All Entries Tagged With: "Group Items"

Using Subtotals in QuickBooks Orders

The subtotal item in QuickBooks can be useful if you want to provide a summary of the price of items you are selling in an order form. Unfortunately, if you try to get tricky with multiple levels of subtotals you may find that this feature doesn’t work the way you might expect. Today we’ll talk a bit about subtotals and how you can get around some limitations.

QuickBooks 2009 Release R6

Just a quick note. Intuit released the R6 update of QuickBooks 2009 today, with little advance notice. There are only two fixes listed for this release:

• If your company file is located in certain locations (some network locations, the root folder of a drive) you would get an error (-6177, 0) when trying to open it. This wasn’t a common problem, and if you ran into it you should have already found that you could move the file to a different location.
• In some cases a sales order would be marked as closed when you used group items or items with different units of measure. If you ran into this problem it was a major hassle, so I’m glad to see that they fixed this. Note that if you have some sales orders showing this problem you still need to repair them – the instructions for this can be found in the Intuit web site at http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/pages/ContentSections/Pages/salesorder

If you have had either of these problems, OR if you work with sales orders and group items (or multiple units of measure) then you should install this update soon. If you don’t have these problems, you can wait to do the update at a convenient time. I should note that I have only used this update for a couple of days – I’ve not seen any new problems introduced, but that isn’t a guarantee. By this stage in their development cycle I don’t expect new major problems to be introduced.

Update later in the day on Feb 6 2009: I’m seeing several messages in the Intuit Community forum from people who got the update and are having problems with printing or the PDF driver. I should note that in MY installation I have NOT run into either of these problems. I have not worked with a system that shows the problems that some are reporting, so I don’t have any fixes for them at this point. If these reports are coming from people with Vista 64 bit systems – note that the PDF driver gets altered back to the standard setting when you install an update, and as I mention in my Vista 64 article, that creates problems that you have to fix.

Groups for Custom Manufacturers

Most QuickBooks users think of Group and Inventory Assembly items as an “either-or” decision – use one or the other. There are times, however, when we can mix the two items to solve problems in QuickBooks. This is particularly useful for custom manufacturers – businesses that produce custom variations of their finished product for each customer.

Groups vs Assemblies

QuickBooks provides two item “types” that can have a list of component items – an Inventory Assembly and a Group. How do they differ, and when is it best to use one instead of the other? Today I’ll list the features of each and how you can use them.