Changes to All Versions of QuickBooks 2015 for Windows
General Changes
Income Tracker has been improved to add Time & Expenses transactions to the money bar. In
addition, you have the option of excluding estimates, sales orders and time & expenses from the
unbilled section of the money bar.
Insights is a new dashboard that is added to the Home Page. This is a more up to date, cleaner
and interactive feature than the older Company Snapshot, although it doesn’t include all of the
charts that the older dashboard had.
Pinned Notes: Now you can “pin” a note for a customer or vendor so that it always shows in the
Center for that list, as well as being the default note included in reports You can only have one
pinned note though..
Flags on Billable Time & Costs: When you are adding billable time and costs to an invoice you
can see how many records there are available in the various tabs, making it less likely that you’ll
overlook something.
Send Portable Company File: This is a feature that lets you send a portable company file to
someone in a simpler fashion than the way we used to.
Reminders Window revamp: The Reminders window has undergone a visual update to make it
easier to understand and work with.
Lots of Little Changes:
Multi User Admin: The Admin user now has the ability to end another user’s
QuickBooks session even if they have unsaved data.
Estimates are automatically closed when you fully invoice them (at last!).
Improved filters in the Inventory Center.
Customer PO # can be added to the Customer Center transaction tab.
Improved selection of items to move from a Sales Order to an Invoice.
Warning when inactivating items that have a quantity on hand.
Branding Changes: New Logo for all QuickBooks Products. You will now see the new
QuickBooks logo for all the versions of QuickBooks 2015 you will install.
Reporting Changes
Report Appearance Revamp: Intuit wants to make reports easier to see while on the screen
(this doesn’t affect printed reports). You’ll see background shading to highlight some lines, more
vertical and horizontal lines, a bit more spacing between lines, and so forth.
Comments on Reports: You can take a “snapshot” of any report, and then add annotations
(comments) to any line.
Send Multiple Reports: Now you can click an email button and send a group of reports all as
attachments to one email message.
Report filter names are sorted alphabetically, and are searchable.
Filter Inactive/Active Names on Name-Based Reports: Reports where a customer or vendor
name is the primary key, like a Customer Balance Detail report, now have a filter where you can
select all active or inactive names.
Adding Other 1 and Other 2 to Reports: These fields have often been neglected, and were less
useful than custom fields. Now you can add them to transaction detail reports, as well as filter
records by their value.
Manufacturer’s Part Number on Sales Transactions: Now you can add the Manufacturer’s
Part Number as a column in invoices, sales receipts and sales orders. But not credit memos.
QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions
Inventory
Disallow Negative Quantities: Is a preference setting that will prevent you from using more
inventory part or inventory assembly items than you have on hand.
Negative Item Listing is a new report that lists all items with a negative quantity on hand, which
is useful.
Shortage Report for Manufacturing: If you want to build an assembly you must have the parts
on hand. If you don’t, the new shortage report will show you exactly what you have on hand,
how many the build needs, and give you a list of the shortages. You can also get this report to
cover all “pending builds” that you have waiting for parts.
Inventory Stock Status report upgrades: A new “full assemblies” checkbox that will make the
report look at all levels of a multiple-level assembly. Also a filter to hide lines that have a “zero
reorder quantity”.
Transactions and Form Customization
Total Columns on Forms: You can set your subtotal item to show a subtotal of the quantity,
price, cost or any custom field, rather than just the amount.
Sorting Columns on Forms: In sales forms, purchase orders, weekly timesheets, build
assemblies, checks, credit card charges, bills and item receipts, you can simply click on a column
heading and the detail lines will sort by that column.
Footer on Last Page on Forms: If you have a sales or purchasing form that flows over to more
than one page, why should you have the “total” box show in the footer of every page?
QuickBooks Enterprise has an option to Only show Total on the last page.
Search on Transactions: A new tab in transactions that lets you do a “search” within the
transaction to find a specific value.
Showing Cost on Sales Transactions
Row Shading on forms: You can specify that forms should print with alternating rows of
shading, which is a nice feature.
Miscellaneous
There is a preference setting to hide opening balances in the display for names and items.
There is a preference setting to not allow sales to overdue customers.
Advanced Reporting
Advanced Reporting feature for QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions. This is a very flexible
reporting function that will make a copy of your database into a separate data store and let you
do all kinds of wonderful things.
Goodbye to the Employee Organizer
The Employee Organizer will be discontinued starting with the 2015 release.
QuickBooks for Mac
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Expense Tracker: Use this to see all expense related transactions in one place. You can get an
instant overview of what’s on order, what you owe, and what you’ve paid. Batch print or email
transactions directly from the Expense Tracker list and filter by transaction or vendor.
Budgets enhancement: Create budgets by fiscal year and gain business insights as you evaluate
how you are doing against your plan. You can easily run reports and compare your actual
performance to your goals.
Batch import transactions enhancement: Save time by batch-importing invoices, payments
and bills. No need to manually enter transactions, you can easily import them all in one
spreadsheet directly into QuickBooks.
Attachments enhancement: You can now attach any relevant files to: Chart of Accounts, Items
List, My Company Preference, Employees and Other Names, Vehicles, Sales Reps, Make
Deposits, Reconcile.
Additional improvements
Customize e-mails: Customize the subject line and edit the reply to email address when
you send an email within QuickBooks.
Sales Tax Liability Drill Down: Double click on any total in your Sales Tax Liability
form to view the detail of the line items that make up this total.
Send to Accountant: Process to send files to your accountant has been streamlined.
Additionally files are automatically verified before you export them.
Searchable and Sortable Registers: Filter line items and transactions in your registers.
Updated Deposits: Quickly access your deposits history with the improved and easy to
use deposits window.
QuickMath: Complete simple math within all calculable fields.
Custom date formats: Now supports display and entry of dates in formats defined by Mac
OS X system preferences.
New QuickBooks 2015 Features: All Versions
QuickBooks 2015 Income Tracker Improvements
Intuit added the Income Tracker in QuickBooks 2014, let’s see what we have for QuickBooks
2015 Income Tracker improvements.
You have a new option in the money bar, Time & Expenses. This is a nice addition, you can see
any billable time & expenses records that haven’t been billed to the customer. Note that there
will be only one line for each customer – all of the outstanding billable time & expenses records
for that customer are consolidated in one line.
In the upper right corner you’ll find a gear icon, this gives you the option for hiding the bars for
Estimates, Sales Orders and Time & Expenses. That is nice, if you don’t use those features you
can clean up the display a bit.
In addition, with Time & Expenses records, if you right-click on the transaction the popup
context menu has an option to Create Invoice. This will add all of the outstanding time &
expenses for this customer to the invoice. If you want to pick and choose which to include on the
invoice, select Choose Billables, the next option on the menu.
Pinned Notes
The Notes tab was added to the customer, vendor, inventory and employee “Centers” in
QuickBooks 2013. This year the feature has been enhanced to add the ability to “pin” a particular
note, thereby making it the primary note that is viewed.
When you add a new note in QuickBooks 2015 you will see a new checkbox, Pinned Note. If
you check this then this note becomes the “pinned” note, and it shows in the upper right corner
of the Center.
This is very helpful. In prior versions none of the notes were displayed in the top display of the
customer center. You had to select the Notes tab to see them.
Note the following:
Only one note can be “pinned” per master record (Customer, Vendor, Item).
You cannot un-check the pinned note box when editing the note itself. Once you have at least
one note for a record there has to be one that is pinned, so un-checking the selected one would
leave you without one that is pinned. You can easily change which note is the pinned note by
clicking on the pin icon by a note in the list in the notes tab.
If you upgrade an existing file from a prior year, the top note on the list for each record
(customer, vendor, etc.) will be marked as the pinned note.
If a report lets you add a Note field, it will be the pinned note that is shown. Keep in mind that
this is the Note field, not the Notes field, which (as you can see below) is very different.
.Flags on Billable Time and Costs
When you elect to add “outstanding billable time and/or costs” to an invoice you will now see a
number on each of the tabs in the Choose Billable Time and Costs window. These show you how
many outstanding entries there are in each tab.
Reminders Window Update
The Reminders window has undergone a visual and functional update.
Here’s the Reminders window from the 2014 product:
You can tell that there are some records in some of the sections because there are numbers in the
Amount column, but unless you double click on an item to expand it you can’t tell how many
items are there. Particularly in the “To Do Notes” section.
Here’s the revamped Reminders window in QuickBooks 2015. As you can see, they are
continuing with the trend to provide more space around elements, to use different fonts to break
up what it otherwise a monotonous display. Of course, this also means that it takes more space.
You can add a “To Do” directly from here, which is nice, if you are using that feature.
The “Upcoming” section gives you a preview of activity coming up in the next few days. This is
quite useful, particularly if you are using the to do feature.
You can easily see how many records there are in each section by the numbers in parentheses,
similar to the change in the billable time and costs window.
Warning When Inactivating Items
This is a nice change – if you try to make an inventory part or inventory assembly item
“inactive” when it has a non-zero quantity on hand, you get this warning.
This is important, because if you have inactive items with a quantity on hand the value of these
items won’t be included in the inventory valuation reports, BUT the value will be included in
your balance sheet. This is one of the first things that I check when working with a new client
who manages inventory.
Kick Users Out!
In a multi-user QuickBooks environment there are times when you have to be in single user
mode. The admin user has the ability to see what users are logged in, and those users can be shut
down remotely by the admin. HOWEVER, if those users happen to have left an active
transaction window open, the admin has not been able to kick them out. Until now. With
QuickBooks 2015 there is an option to “Close even if users have unsaved data”, for those times
when the admin just has to close everyone else down regardless of what they are doing.
Use this with caution! It isn’t something you normally want to do, but sometimes you just gotta
do what you gotta do.
Improved Inventory Center Filters
In the Inventory Center we now have an option to list all of the inventory part and inventory
assembly items (active and inactive), where before you were limited to just the active items (or,
all items of just one type).
Customer PO Number in Customer Center
Another helpful small fix, you can add a “P.O. Number” column to the Transactions tab in the
Customer Center, when you are showing sales transactions (“all sales transactions” or
individually estimates, sales orders or invoices). It is interesting to note that this customization is
specific to each of the views – if you add the column to the “sales order” list, it won’t show up in
the “invoice” list automatically.
Right click on any column heading and pick customize columns.
Improved Selection of Sales Order Items
If you create an invoice from a sales order and choose “Create invoice for selected items”, the
window that opens to let you select the quantities of items has been updated.
A selection column is added on the left that lets you select the items to include in the invoice that
is created. This is independent of the “to invoice” quantity. That is, regardless of the quantity to
invoice, any checked item is included and any item not checked is not included.
If “to invoice” has a quantity but the line isn’t checked, the line isn’t included in the invoice.
If “to invoice” has a zero quantity but the line is checked, the line is included, with the zero
quantity.
Branding Changes
Last year I talked about the new QuickBooks Logo that was starting to show up in different
places. This year we are finally seeing the new logo show up in the desktop product.
You will also see this in the QuickBooks icon used in the desktop shortcut and system tray.
One minor annoyance here is that the same icon is used for Pro, Premier and Enterprise. We used
to be able to differentiate between Pro/Premier and Enterprise by the icon.