all the new bells and whistles in two weeks!
