QuickBooks ®Simplifies, Maybe Accelerates Common Tasks

Rather than pile on tons of new features in its upgrades, Intuit – for many years – has seemed to concentrate on making it easier for you to access the tools and data that are already there.
QuickBooks 2014 can make it easier to get in and do what needs to be done quickly, and then move on to other activities that will help build your business.

A Better View
If you do upgrade to QuickBooks 2014, check out the new Income Tracker (Customers | Income Tracker). QuickBooks new feature provides possibly the best “view” we’ve seen in the software.

Figure 1: QuickBooks 2014’s new Income Tracker gives you real-time access to the status of your receivables.

This screen gives you a birds-eye view of your receivables that isn’t available anywhere else in the program. You can click on any of the four colored bars that run across the top of the screen – Estimates, Open Invoices, Overdue and Paid Last 30 Days — to change the data that appears below. Within each bar is the number of related transactions and their total dollar amount.
More Descriptive/Detailed Email
If you regularly send invoices through email, you may have wondered how many of them actually get opened by your customers in a decent, timely fashion. QuickBooks 2014 has a new tool that makes the details of an invoice available in the body of the email itself.

Figure 2: You can modify this template or leave it as is: QuickBooks 2014 will fill in the relevant details for each customer.
To access this template, open the Edit menu and select Preferences. Click on the Send Forms tab, then Company Preferences.
Some Other Smaller Changes
Intuit has made many small-but-productive features to QuickBooks 2014, all designed to help you work faster and smarter, and simply to support simpler operations. For example, the Ribbon toolbars on transactions now include a tab or menu that lets you open related reports.

Figure 3: You can now access reports directly from the Ribbon toolbar on transaction screens.
In addition:

• The program seems to run faster.
• We can communicate with you (and vice versa) through an email window that’s been embedded into the software.
• There’s been some re-doing of online banking (now called “Bank Feeds”), making it more accessible and hopefully understandable to you and other users.

Upgrading to a new version of QuickBooks can sometimes be challenging, so we encourage you to let us know if you’d like to explore the process. New functionality and usability that improves your workflow and your understanding of your finances can be worth the time and trouble.