Recently I attended a webinar presented by Intuit outlining significant updates for 2012. Here’s the link if you would like to listen to the entire presentation QuickBooks 2012 Webinar recording.
We are advising our clients to upgrade to QuickBooks 2012. Here are three of the most important reasons why.
1. Calendar View. The Calendar View enables businesses to see what they need to do today, and into the future, including tasks, invoices and bill payment deadlines, and transactions posted.
QuickBooks 2012 Calendar View
This calendar does NOT sync with Outlook or any other calendaring software. This was intentional. According to Intuit, many users in the beta program indicated they wanted a confined place for their financial information and to-dos. This is a limitation in our view since many of our clients would like to see that information at any time, anywhere. That said having a more usable task function within QuickBooks, one allowing you to attach a transaction to the task, is incredibly beneficial.
2. Document Center: With Document Center, businesses can attach receipts, invoices, estimates and virtually any other document to a transaction. These documents are locally stored. We love this! In previous editions a user could store documents in the subscription based QuickBooks cloud storage service. Most hated this option. We did.
QuickBooks 2012 Document Center
Now you can get more of your work done in a paperless environment – no more searching files for a paid invoice on a piece of equipment, for instance. And attaching files is easy, just drag and drop. Very nice.
Warning: there are some real limitations. Attachments are stored in a separate folder. Meaning when you create a backup of your QuickBooks file, the attachments do not come along. So you will also need to backup the attachments folder. In addition, the attachments folder is “in the clear”. In other words, not secure. So attaching documents with personal or sensitive information, like credit card, social security or driver’s license numbers, is not advised.
3. Lead Center: The Lead Center allows businesses to track sales leads and prospect information, thus functioning as mini-CRM (customer relationship management) tool. You can attach tasks to any entry within the Lead Center. So if you want to make sure you follow up with this lead, you can assign a task to it to remind you to do so. Fabulous! No more lost leads! And when that lead becomes a customer, with a couple of clicks of the mouse that entry transfers from the Lead Center to the Customer Center. Sweet!
QuickBooks 2012 Lead Center
Bottomline: Despite some limitations, QuickBooks 2012 is well worth the upgrade. Another reason to upgrade: if your QuickBooks software is more than three years old, Intuit will no longer support it.
For a complete list of what’s new in QuickBooks 2012 go here.