In 1978, just 3 years after the original, the headline of the summer read, "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...". It was the tag-line for the summer's most anticipated scary movie, 'Jaws 2'; the sequel to the box-office spectacular Jaws during the summer of 1975 that resulted in a decline in 'beach attendance' across the world.
Well it seems this summer is 'no different'.....Just when you thought it was safe to automatic load QuickBooks maintenance releases after re-developing confidence following the debacles of 2013, we have the Maintenance Release 6 issue, apparently full of bugs, rushed to resolve bugs still in the original release candidate as well as Release 5.
There are just two big problems; first Intuit released MR6 only hours before a huge portion of the ProAdvisor community left their homes and workplaces to travel to San Antonio for this year's Scaling New Heights convention. This meant that almost everyone who routinely spends their time 'checking Intuit maintenance releases' while they are still in the 'manual update' phase did not get to perform their extensive testing. Second, because this 'check-n-balance' was out of reach, MR6 got posted to Automatic Update and quickly began producing errors that started pouring into QuickBooks Technical Support.
Within hours of going Automatic, multiple QuickBooks issues began surfacing. Like Chief Brody attempting to 'close the beaches' in response to the original shark attack, Intuit withdrew MR6 from auto-udpate; there was just one problem, thousands of computers had already downloaded the update, and users would soon be asked if they wanted to 'update' the next time they opened QuickBooks. I only began hearing about the problems well after I knew that some users had already installed the update.
Even as I was publishing my first article about this problem last Friday, additional details were becoming available. Then the weekend hit, and a lot of people always 'depart early on Fridays during the summer', so who reads trade journals like Intuitive Accountant (or even the other guys) over the weekend? My Blog from last Friday has had minimal hits, but hopefully this one will be read by a few more people.
1. If you have not already 'installed' Maintenance Release 6 DO NOT DO SO !
2. If your computer has already 'downloaded' Maintenance Release 6, DO NOT INSTALL IT.
3. If you have already installed it, you may be finding that you are having problems as described in either my blog from late Friday, or the problem below.
Truncated Data in QuickBooks Reports
When printing reports after installing Maintenance Release 6 for the QuickBooks 2014 product line (including Enterprise 14), some section headers in reports may become truncated, only showing the first few characters. The titles for the sections will however show completely in the subtotal for that section.
This has been seen in the Aging detail reports where the time intervals (1-30, 31-60, 61-90, >90) only show the first character and with Unpaid Bills Detail and Open Invoices reports where the customer and vendor names only show the first 1 or 2 characters.
This may occur when printing the report or saving the report as a PDF.
In order to temporarily resolve this problem you can export the report to Excel and then print it.
Should you remove QuickBooks and Reinstall?
That is almost as big a question, as was 'should go back into the water' in 1978. Ultimately it maybe necessary to uninstall QuickBooks if you have already installed R6, and then perform a clean install of the R5 product. Intuit is saying that they are trying to 'push out' some specific problem resolutions, and get all the errors fixed as quickly as possible.
Stay tuned for more information.