News from Intuit
Every year when a new version of QuickBooks is released Intuit also reviews their various other services and offerings and announce changes, updates, or items that will be discontinued. There are several articles available that cover what’s new in the QuickBooks 2015 version; however we wanted to highlight a few of the ‘biggies’ that everyone should be aware of outside of any new features or UI changes.
Intuit Discontinuing Intuit Sync Manager
Add-on software developers have been notified that Intuit Sync Manager will be discontinued on March 1, 2016. This includes the services that support Sync Manager.
If you are a QuickBooks user, and you’re using one of the apps that use Sync Manager, you will not be able to use that app starting in March 2016. For the list of apps affected go to: https://bit.ly/1BFgdwi
A couple of popular examples are: ReceiptMatch with QuickBooks and the QuickBooks Client Collaborator. It’s still unclear what will happen with the Client Collaborator (which was new in 2013); hopefully they will build a new connector instead of discontinuing it.
Employee Organizer
The Employee Organizer is specific to QuickBooks Enterprise; or I should say ‘was’ specific to earlier versions of Enterprise. If you use this free add-in now you won’t want to upgrade to Enterprise 2015 until you find a replacement product.
Salesforce for QuickBooks
On September 4th Intuit announced that they were discontinuing Salesforce for QuickBooks effective December 3, 2014. Salesforce was a CRM subscription that integrated with QuickBooks via the QuickBooks-Salesforce Integration App. You can switch your subscription from Intuit to Salesforce directly and use Salesforce as a stand-alone CRM, but you will not have the ability to ‘share’ data between Intuit’s QuickBooks and your Salesforce CRM.
You can migrate your Salesforce data to other CRM products if needed.
As reported on Charlie Russell’s Sleeter Group Blog there are some 3rd party utilities that may offer a way to ‘exchange data’ between QuickBooks and Salesforce. But of course, that will cost you more in time and money.
Intuit is giving users three months to complete the conversion. For more information, see the Salesforce FAQ page.
Windows XP
One more important thing to keep in mind: QuickBooks 2015 does not support Windows XP. If you’re still using Windows XP you must update your operating system to Windows 7 or 8 before you upgrade your QuickBooks to the 2015 version. Even if you’re not planning on upgrading to QuickBooks 2015, you should still be concerned about using Windows XP on a computer that is connected to the Internet since it is no longer supported by Microsoft. Microsoft retired the popular operating system on April 8, 2014; so no further security updates will be released for XP; which could put your data at risk.
Intuit PaymentNetwork
This has to be one of the worst decisions Intuit has ever made! Many of us bill through our QuickBooks file, it’s a daily necessity and it’s always been very easy to do this within QuickBooks. I had always used their Merchant Services; however last year it stopped working in my 2013 file one day with no warning. I upgraded to 2014 thinking that would fix it; unfortunately that wasn’t the case – they basically said it was no longer available and I had to use IPN (Intuit PaymentNetwork). I switched to that and have been using it for just over a year now.
It seems that IPN is not actually going away (yet), we can still manually add a payment link to the emailed invoices – but how is that very helpful? So the bottom line is the nice in-product integration is no longer available in QuickBooks 2015 and there is not a replacement product. If last year is any indication, we may even have problems in our 2013 and 2014 files. Personally I’ve not experienced any problems; however 2015 became available to end-users yesterday – so it feels like a ticking time bomb. I have seen a few forum posts of others having issues already – so this one change can wreck a lot of havoc on a user!
As always, if you use ANY 3rd party programs or add-ins it’s very important that you check with the developer, or company, before you update to the newest QuickBooks version. There is no guarantee that whatever program that you have successfully working with QuickBooks now will work with a new version.
Use your feedback icon in QuickBooks to send your feedback to Intuit – that’s how they track improvements and make changes. Hopefully if enough people complain and provide enough feedback some USEFUL changes will come about; we can always hope.