QuickBooks 2021 R3 Released

Intuit has released QuickBooks 2021 R3, the first bug release update of the new product. I always recommend that you avoid using an R1 release, because we know that they are already working to fix bugs when they first release a new product year. And here it is, bug fixes based on the last rounds of beta testing, and maybe some early user feedback. And, some things thrown in that aren’t really just bug fixes…

This update should be available via automatic updates. You can also go to the QuickBooks Update site to download the patch.

Should you get this update? Well, if you are using QuickBooks 2021 R1, you definitely SHOULD. But, if you are using an older version of QuickBooks, I generally suggest that you wait a bit longer before you jump into the 2021 version. I don’t know of any problems, but this is a very new product and you don’t want to experiment with your company accounting process. Besides, we are getting close to most people’s year-end, why mess around with something that works at this critical time?

QuickBooks 2021 R3 Bug Fixes

I want to start off with the bug fixes, because that is the important part of this release. To be honest, this isn’t a huge list, but if you ran into the problems they were, well, “a problem”.

• This release fixes an issue that caused a crash when creating a Payment Receipt template.
• Another crash issue was fixed, this one occurs while restoring a company file backup.
• Yet another crash issue was fixed, it occurred when closing the company file after adding contacts in the Customer or Vendor center.
• This release fixes an issue where the number of attachments to an email were not shown correctly after an attachment was removed while you were using the Combine all forms to recipient in one email option in the Send Forms window.
• In Advanced Bank feeds, if a user had M/D/YY as their system date format, the current date was used for recording the transaction. Fixed!
• Receipt Management:
  • New transactions used to fail if the bank account name included special characters. Fixed!
  • All of the receipts were not listed in the dashboard if a large number of receipts (above 1000) were uploaded. Fixed!
• This release fixes an issue where date and amount columns were not being sorted on the Match to Existing transactions window.

QuickBooks User Management

These updates are pretty much the same that they have been rolling out to other versions of QuickBooks lately (like QuickBooks 2019 R13). Intuit is ramping up the requirement to have an Intuit Account attached to your company file. According to Intuit, this “makes it easier to connect and maintain product features and services”. You need to do this for the Admin user, and when you do you will no longer receive “persistent messaging” to do so.

Users other than the Admin can send a Request for Access to the Admin. This isn’t clear to me yet (I need to play with it), this should relate to the Intuit Account.

Intuit’s initial release notes didn’t mention a feature that was released in other years of QuickBooks in this area, where the Admin could “invite” other QuickBooks users to create their own Intuit Account.

I think that many people are going to be annoyed by this, but it isn’t that big of a problem.

Online Banking

Several improvements here:

• Users can assign a Customer:Job to their expenses in their banking transaction tables.
• Users can create rules that automatically assign customer jobs to expenses.
• Users can refresh bank data for multiple accounts within the same bank with a single click of a button.
• Users can create rules for both money-in and money-out transactions.
• Users can save column customizations.

A nice set of useful improvements.

Other Improvements

• Scheduled Statements: You can now send statements to customers who are “dynamically added to the group” after the group has already been sent statements.
• Receipt Management: You can register a custom email ID for the company file and send receipts via email. The emailed receipts will be extracted, and can be reviewed before adding them to the register. You can also batch edit and delete the transactions.
• Inventory Aging Reports: Two Inventory Aging reports have been added that show the value of inventory items in stock, categorized on their aging since purchase/acquisition.

Tags: Bank Feeds, Intuit Account, Inventory Reports, Online Banking, QuickBooks Bugs, Receipt Management, Statements

Category: QuickBooks 2021