What’s New in QuickBooks 2016 Pro and Premier

QuickBooks 2016 Desktop was recently released and there are a few new features that you will want to take a look at to see if it has something worth upgrading for.

Bill Tracker
The Bill Tracker is similar to the Income Tracker in the Customer Center that was released as a new feature in QuickBooks 2014 and improved with QuickBooks 2015. The Bill Tracker is located in the Vendor Center and allows a Snapshot View of Purchase Orders, Open Bills, Overdue Bills and Bills that have been paid in the last 30 days. Transactions can be managed from this area and batch actions can be taken to print or email and to close Purchase Orders and Pay Bills.


This Fiscal Year-to-Last Month
In the past, we had choices for date ranges on financial reports of This Fiscal Year or This Fiscal Year-to-Date as well as This Month or This Month-to-Date, none of which worked well for month-end reporting purposes. We now have This Fiscal Year-to-Last Month which allows us to print our financial reports as of the end of the Last Month, through which accounts are typically reconciled. This will allow us to Memorize Reports with the correct date instead of saving with a Custom Date that needs to be changed each time.


Bulk Clear “Send” Forms
Sales Receipts, Invoices, Estimates and Purchase Orders all have an Email Later check box and it’s a “sticky” feature, meaning that once selected, it remembers for future transactions. In the past, we would accumulate many documents in the queue to be sent later and if we wished to clear the queue, it would have to be done individually. With this release, under the File menu, Send Forms, we can now Select All and click Remove.


Label Printer Support
QuickBooks 2016 has the ability to print continuous feed labels and we can select from any of the Names Lists as well as by Customer or Vendor Type and by Zip Code.


Enhanced Rebuild/Verify
QuickBooks 2016 allows you to View the Errors and shows links to Knowledgebase Articles about the errors encountered. This saves a lot of time hunting and pecking through the Notepad QBWIN.log for the specific details about the error.

Streamline Company File Upgrade 
Intuit tells us that the Upgrade process is supposed to be faster. I have not noticed a difference in the time it takes to upgrade from a prior year version of the software. My advice – no matter what –
do a Backup!
Unless you see something in these changes that has been an issue for you in the version you are using now, there is no real reason to upgrade. If Intuit stays true to form, the 2013 version of QuickBooks will be sunsetted in May of 2016 at which time those users will be required to update if they wish to continue using any of the integrated services such as online banking, merchant services, payroll and email from within the program.