Release Update 4 for QuickBooks Pro, Premier and Accountant 2018 and Enterprise 18.0 has been made available for manual download, and will begin being pushed out in automatic updates over the next 10 days or so. The following changes, improvements, and fixes were made in this latest release, and as always, later releases (ones with higher numbers) include all changes in earlier releases.
1099 Compliance
Update to latest 1099 Compliance changes from IRS for Tax Filing. Support for a new functionality in the 1099-Misc forms printing wizard in the Vendor Center to enter State tax withheld and Payer's State ID with verification only for two states (WI and NJ). In an upcoming release, these form elements will also be written into the company file to retain for later use.
Reportedly fixed an issue causing Batch Invoices to be marked as sent but haven't been sent.
Export
Reportedly fixed a crash while exporting a report to an existing excel sheet which is in use.
Help
Reportedly fixed help crash issue when user is in offline mode.
Invoices
Reportedly fixed an issue while saving an invoice after copy pasting any billable items.
Online Banking
Capital One Bank discontinued support for the Direct Connect service during December, 2017 . Express Web Connect service will replace Direct Connect and the impact will extend to loss of Bill Pay functionality in addition to statement download. Instructions to switch from Direct Connect to Express Web Connect is available at this Intuit website.
Payments
Merchants can now accept and process EMV chip credit cards with QuickBooks 2018 (R4 and later). (Editor's note: At this time we have no information about which EMV-chip readers will work with QuickBooks 2018.)
Reported fixed an issue with QuickBooks crashing when user upgrades Company file, processes a credit card and E-Check transactions, then closes Company File
SDK
Reportedly fixed an issue with Build Description not matching the UI.
User Interface
Corrected the Knowledge Based-article link displayed within the Balance Sheet Out of Balance warning dialog.
Should you or Shouldn't you
For the most part QuickBooks 2018 has shown to be a very stable and mostly error free product, but a few bugs were obviously identified and reportedly resolved within this R4 update. In addition functionality related to the Capital One Bank Direct Connect service discontinuation and EMV Chip-reader capabilities are included in this release, along with support for 1099 compliance.
If you are using 2018 products and need to implement these changes then you should consider updating to the R4 release, if you want to wait to see how these changes may impact users, then consider turning off your auto-update functionality at this time.