Once again Intuit has “never let a Holiday weekend roll around without a desktop product release update…” so for this long Labor Day weekend they began rolling out Maintenance Release 8 (R8) for the QuickBooks 2020 Desktop Product-line. With the 'crashing of QuickBooks' resulting from Windows updates Tech Support is likely to be so busy that if you have any issue with R8 you may just be on hold waiting for a tech for hours and hours, so I would wait on updating if I were you,but more on this a little later in this feature.
The changes, improvements and fixes elaborated below were included in this release for QuickBooks Pro 2020, QuickBooks Premier 2020, QuickBooks Accountant 2020 and QuickBooks Enterprise v20.0. Be aware that each new update also includes all the changes from earlier updates. If you have automatic updates turned on, QuickBooks will download the updates for you and prompt you to install it. You can manually download the update from the Official Intuit QuickBooks Downloads and Updates Webpage (product/version specific).
Release 8 (R8) - September 2020
This appears to be mostly 'bug fixes' by the long list of them. There are also additional Admin user file related functions that seem to have to do with the changes recently being implemented in regard to 'company file' registration.
The changes, improvements and fixes elaborated below were included in this release:
User Management
- Company file users can request that the Admin grant them necessary roles or permissions needed to complete certain tasks.
- The Intuit account user management dashboard is now accessible from a browser. If multiple companies exist, the customer can search and select the desired Company File.
Enterprise - Advanced Inventory
- Users now have the ability to make Lot/Serial numbers required on transactions allowing for better tracking.
Payroll
- 941 forms changes to support FFCRA compliance: All employers who benefited from FFCRA and CARES act have to report the Federal withholdings from their employees paychecks and company contributions to IRS.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue that caused QuickBooks to quit unexpectedly while upgrading from an earlier version of QuickBooks.
- Added a checkbox confirming customer’s signed. authorization to save credit card payment information has been obtained.
- Fixed error message preventing Business Planner from launching.
- Fixed an issue where the wrong address would be selected when creating a purchase order from a sales order.
- Fixed an issue that prevented a user from setting up Gmail with Enhanced Security.
- Fixed login issues relating to QuickBooks File Manager.
- Fixed Unit of Measure issue preventing item import when using advanced import with Excel.
- Fixed an issue that may occur preventing when changing of an Other Name to a Vendor, Customer or Employee.
Should You Update?
Well, this is always a question, and at the top of this article I addressed this topic in part. First of all it is a holiday weekend, and I hate to see people implement a maintenance update over a long weekend, have a problem and then sit on hold waiting for oversees support for hours on end. Second, I also mentioned another problem users are reporting with QuickBooks as a result of a Windows update, that is likely to be causing a backlog in Tech Support calls. For these two reasons along, I personally would stay away from immediately updating to this release.
But, if you have experienced any of these problems then you may want to go ahead and install this update (perhaps in a 'testing environment') and see how it performs with either a sample file or a copy of your Company file (for testing purposes only); otherwise I would just hold off a week or so to see if any adverse findings are reported or until things calm down with the other 'Windows Update QuickBooks Crashing' related problem.
By the way, if you are not interested in these updates then you need to make certain that 'Auto-updates' have been turned-off inside QuickBooks.