QuickBooks 2015- The Good, Bad and Ugly, Part 1

QuickBooks 2015 became available for purchase, beginning yesterday.

Most years I spend hours writing about the new features in the upcoming version – but this year has just gotten away from me and while I did beta test QuickBooks Premier Accountant 2015 – time has simply gotten away from me. Plus the fact that no matter how many notes, screenshots, and comparisons you make during beta testing; the final product is often quite different.

So what I’ve decided to do this year is a three part series called The Good, The Bad, and the UGLY and just highlight things in bullet points with a brief description. I may raise a few eyebrows over some to the things that I end up putting in each of the three categories, but so be it.

I’m going to start with the “ugly” things, because I feel some of the following items are just that – ugly.  Ugly enough to make some people consider NOT upgrading to the 2015 product line because they will have a negative impact in one form or another.

QuickBooks 2015 – The Ugly

The following items pertain to QuickBooks Pro and Premier 2015 OR Enterprise 15.0.

• NO support for Windows XP – We all should have seen the writing on the wall back in July with the release of the R6 Maintenance Release for QuickBooks 2014 that produced an Error Connecting to the QuickBooks file when using 3rd party desktop software.  Don’t even bother to “try” and install any of the QuickBooks 2015 product on a Windows XP machine, it won’t install – and it’s NOT a bug. Bite the bullet and buy a new computer, preferably a Windows 7 machine.
• NO support for Office 2003 – None of the Technical Specifications lists for any of the QuickBooks 2015 product say anything about integration with Office 2003.  I don’t know for certain if you can still export reports Pfrom QuickBooks 2015 to Excel 2003 as I do not have Office 2003 installed anywhere any longer.
• Employee Organizer is no longer available in Enterprise – If you rely on Employee Organizer you just won’t find it in Enterprise 15.0, apparently Intuit’s provider of the regulates content has discontinued updates – this is the only thing I’ve seen and you can read it here – https://payroll.intuit.com/support/kb/2001733.html
• Sync Manager to be discontinued on March 1, 2016 – Intuit has told 3rd party software developers that the Sync Manager functionality built into current desktop versions of QuickBooks will be discontinued. As of yet, I have not heard about an alternate or substitute to the use of Sync Manager.
• Intuit PaymentNetwork no longer integrated/available in QuickBooks 2015 – If you utilize the Intuit PaymentNetwork (or IPN as it’s also called), you’ll find that it’s not an available option in QuickBooks 2015. Apparently you can still use IPN outside of QuickBooks to request payments, BUT you’ll need to manually add pay links to your emailed invoices and manually reconcile the deposits and fees. Here’s information on how to do this – https://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/articles/SLN88182?rmid=31904_QBDTMangoEmail31Tier2plus_001&rrid=21854932
• Salesforce for QuickBooks to be discontinue on December 3, 2014 – Supposedly all current subscribers have been notified of this and there is a transition plan to move existing subscribers from the Intuit version to the full-fledged Salesforce subscription – see this FAQ for more information – https://salesforceforquickbooks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203141840-About-Discontinuation-FAQ

So there you have the ugly about the latest release of QuickBooks 2015.  If none of these items apply to you or your business then all is well.

Look for Part 2 – QuickBooks 2015, The Bad and Part 3 – QuickBooks 2015 – The Good later this week.

What do you think of these changes?  Will any of them negatively impact your business or your clients business?