QuickBooks 2015 is Here

The desktop versions of QuickBooks (Pro, Premier, and Enterprise) are considered "mature" products and the changes from one year to the next are relatively minor. That is why a lot of companies do not need to purchase the annual upgrades that come out every Fall. Although the cost for companies running a single installation of Pro is relatively minor (you can usually find it for less than $200), the cost is more significant for multi-user installations and the Premier and Enterprise versions. For companies that have purchased add-ons, those products will most likely need to be updated as well, increasing the cost even more. Since Intuit supports its products for three years, there is often little to compel companies to buy the annual  upgrade.

The 2015 versions of QuickBooks have just been released and we've had a chance to kick the tires, so to speak. One added feature that we like and might prove useful for contractors is the ability to add comments to reports. This provides an easy method for providing information, comments, or questions about items in a report. For those of you who send lengthy emails with questions about report information, this allows you to comment right on the report. Here's how it works.

When you run a report, there's a new blue button at the top called "Comment on Report"

Selecting this option, places check boxes to just to the right of the data. Clicking in the box adds a reference number and allows you to enter unlimited narrative that corresponds to that reference. Additional comments are simply incremented from 1 to 2 to 3 and so forth.

The comments are saved with the report so that when the report is printed, the references and the comments show up. Here's the reference:

Here's the comment, always at the end of the report - like a footnote.

In some situations, this is a very valuable feature. Whether it is important enough to compel an upgrade is a business decision. We might suggest that if a company is still using a 2012 version, it might be time to upgrade anyway as Intuit is sun-setting its support for that version.