QuickBooks 2011 Overview
QuickBooks 2011 is Coming! Set for release later in September (tentatively), QuickBooks 2011 contains a significant number of new features, many that have been requested for years. Some have me very excited and are very welcome. Some are provided as Internet based services, which will usually involve an additional fee. This article will list the major changes, with details to come in future articles.
PLEASE NOTE that much of this is based on information from an early release of QuickBooks 2011 – it is possible that some features may vary from what is described here.
Keep your eye on the Practical QuickBooks blog over the next few weeks as I release a series of articles that go into more detailon the new features. This article is a summary of what we will see.
Important Additions and Improvements
Web E-Mail Integration – For the last several years if you wanted to send invoices or reports via email from QuickBooks you were limited to using Microsoft Outlook or the Intuit email server. If you wanted to use another method for emailing you would have to save your document as a PDF file and manually attach it to the email. Starting with 2011 QuickBooks will now support emailing via web mail email programs. Support is built in for three webmail services: Gmail, Yahoo & Hotmail. However, you can use just about any email client that you wish. See our detailed article on this feature.
PDF Printing – When I saw this feature, I jumped up and clicked my heels! Hooray! For years we have been struggling with the PDF printer driver that QuickBooks has been using. It has been the source of countless errors and problems. The 2011 release replaces this with an internal routine that is far better. See our detailed article on this feature.
History on Transactions - Customer/Vendor summary information is provided at the point of need. By seeing the recent history in the same window as the transaction you are creating you will save considerable time by not having to stop and to go and look it up. See our detailed article on this feature.
Batch Invoicing – This will allow you to create invoices for a number of customers that get the same invoice information in a batch. You only have to fill out the invoice info once then have it create an invoice for all customers.
Improved Inventory Adjustments – An improvement that is long overdue. The Adjust Quantity/Value On Hand has been one of the poorest functions in QuickBooks for years, and with this release they have made a dramatic improvement in usability. See our detailed article on this feature.
Support for Office 2010 – This is a tough one. Intuit continues to work on integration with Office 2010, but at the time I’m writing this they aren’t yet announcing full support. We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out – you may see updates later in the year.
Features in Enterprise
These features are only available in the Enterprise Edition.
Multi-Location Inventory – Advanced Inventory is a new feature that allows you to track inventory quantities in more than one warehouse and transfer inventory items between warehouses. This will be available for an addition fee, but it is not an Internet enabled solution – it runs in your local company file. See our detailed article on this feature.
Multi-instance allows you to open two different company files in two instances of QuickBooks and work with opened files at the same time. This should be available in all editions of Enterprise, and QuickBooks Premier Accountants Edition. See our detailed article on this feature.
Improved ODBC Connectivity – Enterprise has included a read-only ODBC driver for awhile now, but it is a bit complicated to set up your “user” and “DSN” settings. This release brings those processes into the QuickBooks menu, making the process much easier to set up.
Internet/Service Features
These features require access to the Internet, much like the Document Management feature that was introduced last year. Some of these features will require an additional fee, some might not.
Some of these features might not be released right away, they may be released later in the year as the details are worked out.
QuickBooks Connect – This allows you to access your essential customer and transaction data via the Internet when you are out of the office. It will include some basic features like adding customers and invoices, as well as being able to look up inventory information.
Intuit Data Protect – Online Backup in QuickBooks 2011 will be fully integrated into QuickBooks, enabling a significantly better user experience than in previous versions.
Intuit Commissions Center – This helps you easily calculate sales commissions by setting default commission rates for each sales rep, marking items as non-commissionable, and having the flexibility to assign the commission percentages or amounts at a line-item level.
Other New and Improved Features
Instant Startup – QuickBooks can be set to pre-load portions of the program so that startup time can be reduced. Note that this may not be released right away, I’m still pinning this detail down. See our detailed article on this feature.
QuickBooks Search – We’ve had various kinds of “search” features over the years – this time Intuit has worked to integrate a fast and flexible search feature that replaces the “Find” functionality in QuickBooks. I really like this feature, but some people I’ve talked to miss the older function. See our detailed article on this feature.
Collections Center – Managing your Accounts Receivable is one of your most important business functions. QuickBooks 2011 has added several improvements that will make this task easier for you, including the addition of the Collections Center. See our detailed article on this feature.
Customer Snapshot - The Customer Snapshot feature has been enhanced to add a number of new “widgets”, such as recent invoices, recent payments, sales history, best selling items and more.
Document Management – I’m expecting a number of changes here, but in the initial release we won’t see anything new. I’ll let you know what is coming up when the information is available.
Reporting Enhancements – A number of new reports, or improvements on existing ones:
- Average Days To Pay will provide information on the average number of days it takes your customers to pay from the time that they were invoiced.
- Sales By Ship To Address Report will show you details on the items (quantities and dollar value) based on the Ship To address
- There are smaller changes to the Open Sales Report, Open Purchase Order report, Sales By Item Summary, Open Purchase Order Detail Report and Sales By Item Detail.
- Balance Sheet by Class - Balance Sheet by Class is a new report that gives users the option of selecting “Class” as their column grouping, even for Balance Sheet accounts. This is a feature that has been requested by many people – although I’ll note that it does have some limitations.
See our detailed article on the new and improved reports.
Intuit PaymentNetwork has been updated to include a closer integration with your QuickBooks data.
Availability in Purchase Orders – Only in Enterprise – an availability icon in the quantity column.
Vendor Billing Address – Now we have TWO addresses in the vendor record – one for billed from, one for shipped from.
Date on “Paid” stamp in invoices – A small change to the “paid” status stamp.
Changes to Online Form Design – A fee if you want to access your online customized form design after 30 days from when you created it.
New Company Interview – If you create a new company file you have an easy way to add vendors or customers from your Outlook or other address book, as well as setting up initial inventory and bank information.
Features for Accountants
These features will only be found in the Accountants Edition:
QuickBooks File Manager is a tool that allows accountants to:
- Automatically open clients’ files with the correct version of QuickBooks
- Save file login info to eliminate a need to remember and enter user name and password for each client’s file (functionality provided by password vault)
- Easily upgrade multiple files to the latest version of QuickBooks through an automated batch process
See our detailed article on this feature.
Multi-instance allows you to open two different company files in two instances of QuickBooks and work with opened files at the same time. This should be available in all editions of Enterprise, and QuickBooks Premier Accountants Edition. See our detailed article on this feature.
Should I Upgrade?
That is the question that I’m always asked each year. Should I upgrade to this new release? My typical answer to this every year is that you go ahead and purchase the upgrade, but that you should probably wait awhile before actually moving your business over to the 2011 program unless you strongly need the new features. Why? Every year we find that there are bugs in the first release, and you don’t want to be the person who gets caught by one. Wait a month or two – see if people are running into errors - there will probably be some updates that will resolve the problems fairly soon.
Having said that, I’ll note that I’ve been running the program for awhile now without any issues in QuickBooks itself. It seems pretty stable, but I don’t use all features as heavily as some businesses. I would be cautious with some of the new online Intuit Marketplace apps at the beginning.
Category: Program Updates, QB 2011
About the Author (Author Profile)
Charlie Russell is the founder of CCRSoftware. He’s been involved with the small business software industry since the mid 70′s, focusing on inventory and accounting software for small businesses. Charlie is a Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor. Look for Charlie’s articles in the QuickBooks and Beyond blog, as well as his California Wildflower Hikes blog.
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Judy, a long question. Hard to give a succinct answer in a blog comment, particularly when it is a bit off topic.
I’ll just give you a few tips here.
QuickBooks doesn’t directly tell you what items you have to order, although you can do some things. If you enter your builds as “pending”, then you can look at the “inventory stock status by item” report. You will see the quantity needed for assemblies, and the “available” amount.
This is available in Pro as well as Premier.
Note also, that my company produces a product, CCRQBOM, that can help with this. You don’t have to create pending builds – you can enter a list of the items you want to build, and it will give you a direct calculation of the shortages you have (including a full level explosion, which QB won’t do).
As far as changing reorder points, QuickBooks doesn’t do that.
Thanks a lot for your answer. I will pass this along to my IT specialist for further discussion. Your software might be important to us. Appreciate the help and speedy response.
I just wanna ask with regards to my issue about QB, can we transfer the data of QB 2005 to 2011 QB? is there a lot of changes in current QB?
Billy – huge number of changes from 2005 to 2011. You can see some of the changes by looking in this blog at the “updates” articles for each year. Note that when going from 2005 to any later year, the database manager changes and that involves a conversion process, internally in the program.
I can’t give you a full writeup in a blog comment like this – but you CAN do the upgrade. In a pefect world – you just install QB 2011 and open your QB 2005 file, and it converts. However, that assumes that the QB 2005 file is very clean, and the odds of that are low. At the very least – make a backup of your QB 2005 file first, run the “rebuild” utility in your File/Utilities menu to clean things up. Run some reports such as your company financials, a trial balance, and an aged A/R. Install QB 2011 in it’s own folder so that you have both programs installed. Open the 2005 with the 2011 program to convert it. If you don’t get any errors, run the same reports and see if they match. If they do, then you are OK. If you get an error in the process, or the reports don’t match, you can restore the QB 2005 backup (using the QB 2005 program) and continue to use the 2005 program until you figure out what to do next. I ProAdvisor can help you with this (for a fee) – if you have problems with the conversion they can do additional cleanup, or possibly do the conversion in a couple of steps. Converting from 2005 to 2011 should work, I’ve done it several times, but sometimes there are some gotchas that get in the way.
That is a BRIEF overview…
My question is similar to Elizabeth’s “Will that work with customers who have different price levels? Can I split an order by percent (say 60/40) and invoice 2 csutomers?”
My batch invoicing would consist of members paying different dues amounts, and in some cases there will be portions of dues to be paid. Will QB2011 be able to do that?
Tervia, “batch invoicing” is just a way to generate multiple QuickBooks invoices, it doesn’t provide features you might not find in QB in normal invoicing. Splitting an order between two customers isn’t something it is going to do.