Improvements to the Income List

We have improved the performance of the Income List and folks with a large number of transactions should now see their data load relatively faster than before. If you are using Internet Explorer 8 as your browser, we highly recommend upgrading to one of the browsers listed here to get the most performance benefits.

With this newest release of the Income List we’ve removed the Invoice List.  The Income List now contains all the same functionality of the Invoice List and we didn’t want to have a more cluttered menu.

Many folks requested the ability to export the Income List to Excel.  Hurrah, it’s here!   First, narrow the list to show what needs to be printed or exported to Excel. Then click the Export To Excel button in the top right corner of the table.   You can also add more columns to the list such as the Ship Date column;  QuickBooks Online Plus customers can add their custom fields as columns too.

You can also now filter the income list by the To Be Printed or To Be Sent delivery statuses.

Improvements to the Reports List page

It’s faster to find just the report you’re looking for, including recently used reports in the Recent Reports section.

Streamlined Your Account page

We’ve made it easier for you to review and manage your billing, personal, and company information. Screenshots below show a few sections of the new account management page.

Some Issues

• Google Chrome shows a “Kill” dialog when you launch a popup in QuickBooks Online. This issue is being tracked here – http://crbug.com/122153. You can star the issue to remain updated. In the mean time you can just click “wait” and proceed normally as before. This issue has been fixed in future versions of Chrome and may get back ported to the current version.
• Safari users should upgrade to Safari 5.1.7 or higher to fix prior known issues about popups being un-responsive – not being able to go to the registers or reconcile page or not being able to quick add a new entity like customer or item.

These popups are not created or endorsed by Intuit. Third party companies such as dropdowndeals.com and dropinsavings.com prompt users to download these add-on tools.

Drop down deals

Image 1: Dropdowndeals.com is a browser plugin that enables users to access deals. It was downloaded unintentionally by the QuickBooks Online user.

Dropin savings image

Image:2  Dropinsavings is another add on which is difficult to uninstall

In the offline world, this experience is analogous to local grocery stores stuffing your mail boxes with coupons. Fortunately in the online world, you have the ability to prevent these downloads with a little bit of precaution. You can follow the tips provided by Intuit security at http://security.intuit.com/protect-your-computer.html to be safe while browsing the Internet and prevent spyware downloads.

If you have dropinsavings or dropdowndeals on your computer now, you can follow these steps below to uninstall them.

How do I uninstall Drop Down Deals?

If there’s a single piece of functionality you no longer want, but still want to use others, consider disabling the specific Layers App individually.

Uninstall from Internet Explorer, Firefox or Google Chrome (PC): Go to the Windows Start Menu and then to Control Panel > Add/Remove(“Programs & Features” in Vista/Windows 7) and click “Remove” next to ‘Yontoo Layers’.

Uninstall from Firefox or Google Chrome (Mac): In the top menu, go to Tools > Add-ons. Select the Yontoo Layers logo and then click Uninstall. Note: You cannot uninstall from PC with these steps, see instructions above for PC.

How do I uninstall Droping Savings?

If you installed the Chrome Extension (CRX):

Step 1: Open Chrome, click on the Settings icon, and navigate to Tools -> Extensions.

Step 2: Select the DropinSavings plugin from the list of extensions, and click Uninstall.

** That’s it, DropinSavings plug-in is now uninstalled!

If you installed the Firefox Addon (XPI):

Step 1: Open Firefox, and navigate to Tools -> Add-ons.

Step 2: Select the DropinSavings plugin from the list of add-ons, and click Uninstall.

** That’s it, DropinSavings plug-in is now uninstalled!

If you installed the plugin for other browsers:

Step 1: Click Start, and navigate to: Control Panel.

Step 2: Select “Add/Remove Programs” from the Control Panel. For Windows Vista/7 users, this will be called “Programs/Features”.

Step 3: Select the DropinSavings plugin from the list of software, and click Uninstall/Remove.

** That’s it, DropinSavings plug-in is now uninstalled!

If you are a current user and have 2 minutes to give us feedback, please fill out a short survey.

Survey: http://survey.intuit.com/survey/survey_start.cfm?x=12970&y=5655

Thank you,
Quickbooks Online Team

Popular Bugs

Known issue: Some users are experiencing issues with Safari 5.1.4 / 5.1.5 when trying to click buttons on popups – basically nothing happens when you do so. This is a Safari bug which has now been resolved in Safar 5.1.7. Please upgrade to it for a fix or switch to Chrome or Firefox instead.

Fixed issue: With this release, we will fix the problem some folks were having when using the new reconcile screen – where certain transactions were either not visible or were showing as duplicated.

Feature Enhancements

Following are the new enhancements in our upcoming release that will be rolled out over the next week. If you don’t see the features below already, then you will on April 4th.

Income List Enhancements

We introduced the Income List with our last release. If you haven’t tried it out, please do so and continue to give us feedback on it. The Income List will be replacing the older Invoice List in the near future.  You might ask why we’re putting so much focus on the Income List.  It’s the place we expect you to create, manage  and take action on your estimates, invoices and sales receipts.  We are now suggesting  the next action that you might want to take on a particular transaction.

The Income List can now be printed via the Print List option as shown in the image above. This should be useful for people who generally used reports to get the same information. The optional columns of the list can now be turned off and on via the Edit Columns option. You can also choose to show the Memo and Due Date columns. The Open status filter will now also show Partially Paid and Overdue invoices.  Don’t forget that each column is sortable by clicking on the column name and the columns can be widened or narrowed as well.

Personalize emails before sending

When you choose the Send action for an Estimate, Invoice or Sales Receipt from the action column on the Income List page, you will see a new dialog box as shown in the picture below. It will now allow you to edit the email’s subject and body before sending so that you can personalize the message. By default the data shown is what you have setup under Company >Preferences > Form Delivery > Email Message.  This is perfect for when you’re resending an invoice for an overdue invoice.  You can add some special encouragement to help  your customers pay promptly!  It’s also easy from this dialog to send an invoice or estimate to multiple e-mail addresses by separating the e-mail addresses with a comma.

Note: This feature is currently available only on the new Income List page as well as on the new Sales Receipt page.

Note: We don’t save any of the customized subject or body text.   After the email has been sent, this data is lost and the next time you try sending the email again it will revert back to the default data setup under the preferences page. If you want to keep a record of the message you are sending, for now, you can enable the Company > Preferences > Form Delivery > Email Message > Copy me on all forms sent by email preference so that you get a copy of whatever you send.

Convert an estimate into an invoice

We heard from many customers that they just want to convert an estimate into an invoice.  Now you can easily do that from the Income List or the estimate page, you can convert an existing estimate into an invoice with just one click. Use the Copy to New Invoice button as shown in the images below.

New Reports List page

The reports list page has been revamped to give better access to users. Please see the screenshots below.

As before, mouse over the magnification icon to see a small preview. If you prefer permanent previews, then switch the layout to grid.

There is also a search box added on the top left where you can just search for a report rather than trying to find one manually by browsing. The reports should filter as you type into the search field.

New Sales Receipt page changes

For a complete list of changes click here.

Intuit PaymentNetwork Integration with statements

You can now offer online payment on invoices you include in statements. Your customers can pay open invoices by clicking the Pay button in statement and invoice emails. To try it out, go to Customers > Customer Center > Statement > Get paid by your customers online.

Browsing performance enhancement

We’re committed to continually improve performance. We’ve started removing unnecessary page refreshes from the product (just a start!). Below is a small video of this performance improvement. Your performance may differ from mine, but you should still see some difference when navigating between the new Sales Receipt, the new Income List and the new Reports List page. Currently only these 3 new pages are using a new infrastructure, so you will see this performance improvement only when navigating between one of these pages. In the near future when more pages are updated to use this new infrastructure the performance will become more noticeable.

FAQ from the Part 1 of the blog post:

Is the old Sales Receipt page being removed?
We have no plans right now for removing the old page. You will be able to switch back and forth from the new and old page whenever you want.

Who can access the new Sales Receipt page?
At the moment, the new page is only available to users who access QuickBooks Online via Google Chrome, Firefox (version 4+), Safari (version 5.0.6+) or Internet Explorer (version 9+) and are not using credit card payment processing (Merchant Account Services). This page is only accessible to US companies.

How do I access the new page?
You will see a Try new Sales Receipt button on the old sales receipt page if the above mentioned conditions are met. Click to switch to the new page. On the new page, there is a button on the bottom-right to switch back to the old page.

Is this page finished?
Nope, this page is still in beta and is being actively worked upon. More design changes are planned and will be mentioned in future blog posts.

What’s new or changed?

The screenshot below shows a high level overview of the upcoming changes. What you see in the screenshot is what you will see when you open a previously saved Sales Receipt. The screenshot is taken in Google Chrome, which is using it’s internal PDF plugin to render the Sales Receipt PDF. Firefox and others may look a bit different.

Popular Bugs

• Sold To / Ship To address fields will save data when customer isn’t selected and instead data is manually typed into them.
• Deleting detail lines should properly update the total and persist data.
• Delete and Void buttons will now confirm before deleting or voiding.

Button Changes

Since many users like having action buttons on the top, we tried to fit as many as we could. However there was too much crowding going on and as a result action items were consolidated into a More Actions menu on the top right. All but the button to Save fall under this menu. Some menu entries will only show when you have a previously saved transaction open on the page. For example, showing Delete or Void doesn’t make sense if you don’t have an existing transaction open that can be deleted or voided.

The Save button has been renamed to Save and New so that whenever you use it you will remain on the current page with a fresh and empty form. This will be useful when you are creating multiple transactions one after the other. This button also has a drop down for Save and Return that will take you back where you came from after saving. So say you came from the Income List, then you would be taken back there after saving. While not implemented yet, there is a possibility of a 2nd item in the drop down namely Save Draft that will save a draft copy of the transaction – that is when you haven’t finished filling it out yet.

Print and Send actions are now inside the More Actions menu. The menu entries as well as the buttons at the bottom of the page will get renamed to Save and Print and Save and Send respectively if a transaction needs saving before it can either be printed or emailed. On our old page we showed a popup instead asking you to save. On the new page those popups have been removed.

Printing Changes

We will no longer be using a popup to show the PDF of the transaction. Instead we will rely on the browser to open a PDF in its own tab using its own plugin. Clicking the print button should open the PDF in a new tab and from there you can Print or Save the PDF. We will also show a preview of the PDF on the transaction page itself. This will however only show when you open an existing transaction that has been saved already. In both cases above a PDF plugin in required to view the PDF. Browsers like Google Chrome and the latest Safari have an inbuilt PDF viewer. For Firefox and IE an external 3rd party plugin is needed. Screenshots below are from Chrome.

Note: We still need to work on a better interaction for managing To be printed and To be sent queues.

Emailing Changes

When you click on the Send button you will see a new dialog box as shown in the picture below. It will now allow you to edit the email’s subject and body before sending so that you can personalize the message. By default the data shown is what you have setup under Company > Preferences > Form Delivery > Email Message.

Note: Any new data you enter for the email’s subject or body is volatile and not saved. In other words after the email has been sent, this data is lost and the next time you try sending the email again it will revert back to the default data setup under the preferences page. If you want to keep a record of the message you are sending, for now, you can enable the Company > Preferences > Form Delivery > Email Message > Copy me on all forms sent by email preference so that you get a copy of whatever you send.

Other Changes

- Due to popular demand we have removed the tab container for Payment and Delivery Info. Both sections are now open and visible since people found switching tabs annoying. See the 1st screenshot on top.

- If you select a product/service item that has Inventory Tracking enabled, then you will see the On Hand quantity when hovering over the Quantity field in the detail lines grid.

- There is an experimental Copy / Paste menu items entry under the More Actions menu. You can use this to copy data from one transaction to another. While its usefulness will mostly come when we implement another transaction page with our newer UI, it still can be used to copy data from an existing Sales Receipt to a fresh new one. To do so:

1. Open an existing Sales Receipt that you created and saved before.
2. Once loaded, click More Actions > Copy
3. Then do More Actions > Paste
4. Once the data is pasted, modify it to your liking before saving.

The form is 1st cleared out before data is pasted so keep an eye on any issues with duplicate Sales Number if you were using Company > Preferences > Sales Form Entry > Custom Transaction Numbers. Also check the dates if they need to be changed. In the future when Invoice or Estimate pages are released with the newer UI, then the above process should work inter-transaction too. Copy data from one type of transaction and paste it to another type.

Keep an eye on this blog for updates.

One such page using couple of the above mentioned technologies is our new Sales Receipt page (http://blog.qbo.intuit.com/2012/03/04/new-transaction-page-design-part-2/)

In Firefox 10 on the mac you will see the permission request notification as shown in the image below. Other versions on other platforms might look a bit different visually.

For Chrome users, you can just grab the Chrome Web Store app if you haven’t already done so. This will automatically add the necessary permissions (without the app, the notifications may come as a yellow bar on top). After installing that app, in the future you may notice the QuickBooks Online app shortcut greyed out on your Chrome’s New Tab page as shown below and Chrome should prompt for you to accept some permissions. Click re-enable to get it working again.

Income List

Last year we introduced the Invoice List which was loved by many of our users. The page soon became a high traffic page within QuickBooks Online. Today we are introducing the Income List that incorporates much of the feedback users gave us on the Invoice List. The biggest difference between the two is that the Invoice List shows just invoices, while this new Income List shows invoices, estimates and sales receipts.

To get to this new Income List, go to the Invoice List under the Customers (or Members/Clients etc) menu tab. You will see a link to switch to the new Income List next to the page title as shown in the image below. Likewise, to switch back to the Invoice List, use a similar link found on the Income List page. Eventually when this new Income List page is finished, we will remove the old Invoice List and make this permanent for all users.

The image below shows the new income list page and various sections of it.

By default it will show all the transactions, but you can narrow down what you wish to see via the Narrow By button as shown. Once you choose certain filters, they should remain selected even when you navigate away from this page and come back later.

After choosing your specific filters, click apply to update the transaction grid. Above the grid you will also see the breadcrumbs for the currently chosen filters as shown in the image below. You can click the (X) to remove that part of the filter.

For our first release you can filter by transaction type, its status, a date range and a customer. We will be further improving the filtering of this list in our future releases, so this is definitely not the final version of how filtering is going to work.  We look forward to hearing your feedback on this new Income List.

Copy Estimates

You can now quickly copy information from one estimate to another. Just open an existing estimate and click the copy button at the bottom. This should copy the data to a fresh new estimate that you can save or modify before saving. Note: Estimates functionality is not available to QBO Simple Start subscribers.

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Important notice for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.x users

We are down to about 1-2% usage for these browsers and will soon block QuickBooks Online usage on them. Expect this to happen sometime in March. If you are still using IE7 or Firefox 3.x, please upgrade as soon as possible otherwise you will not be able to access QuickBooks Online once it gets blocked. We need to end full support for these old browsers to prevent any interoperability issues that can happen when we put out new features, as they are not being tested on these browsers at all. Below are a few upgrade paths that users can take to continue using QuickBooks Online without issues. Do realize that by switching to a modern browser you not only improving QuickBooks Online performance but also for any other websites you visit, thereby increasing your own productivity!

Window Vista, Windows 7
IE7       –> IE9 or Firefox 10 or Chrome (latter 2 preferred)
FF 3.x –> IE9 or Firefox 10 or Chrome (latter 2 preferred)

Windows XP or prior
IE7       –> IE8 or Firefox 10 or Chrome (latter 2 preferred)
FF 3.x –> Firefox 10 or Chrome

OSX Leopard, Snow Leopard or Lion
FF 3.x –> Safari 5 or Firefox 10 or Chrome (latter 2 preferred)

OSX Tiger
FF 3.x –> Safari 4.1.3

Linux
FF 3.x –> Firefox 10 or Chrome

Other users should always upgrade to the latest version of their browser. IE8 users should definitely look into switching to IE9, Safari 5 users should get on Safari 5.0.6 or higher. Firefox users should get upgraded to Firefox 10 soon if not already on it, while Chrome is soon going to be on version 17. Pay One Vendor issue with Firefox 9+ will also be fixed with this above release. Creating a new company from the My Account page should also not complain about Firefox. Safari 5 on windows still has the issue of character duplication in popups. Safari 5 on the mac still has the issue of Caps Lock logging you out + some printing issues (printing issues seem to be fixed with Safari 5.1.4, so you have to wait till whenever Apple decides to release it). These latter ones need to be fixed by Apple, till then you can use Chrome or Firefox. More browser info here.

In order to improve the current Reports feature in Quickbooks Online we would like to solicit feedback from current users.

If you are a current user and have 5 minutes to give us feedback, please fill out a short survey.

Survey: http://survey.intuit.com/survey/survey_start.cfm?x=12321&y=1710

Thank you,
Quickbooks Online Team

An early Happy New Year to all of our readers. I wanted to highlight a few changes to our 1099-Misc preparation workflow in preparation of filing season.

1099k

The IRS has issued new reporting requirements for tax year 2011 1099-MISC form. These requirements will exclude some forms of payments from the 1099-MISC form that will instead be reported on the new third party form 1099-K.

If you’ve made payments to vendors in tax year 2011, you’ll only need to report certain types of transactions and exclude others.

What does this mean to you?

• Payments to 1099 vendors made via credit card, debit card, or third party system such as PayPal will be excluded from the 1099-MISC calculations.
• On the Prepare 1099-MISC screen…
  
• Navigate to the the Prepare 1099 Forms preview.  Note the column titled Total 1099 Payments Excluded. You can click on the total in this column to see an Excluded Payments by Vendor report which shows transaction details.  This report can help you verify if payments should indeed be excluded.
  

For additional information on the new IRS requirements please visit the links below:

• Explanation of final regulations published by the IRS on the new payment card reporting requirements:  http://www.irs.gov/govt/fslg/article/0,,id=226894,00.html
• IRS Third Party Reporting Information Center Link: http://www.irs.gov/taxpros/article/0,,id=225080,00.html

eFile

Prefer to electronically file your 1099 forms?

Well, you’re in luck! Intuit’s 1099 E-File Service allows 1099 forms to be filed electronically. For more information about the 1099 E-File Service, see this web page: http://payroll.intuit.com/support/kb/2000864.html.

Want to give it a try?

You can sign up for the E-file service here: https://onlinepayroll.intuit.com/welcome/1099.jsp

Thank you,
Quickbooks Online Team

YOU SPOKE AND WE LISTENED

“We NEED the ability for a customer to pay online with a credit card. . . seems like it should be a very basic part of Quickbooks online. . . People are scared of giving out routing numbers and bank info. Let them pay by credit cards!”

“Add a credit card option and you will have a winner”

“Intuit – when can we expect something like this to come out?? There are requests all over the forums and we have yet to hear any response (at least as far as I can see)…What’s the deal??”

“Excuse me for shouting, but… WE REALLY NEED OUR CUSTOMERS TO BE ABLE TO PAY ONLINE, USING A CREDIT CARD, BY CLICKING A LINK IN OUR EMAILED INVOICES.”

The above is just a small sample of the many comments we’ve received about credit card functionality.

Thank you for all the feedback. We are happy to announce the ability to accept credit card payment on invoices! Find out more about this new feature below.

What’s the new feature?

QuickBooks online customers can now get invoices paid by credit card, in addition to bank payments.

This is an optional feature and can be managed (turned on/off) at any time by the small business by signing into IPN and clicking on ‘Profile’ in the left navigation bar.

What does it cost?

This feature, like bank payments will not have monthly, set up or termination fees. You will also not be charged any fixed authorization fees per transaction. The only fee you pay is 3.25% per transaction when a customer pays by credit card.

How do I turn it on?

Sign into IPN and click ‘Profile’ in the left navigation bar. Navigate to ‘Receiving Preferences’ and click the ‘Turn On’ button. That’s it – easy! All invoices you create and send after turning this option ON can be paid by either credit card or bank account. You can turn OFF this option at any time.

What will my customers see?

Your customers will see an additional option to pay by credit card when they pay online.

What’s not available in this update?

• Currently, only Visa and MasterCard are supported.
• The option to turn on/turn off credit card payment method is a global setting in IPN, and cannot be changed for every invoice.

A big thanks to our IPN customers for the feedback, which helps us build great products for you!Try it out and let us know what you think.