QuickBooks 2009 and Online Banking - Continued

In my November 3^rd posting on QuickBooks 2009 and Online Banking I talked about the problems with the new, updated Online Banking feature in QuickBooks 2009. I received a response from Rich Walker, an Accountant Communications and Media Relations employee from Intuit who wanted to pass on additional information. Note that a lot of this duplicates what was said by Intuit product manager Greg Walker in the Intuit Community discussion on this subject, but it does add more information.

I would like to point out that in the past three years I’ve not see this kind of public response from anyone at Intuit when a new release has created widespread problems for a class of users. It is encouraging that they acknowledge a problem and are letting us know that they are addressing it. People may complain that a six to eight week delay in getting a change out is very long, but I personally would hope that they would not be pressured to rush it out prematurely. It takes time to make changes and to test them properly.

Intuit did provide this feature in a beta test copy of the 2009 program before it was released – I was one of those beta testers. However, beta (or field) tests are very tricky. I, for example, didn’t use this feature in the beta test (I don’t do enough online banking with QuickBooks to make it worthwhile). I don’t know what kind of feedback they got from the field testing sites.

Here is his statement, unedited:

We’ve heard your feedback. We are concerned that our redesigned online banking isn’t doing enough to help you save time and get your banking data into QuickBooks easily. We know you are busy, and that saving time and being efficient is vitally important to you and your business.

That’s why we’ll be releasing an update to QuickBooks 2009 Pro, Premier and Enterprise Solutions in late December that will help you enter your downloaded banking transactions faster and more easily.

December updates to online banking in QuickBooks 2009 will:

• allow you to quickly add new names, accounts, and classes when recording downloaded transactions
• enable QuickBooks to recognize what you are typing– such as payee & account names- and complete the information for you
• give you access to view and select QuickBooks register entries while manually matching downloaded transactions

We recognize that the ability to review and add multiple bank transactions at once to your QuickBooks data will also help you get back to business faster. We are currently investigating solutions to address this, and will let you know as soon as we have more information.

To get the December updates as soon as they are available, please turn on automatic updates in QuickBooks and you will get prompted when the changes are available. You can do this by going to the Help menu in QuickBooks and selecting “Update QuickBooks.” Then, go to the options tab and select “Yes” for “Automatic Update.” Or, feel free to visit www.quickbooks.com/support and click on the “Updates & Downloads” section to get downloads when they are available.

Finally, we know some people have reported trouble downloading bank transactions from Bank of America. Bank of America needs to update their systems to work correctly with QuickBooks and have indicated to us they will complete this in a few weeks.

We hope that you’ll continue to find value in the new features in QuickBooks 2009 including the Company Snapshot which helps you stay on top of your cash flow with a real-time snapshot of your business.

As always, we welcome your comments. Feel free to e-mail us at onlinebanking_qb2009@intuit.com with your thoughts or if you’d like to receive information on further online banking-related updates.

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Update 11/7/2008: In a notice to ProAdvisors Intuit adds that they also are working on the ability to handle multiple transactions in a batch, a highly requested feature.

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Update 12/9/2008: Intuit has announced release dates for some fixes, see our article on the updates.