1 of 3
Intuit - The New QuickBooks Online
Newly Revised Bank Feeds
2 of 3
Intuit - The New QuickBooks Online
New Revised Bank Feeds - Row Expansion feature
3 of 3
Intuit - The New QuickBooks Online
Newly Revised Bank Feeds - Transfer feature
Months ago I wrote an article titled, “SLICK–N-SPEEDY - What can it be? The NEW QuickBooks Online!” In that article I praised, for the first time ever, the benefits of QuickBooks On-line. One of the statements I made about the New QBO was “this QuickBooks Online is the most visionary change I have seen out of Intuit in ages; heck it is almost ‘Apple-like’.
Well I am here to tell you that the ‘Apple-like’ qualities of the New QuickBooks Online just keep getting polished like a ‘gift for your favorite teacher’ because this new QBO just keeps getting ‘newer’ and better. It seems that every few weeks Intuit is making enhancements to the new QBO. Some of the most recent changes involve Bank Feeds designed to manage your electronic banking experience. While Bank Feeds was included in the premier release of the new QBO, Intuit has continued to refine this feature, in part based upon user feedback.
Bank Feeds can save you a lot of time and effort, and these new revisions only enhance those benefits. When Bank Feeds downloads your bank or credit card data, there’s no need to enter expenses manually, or do overly complex month-end reconciliations. QuickBooks pulls in your financial institution data nightly. The next time you log-in you simply confirm and add new data or match it to existing transactions; you hardly get started with this task before you realize that you’re done. And just as important, nothing actually gets entered in your books without your approval.
Recognizing that users of the new QBO are more mobile than ever Intuit recently set out to improve performance and mobile device friendliness for Bank Feeds. In so doing they redesigned many aspects of the user interface and infrastructure. One advantage of this redesign is improved performance even beyond the ‘race car speeds’ that the new QBO is noted for over its’ predecessor. Those users connected to their bank or credit card institutions will see even faster page loading. The second big advantage is that these changes make the Bank Feeds function iPad and iPhone browser friendly.
One of the first things I noticed in these revisions to the new QBO was the separation of transaction amounts into two columns: Spent and Received; no more worrying about the meaning of a negative number appearing in a single amount column, this new two column approach makes the money coming in and going out much more obvious.
Bank Feeds has moved your bank and credit card accounts up near the top of the page and made key information significantly more obvious. Each account has its own “ID card,” which shows details like connection status, bank balance, QuickBooks balance, and the number of new transactions.
Another change the new QBO team has made is the elimination of the Details tab by expanding the row information. QBO users had reported that the Details tab covered up lower rows. So now when you click on a transaction its row expands to show you details without covering up the next row. (Figure 2) Intuit also heard that for users who always entered in a Memo line found it an unnecessary hardship to click Details on every row. Now it’s one click into the row instead of two.
Another improvement deals with the way in which you select action options regarding your transaction. Now there are action buttons that become available when you expand a row, these buttons allow you to add, match or transfer.
Speaking of Transfers, the new QBO now makes it simpler to label any bank transaction as a transfer. (Figure 3) Just select the Transfer option within a transaction’s expanded row.
The New QBO team is also doing a better job at interpreting the electronic transactions downloaded into Bank Feeds. This improvements help to insure that expenses get added to QuickBooks as expenses rather than checks. Actual check transactions are still added as checks, but credit card transactions are imported as expenses with credit card as the payment method.
All of these make the new QuickBooks Online an even better product than it has been the last few months. Better yet, these kinds of rapid changes, especially those implemented in response to specific user feedback, show that Intuit is committed to making the new QBO the best QuickBooks ever.
Be on the look-out for our future articles on changes, enhancements and improvements to the New QuickBooks Online. Like a perfectly engineered Italian sports car, the New QBO is going somewhere, and getting there ‘very fast’. We are watching in anticipation for what is next.