Quickbooks Makes Changes to Forms

Intuit has finally thrilled its anticipatory public with the release of the latest version of Quickbooks. For decades, Quickbooks has been the favorite accounting tool of small- and middle-sized businesses that don't have a full-time accounting staff. While early versions of the software drew criticism for glaring oversights that included failure to adhere to accepted accounting practices and the lack of an audit trail, each update of the program has further ironed out the shortcomings of previous versions, bringing Quickbooks to the top of the accounting software market over the last thirty years. This process of revision continues in Quickbooks 2014, so a guide to the changes may well be in order.

The dominance of Quickbooks has made it the most familiar piece of accounting software in the world for an entire generation. Whole websites have been known to drop everything to review the latest version of the program, knowing the impact it will have on hundreds of thousands of businesses. Given its software's ubiquity, you'd expect Intuit to have the bugs ironed out by now. For the most part, this has happened, and the company continues to be very responsive to market criticism of its product. In response to its users' accounting tips, subtle changes have been introduced across the board in the 2014 version. For example, the Do Today tab is gone, as is the My Apps function. A client collaborator function has been added, and stylistic changes have been made to the layout and color palette.

By far the biggest changes rolled out in this version of Quickbooks are to its forms. One of these is an entirely new form called Income Tracker. This is an extremely user-friendly spreadsheet that stores and organizes your invoices, presenting a clear, readable display. It's intended to replace the Collection Center, which was removed in the upgrade. Another change, or rather, a restoration, is the triumphant return of Bounced Checks, and its ability to quickly and easily sort through any bounced and canceled payments. This feature was introduced years ago and was later removed to howls of protest. As usual, Intuit has listened to the accounting professionals it courts as customers, and it has therefore restored this feature.

In addition to a wholesale insertion and deletion of forms, the latest version of Quickbooks has some more subtle changes to the existing forms you already know. One very useful change is to the inventory tracker. Now, you can specify the maximum stocking level of an item, as opposed to just the minimum. The form also allows you to build nested assemblies, customize the fields for sales, and track the physical location of items' use, which gives you more precise insights into how goods are moving through a distributed network.

Of all the accounting tips you'll hear from professionals, among the best has to be the advice to get and learn how to use Quickbooks. There's a reason the software has dominated the bookkeeping market for three decades, and the 2014 version seems positioned to carry on this tradition for Intuit.

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