QuickBooks 2019 R6 Released

Intuit has released QuickBooks 2019 R6, a maintenance release. This update should be available via automatic updates. You can also go to the QuickBooks Update site to download the patch. This release relates solely to the IIF Import feature.

• If you have an IIF Import file that has duplicate data lines, the file will now import successfully except for the duplicate information.
• Accounts, customers, class and inventory items that have “hidden parents” will now import successfully.
• Invoices that have both invoice and credit lines will now import successfully.
• Deposit transactions with 2 digits after the decimal point will now import successfully.
• Several issues relating to importing employee names have been resolved. There is no word on what exactly those issues were?
• You can now import time information in decimal and hours only – this is a bit of a cryptic note from Intuit.
• The field for the Doc Reference Number for payments and bills has been extended from 11 to 20 characters.

Again, all of the updates that have been announced here relate to the IIF import feature. It is interesting to me that Intuit is putting a lot of effort into this feature. It is the only way that you can import data into QuickBooks desktop without having to use an outside product, really. There are better ways to import data, in my mind, but those require using the QuickBooks SDK, and an app designed to work with it. My recommendation is to use the Transaction Pro Importer instead of IIF. Importing with the SDK has much better error checking than IIF imports. The only issue with this is that you have to pay for the addon product.

Note that in the past, Intuit strongly recommended that you don’t use IIF for importing data. We all thought that they were going to drop support for IIF, but there were many people who relied on it (including Intuit’s own payroll system), so that never came about.

My recommendation is that you don’t bother to install this update unless you rely on IIF. I don’t know of any problems with the update, but in the past there have sometimes been problems created by an update, so why take a chance?

Tags: IIF, QuickBooks 2019

Category: Import/Export, QuickBooks 2019