QuickBooks 2014 New Features

All Versions of QuickBooks 2014 for Windows 

These changes will be found throughout all of the US desktop versions: Pro, Premier and Enterprise:

User Interface Changes

The color and layout are some of the largest changes for an upgrade for QuickBooks. Here are some of the most important changes:

• There is a new icon cluster in the upper right corner (may be called the “Global Access Bar”?), with icons for:
  • Reminders and To-Do’s.
  • Maintenance alerts.
  • Client Collaborator, a new feature that I’ll describe later.
• You can customize the View Balances tab in the left navigation bar – a feature that many people have asked for.
• The ability to copy and paste detail lines in transaction forms (useful!)
• Contextual reports: In many transaction windows the Reports tab has been filled out with icons for reports that apply to that transaction.
• Search Auto Suggestions: The Search window has been improved so that it suggests good matches for the term you are entering.
• Company Information is now My Company: We’ve always had a Company Information window under the Company menu – the name has changed to My Company and the window has undergone an overhaul. It should be easier to find what you need, and see what apps you have.
• No more “My Apps” in the left navigation bar. At first I thought that this was an indication of their pulling back from App Center integration, but no, it isn’t that. Now it is the “Your Apps” section in the new My Company window.

Email Improvements

Here are some of the improvements to Email:

• The Customer Center now has a tab for Sent Email, where you can see a history (of sorts) of the emails that you have sent to a client from within QuickBooks.
• You now have the ability to send a customer payment receipt via email.
• The entire send email feature has been overhauled so that you have more control over the message that you send out from QuickBooks, at least for users of Web Mail.

Job Costing

There are a number of changes here to fine tune the Job Costing feature in QuickBooks – an area that many people use.

In all versions you will see:

• Sales Reps on Jobs: You can specify a sales rep for a job, not just for the customer.
• Job Status Filter: You can filter many reports by job status.

In addition, in Enterprise, there are a couple of differences:

• You can customize bill, check and credit card transactions to add the Sales Rep as a column.
• There are two additional job costing reports: Job WIP Summary and Committed Cost by Jobs.

Bank Feeds

This is one area where cloud accounting products have advanced beyond QuickBooks desktop versions. Bank Feeds is the new Online Banking feature in QuickBooks 2014.

Miscellaneous Changes

There are a lot of changes scattered about that will be found in all of the versions – I’ll just summarize them here.

• Income Tracker: This is a great dashboard-like tool that lets you look at open invoices, overdue invoices, unbilled estimates and more. There is a very configurable spreadsheet format list. This replaces the Collection Center.

• Bill Payment Stub: Now the stub will show if the bill is paid entirely with credits.
• Bounced Checks: We had it, we lost it, and now it is back again better than ever! The ability to easily process bounced checks.
• Fit report to x pages HIGH: When you print a report you now have the option to fit it to a number of pages vertically, where before we just had the ability to fit it horizontally.
• Performance Improvements: I’m going to have to say that I can’t verify this from my own tests. I haven’t been working with a really large company file, and I test on a “virtual machine”, so speed comparisons are tough to make. Intuit claims that with this release QuickBooks opens faster, windows open faster, and you can toggle between editions faster. We’ll have to see…
• Add/Edit Multiple Lists: This feature has a Find function – this year they have fine tuned this by adding a check-box for Search within results which should be helpful if you have long lists to work with.
• In the Billable Time & Costs window in Premier, you now have the ability to sort the records by clicking on a column heading. This was added to Enterprise V13 in the R8 release, but apparently it wasn’t added to Premier until the 2014 release.

QuickBooks Enterprise

Intuit continues to add higher level features in Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise V14, adding to the level of sophistication of the product and making it more useful to inventory related businesses.

• Maximum Stocking Levels: You now can specify a maximum quantity on hand in addition to the reorder point (also referred to as a minimum quantity on hand) in the item list. With Advanced Inventory this can be set by site.
• Improvements for Assemblies: Intuit is ramping up the features for manufacturers with this release, with a number of VERY interesting changes:
  • The ability to build nested assemblies.
  • A where-used query.
  • Assembly Cost and Price Rollups if your component costs change.
• New Job Cost Reports: Enterprise adds two job cost reports – Job WIP Summary andCommitted Cost by Jobs.
• More Customization Options for Checks, Bills and Credit Card Charges: This is neat – you can add columns to the detail sections of these transaction forms. You can add the sales rep and ”custom fields”. The values you enter in the transaction can be shown in certain reports.
• Simpler Item Editing: There are now some fields that you can edit for an item in the Inventory Center without clicking the edit button.
• Markup or Margin: Now we have both, when editing inventory parts and assemblies.

Payroll

The Payroll Center has been rearranged. Instead of just the three major blocks of info stacked vertically in one window you now have a separate tab for each area, and this allows them to put a LOT more information in there. More links to reports and functions, more information to show you the status of your payroll process. 

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If you see a section that I have not discussed on here and would like more detail, please email support@blueisleinc.com and let me know!

Thanks,

Brianna