It’s official! QuickBooks 2011 is out and I have to say it is well worth the upgrade as there are some important new features!
There are many things that people have been asking for in QuickBooks for a long time now and Intuit has delivered quite a few much needed features as well as some that are just nice to have. I don’t know how many people have actually spent time on the Company Snapshot in QuickBooks. If you haven’t I highly recommend you get acquainted with it because it offers some really good information at a glance. In QuickBooks 2011 they’ve added a new tab called “Customers” and it looks a little something like this:
Click the image for a close up look at this dashboard. Since most people, unlike me, are NOT numbers people this works much better for most business owners to get an understanding of what the “picture” looks like.
Another feature that stands out right away is the new global search. It is a Google-like search that will bring up transactions, customers, inventory items, and anything else within the QuickBooks universe that contains a match to your search criteria. In my video review of QuickBooks 2011 you can see how to filter the search criteria to get specific about where you are looking for your search results. The original “Find” feature is still very much there an intact.
In the Customer Center there is a new “Collections Center’ which gives you information at a glance about who is past due and who is almost past due. This includes a module that lets you e-mail those customers. Speaking of E-mail QuickBooks 2011 now lets you use most popular web mail features like Gmail, Yahoo!, and Hotmail to send your invoices and statements. Previous versions of QuickBooks only work with outlook.
Rumor has it there will be no more issues with the PDF converter, because there is no more PDF converter. QuickBooks used to create a virtual printer driver in order to create the PDFs. In QuickBooks 2011 the PDF is now created internally so you are actually saving the PDF instead of printing it to a print driver that creates the PDF. This is a really important upgrade because there have been a lot of problems with this, especially for people running Windows Vista and 7 on 64-bit machines.
Invoices and bills have a new summary on the side that shows you a history relative to that customer or vendor. This comes in handy, especially since lots of the information is hyperlinked allowing you to click through to the source. Here’s another screenshot:
Bills have a similar feature relative of course to the Vendor information.
Possibly one of the greatest new features if you’re an accountant is the ability to run a Balance Sheet By Class report. Previous to QuickBooks 2011 this was not possible. You could run a Profit and Loss By class, but never a Balance Sheet. You had to create separate Balance sheet accounts and even open a separate bank account for each class if you truly wanted to separate them on the balance sheet. It will be interesting to learn (and you know I will do it) how QuickBooks handles the equity accounts. This feature is probably more exciting for nerdy accountants like me then it is for the masses.
Intuit has finally tied in customer payment date information to the invoices. So now you can run reports and show the date paid on an invoice. Also the “Paid” stamp that appears on invoices that are paid in full now shows the date right there. What is especially exciting about this is that it gives rise to a new standard report called the “Average Days To Pay” report. Great information when evaluating clients and how they pay. I have actually been known in the past to run a customer balance detail report in QuickBooks, then export it to excel, then back in QuickBooks double click each invoice, click ‘History’ and list the payment date in my excel version so I could run the same analysis that is now available in one click. Maybe 2 J.
Sales by Item and Sales by Customer detail reports now total your quantity columns. Another thing I used to have to export to excel to do. You can also run a Sales by Ship To Address. This kind of information will come in real handy if you have customers with multiple ship to locations.
I’ll give you the 5 minute video on this (below), but you can purchase the full 1 hour video of me going through many of the new features in my Learning Center so Go NOW! Hurry!
Please enjoy the web cast by clicking on the television:
Thanks for writing this. I will be sharing the new customer tab snapshot, collections center, and invoice snapshot as well as the improved PDF converter now driver in QuickBooks 2011 with some of my clients in Greater Seattle that I help set up, review and fix what they have attempted to do themselves, support, help, and properly train them to use the software. I’ve noticed a number of them prefer to use images rather than numbers to understand how they are doing.
Hi. I’ve been delving deep into the Balance Sheet by Class report, and am actually rather disappointed in it, there are several unsupported transaction types – which involve workarounds in order to create an accurate report. I’ll be interested in hearing what you have to say
Interesting, thanks! I will have to make a point of digging deeper into it myself and then of course.. another video on just that area! I did notice in the sample file in my video that one of the classes shows up with hugely negative retained earnings and that piqued my curiosity so stay tuned…
I owned Quickbooks 2007 for Mac and have used it for years. I am a registered user with Intuit. For the past few months, I got a message that I needed to register the product and that it would be good for only 30 days. This made no sense since I was a registered user and the “register online” option did not work. Finally, one day while I was working, I quit the application and tried to relaunch it. The message came up and would not launch. I called Intuit to help with the registration. I got a tech support in India who had passible English. He confirmed that the product was registered. He asked what system I was using. I was up to date with 10.6.4. He said that was the problem since Quickbooks 2007 was not being supported in 10.6, but only with 10.4 and 10.5. and would not work. I told him that it does work in 10.6 and I have been successful with it for months since upgrading to 10.6. He clarified that it would work only 15 times in 10.6 before the registration would not work. I found this to be incredible. This means that Intuit has written script to make the software not work after 15 times with the newer operating system. In some ways this seems illegal to me. It is one thing to say software is not supported with newer systems, it is another to purposefully make it not work when, in fact, it does work. I use Quickbooks basically as an accounting program and not for creating tax returns. As such, I don’t need the most recent version. The tech person further stated that I had to buy the 2011 version and that it, too, would not work after 2014. Again, I’m flabbergasted. Intuit is purposefully making their software not work after a specific period of time. I am livid. I bought the newer version since I had to complete records for a number of clients but felt I was being forced to buy something I did not need due to planned obsolescence.
In general, 2011 seems identical to 2007. I don’t need the newer features. I did notice that during reconciliation that often the program added incorrectly.
Has anyone else had these same problems?
I’ve never seen the program add incorrectly. As far as the forced updates go, yes they stop supporting the products after 3 years. Imagine the cost of having to support the program for an infinite period of time? There are people (like me) who desperately want the new features. The inventory adjustment module is hugely improved, it’s easier to find information, adding multiple customers and other “List Items” cannot be compared from 2007 to 2011 (really in 2009 this feature was introduced) and has saved me hours of time with clients who needed new files set up with large existing customer lists. I also work with QuickBooks for MAC and there again in my own experience you cannot compare the versions. I understand the frustration though. They could simply let the version go without supporting it and also without forcing you out of it. If your needs are pretty simple there are some good alternatives on the web, but since you already upgraded you’re good for another 3 years.
One thing I have found is that when you start getting into the new features, you start to think of ways that these features can help you do things more efficiently. Then it starts to get exciting and become worthwhile. I signed up for the pro adviser program because for basically the same cost I get every version each year.
Some of the planned new features are really strong and will help many people. Certainly as a quickbooks trainer I see people all the time who could benefit from some of the features they are beta testing at the moment.
Nancy Smyth wrote:
“I’ve been delving deep into the Balance Sheet by Class report, and am actually rather disappointed in it, there are several unsupported transaction types…”
I agree! You can read for 30 minutes about all the unsupported transactions. I had hoped to leave Peachtree, but its ability to handle class-type segmentation for non-profits is far superior to this crippled QB balance sheet by class feature.