Maintenance Release Update
So it is getting to be summer-time and as you might expect, Intuit is releasing summer updates to QuickBooks. Many times these updates seem more like ‘lathering on sunscreen’ to cover-up problems than ointment to heal them, and while the list of Release 6 changes for QuickBooks 2014 is long, it doesn’t seem all that eventful for the majority of users. I won’t bore you with the long list that you can obtain from the technical support website, I will simply try to give you a few of the most obvious.
Let’s look at BankFeeds for example; one of the changes involves the capability for users to Create and Send messages to their ‘linked’ financial institutions from the BankFeed Center (if your financial institution doesn’t support his function, QuickBooks will tell you it doesn’t). Now who among us believe that a ‘big bank’ is going to have someone sitting around waiting to get ‘messages’ from their QuickBooks users….really, is this SPF 90 sunscreen or what? On the other hand, Customers who choose to use the ‘Classic mode’ for Bankfeeds will no longer experience errors when they attempt to set-up their on-line accounts….in other words, QuickBooks Bankfeeds is going to finally work for these users the way it should have.
There are several changes to Centers including column width settings will be retained after opening and closing QuickBooks….wonderful, another ‘shouldn’t it have done this all along’ fix. Users will supposedly no longer see significant declines in performance when the Vendor Center is being opened, closed or used. I wonder if this means that fewer users in multi-user configurations will have problems with QuickBooks reporting that another user is doing something that keeps them from doing something else (which seems all too common an issue when the Vendor Center is open on anybody’s computer).
A real ‘biggie’ at least as far as a lot of my own clients will be concerned is related to email. QuickBooks has been having issues with ‘closing’ (or simply not ‘doing it’) when you tried to email reports or PDF transactions. Supposedly R6 has fixed this (but I haven’t tested it yet), if it really works then it may be enough of a reason to update as soon as practical.
A number of causes of ‘unrecoverable errors’ have reportedly been resolved; these include an issue when attempting to create a new company file, and a problem when editing an account to change its type and then making it a sub-account, along with and many others underlying causes.
I have seen a lot of ‘community chatter’ about a problem where QuickBooks paychecks would not compute overtime properly even the time posted to the paychecks came from a timesheet, R6 reportedly fixes this problem. For larger Payroll users of QuickBooks, a new message will be displayed if Federal payroll liabilities exceed $100,000.00 so that users can make the appropriate payroll tax deposit to comply with the ‘next day rule’, even if they regularly fall under this liability amount.
I noticed that QuickBooks Messenger will no longer ‘close’ when QuickBooks is running in multi-user mode; I thought the whole concept of messenger was built around QuickBooks operating in multi-user mode to permit users to communicate between each other. It only makes sense that messenger would be ‘open’ and not ‘close’ during multi-user mode, right? Well now it is fixed, but really how many people use messenger anyway? The only thing I ever found of value with messenger was the ability for the QuickBooks Administrator to use it to ‘log-off’ another user who had ‘abandoned ship’ (so to speak).
Intuit has ‘fixed an issue’ that prevented Transaction Journal reports from being exported to Excel, and they have also beefed up the speed with which the Transaction List by Lot report (for users of the QuickBooks Enterprise Advanced Inventory Lot-tracking feature) will run. More of what the product should have offered in the first place.
One thing I will be really interested in seeing is just ‘how meaningful’ the new displayed results are when the internal version of QuickBooks File Doctor performs Network Diagnostics. I mean will ‘the Dr.’ be giving us real results, or will we have to settle for the typical ‘it didn’t work’ level of information that the Dr. is famous for when it comes to his ‘file diagnostics’? I long for a return to the days of ‘red and green indicators’ for every necessary component like we got from the old faithful ‘Network Connectivity Tool’!
For SDK developers there are a couple of fixes there as well. I recently experienced the error “could not find or create an instance of QuickBooks using InstanceFinder” when I was trying to configure a Webconnector application after updating to QuickBooks Enterprise 2014 until I removed the Integrated Application completely from the file and reinstalled it. Since this ‘error message’ is one of those that is supposedly fixed in R6, I hope it will keep others from encountering similar Webconnector problems since there is absolutely no such thing as ‘support’ for anything Webconnector.
Once again, this is by no means a comprehensive list of all that is included in R6; if it were me I would take my time before updating to this newest release. With the large number of fixes included there is every possibility that something might just be the least little bit ‘buggy’. If you can hold off for a week or two in order to determine if there are any ‘new issues’ with the update, I would recommend doing so. Chances are you will not burn anymore without these fixes right away, unless you are so badly burned already you need the possible ‘ointment’ R6 will provide more than ‘sunscreen’ it appears to be.