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Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise V15
QBES-15 New Column Features
Add Manufacturers Number and Cost to Transaction Columns
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Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise V15
QBES-15 Do Not Sell to Overdue Customers
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Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise V15
QBES-15 Visual Flags on Billable Time and Expense Items
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Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise V15
QBES-15 New Sub-total Items for Transaction Columns
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Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise V15
QBES-15 Sort Transactions by Columns
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Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise V15
QBES-15 Total on Last Page of Transactions Only
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Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise V15
Assembly Shortage Report
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Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise V15
QBES-15 Inventory Stock Status Report with New Full Assembly option
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Intuit - QuickBooks Enterprise V15 - Prevent Negative Inventory Preference
Prevent Negative Inventory Preference 1
Intuit certainly put the brunt of enhancements for the QuickBooks 2015 product line into two areas; the first is ‘user requests’, and the second is ‘QuickBooks Enterprise.’ But in reality it appears that even many of the ‘user requests’, while probably voiced loudly from both Non-Enterprise and Enterprise customers, only got added into QuickBooks Enterprise V15.
While QuickBooks Enterprise includes all of the features you will see in QuickBooks Pro and Premier for 2015, QuickBooks Enterprise V15 has a lot of small enhancements and a couple of what I feel are major ones. This article focuses on those new features found only in QuickBooks Enterprise; we are not going into much detail on these within this summary article, so you will just have to keep checking back as we cover various features in greater depth within future articles.
The little, but nice to have, stuff:
Choose Active or Inactive Names on Name-based reports – new for 2015 is a feature that allows you to select Active Status of All, Active or Inactive from a drop-down field when you select Name from the list of filters on Name-based reports. By the way you will also notice that the filters list has been alphabetized for 2015, another subtle enhancement.
Display manufacturer’s part number (MPN) on Sales Transactions - you can now format any sales forms to add a column for the manufacturer’s part number (MPN) either on-screen and/or on the printed version of the form. This option is selected from the Columns tab of the Additional Customization for your various templates (figure 2). You can also search for the MPN from the Search dialog box found in the new Search tab (also a new feature), QuickBooks will find the item with the corresponding MPN. This might best be used if you happen to work with transactions that occupy several pages. This option is selected from the Columns tab of the Additional Customization for your various templates.
Show Cost on Sales Transactions – Amount, rate, Extended Amount, Mark-up, Total, Prior Amount, etc.; these are all some of the columns that might be displayed on various sales transaction templates, but until now you could not actually show ‘cost’ on sales transactions. You now have the ability to reflect ‘cost’ on sales transactions by selecting the Cost column option on your sales templates (figure 2, also). Cost is only available to ‘view’ on-screen while sales forms are being created or edited, it is not available to be printed on actual forms.
Do not allow Sales to Overdue Customers – this is another one of my ‘functional favorites’. There is a new preference that restricts sales when a customer has an overdue balance. The feature works exactly as described, it is NOT forgiving; and at present you cannot create any ‘parameters’ whereby it does or does not restrict sales if you have enabled this preference. Because the preference is ‘global’ it can only be set by an Administrator in Single-user mode, you may want to seriously consider if you should or should not turn this preference on (figure 3).
New Visual Alert for Time/Expense data – if you select a customer:job in the create invoices window that has time, expenses or items associated with it, QuickBooks will display a new visual alert showing you how many different items there are in the various tabs. (Such as: 6 on the Time tab, 3 on the Expense tab, etc.) As a ProAdvisor I use the Time/Expense billing feature a lot, and this will really help me avoid missing some billable items (figure 4).
Total Columns on Forms – users can now total any numeric column, including custom fields, on all forms that presently permit a sub-total item to be used. To total a column on a form you must first create a sub-total item that is relevant to what you want to sub-total. For example you might want to sub-total ‘Total Quantity’ (figure 5), but you could create any custom columns needed to hold specific numeric data you need to sub-total, such as “weight”. This has been a highly ‘asked for’ enhancement, several 3rd party software products have been developed over the years to permit QuickBooks users to do this simply because Intuit had not seen it as significantly beneficial to their users until now.
Sort on Columns – You can now sort on column headers on almost every transaction window. This feature is available on sales forms like estimates, sales orders, sales receipts and invoices; it is also available on A/P forms like purchase orders, item receipts, vendor bills, credit memos, and credit card transactions. Just click on a column heading and the detail lines will be sorted by that column (figure 6 shows two different sorts). I think a lot of people will use this new feature to help them configure the way that their sales transactions appear; I also think it will be beneficial to sort your item receipts via location or bin if you have set those up as custom fields and added them to the transaction.
Only Show Total on Last Page Only – QuickBooks Enterprise users who are involved in retail, wholesale, manufacturing or distribution/warehouse operations frequently have purchase forms and receiving forms that are many pages long. QuickBooks users have always had the footer, or at least the Total (box) of the footer appear on every page of the transaction. New for 2015 is an option to “Only Show Total on the Last Page”. You turn this feature on from the Print tab of the Template’s Additional Customization feature for each applicable template. (figure 7) I have had 100’s of clients ask when Intuit was going to offer this, so I am sure it has been a highly requested improvement that Intuit has finally made available.
Assembly Shortage Report - Building assemblies in QuickBooks requires all of the parts to be on-hand; the Build Assembly window would show you how deficient you were for a specific number of Assemblies you wanted to build, but actual reporting on the status of Assembly required components was minimal. New for 2015 QuickBooks Enterprise allows you to see, for any particular assembly, which components are out of stock, thus preventing you from being able to build the number of assemblies you’ve specified (figure 8). You can choose to include or exclude your ‘pending builds’ in this report. Somewhat similar to this new report is a new check-box for “full assemblies” in the QuickBooks Enterprise Inventory Stock Status report (figure 9) that causes the report to look at all levels of multi-level assemblies.
Two Big-time Improvements for 2015:
Prevent Negative Inventory – In my way of thinking this is not only the biggest improvement for 2015 in QuickBooks Enterprise, but one of the biggest improvements of ‘all time’. Now if Intuit would make this same ‘preference’ available for ‘all versions’ of QuickBooks (not just Enterprise). QuickBooks has historically allowed you to sell more of an item than you had in stock. When this happened, the item's quantity went negative, and that had long-term ramifications on an item's average cost. New for 2015 QuickBooks Enterprise is a preference to prevent negative inventory quantities (figure 10). With this new preference turned-on, QuickBooks will prevent posting transactions, such as invoices and sales receipts that would result in a negative quantity. The effects of ‘going negative’ with inventory upon an item’s average cost and thus the overall valuation of inventory are well known, and are a common source of serious clean-up issues that must be undertaken every time financials are prepared. I have already written an article that outlines the fundamental of this new feature, to learn more about it you should review that article.
Advanced Reporting – New for 2015 is a new feature called Advanced Reporting that provides sophisticated reporting with capabilities exceeding the ODBC reporting tool Intuit has made available for the last few years. While rumors had it that Advanced Reporting might be like the Enterprise Advanced Inventory and Advanced Pricing add-on subscription features, Intuit has apparently decided to make Advanced Reporting available to QuickBooks Enterprise 15 customers at NO additional charge just as long as they have a current Full Service Plan in force. Donovan Sachs, Intuitive Accountant’s resident ‘all things reporting’ Guru will be providing us with both overview and detailed articles on this new feature over the next few weeks.
Please remember that I wrote this article based upon a pre-release version of QuickBooks Enterprise 15, so it is possible that some of the newbies I described might be slightly different, or updated by the time the product is actually released.
Intuit has already begun to distribute the 2015 products to QuickBooks ProAdvisors this week. You can be among the very first to receive instruction on all the new features to be found in the QuickBooks Enterprise 15, by participating in the Intuit QuickBooks Accounting Virtual Conference to be held on September 22 and 23, 2014. See the website for more information or register here.
Over the next couple of weeks Intuitive Accountant will be reviewing more of the new features, functions and enhancements in the various versions of QuickBooks-2015, including Enterprise. Feel free to use the ‘comments section’ of this article to tell us about your own impressions of the new QuickBooks Enterprise offering for 2015.