What’s New in Enterprise for 2015 – Part 2

Part 1 of our What’s New in Enterprise for 2015 focused on the changes to the Preferences. This issue will cover some of the other changes that were made to enhance this more powerful and robust version of QuickBooks.

Total Columns on Forms

In addition to being able to total the dollar amounts on transaction forms, we can now total Quantity and Custom Fields such as weights and counts specific to our industry.

This is available on Invoices, Sales Receipts, Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, Checks, Bills and Credit Card Charges. The Custom Field must be a numeric field and not text.

A section has been added to the Subtotal Item to allow you to edit and select which columns to total on forms.

This feature does not work well with Units of Measure. There is no way for the program to understand 2 each or 2 dozen and make the proper calculation. It’s also a little tricky for Group Items but it can be configured to work for this type of item.

Sort on Columns in Transactions

We now have the ability to sort columns on our transaction forms. This is available in Estimates, Sales Orders, Invoices, Assemblies, Checks, Credit Card Charges, Bills, Item Receipts, Credit Memos, Sales Receipts, Weekly Timesheets and Purchase Orders.

It behaves property with Subtotal Items by sorting those items above the Subtotal separately from the items below the subtotal. It does not do as well with Group Items.

Other than making the forms look neater, I don’t really understand it’s purpose here.

Search Within Transactions

This feature I like for when I am trying to find that needle in a haystack, like on lengthy purchase orders when I can’t remember if I added something to my order and I want to go back and look for it.

It’s located on a separate tab in the transaction menu ribbon. Just type in the box and it will search the displayed transaction for matches to your inquiry. It looks at the Item Code and the Description only – not custom fields.

Shaded Lines on Forms and Reports

For me, this makes my forms and reports easier to read by alternating shaded lines. This option is available in the print window and is stored in the local printer preferences; it is saved per form and per user.

The option is available on Estimates, Sales Orders, Pick Ticket lists, Packing Slips, Invoices, Purchase Orders, Bills, Item Receipts, Sales Receipts, building Assemblies, the physical inventory worksheet and item price lists.

Show Cost on Sales Forms

This field is available for Sales/Work Orders, Invoices and Sales Receipts. It is only a screen option and will not print on the forms themselves. It allows you to see your cost as your making a sale and with the new Subtotal feature, you can compare your total cost to your total sale.

Keep in mind that this is Cost, not Average Cost. I can imagine that this would be useful in calculating customer discounts or mark-downs at the time of a sale to make sure that you’re not selling below cost.

Print Footer on Last Page Only

I’ve been waiting for this one, unfortunately it’s only in Enterprise 2015 and not Pro and Premier 2015. The option is located in the additional customization settings of the form template on the last tab – Print – Only Show Total on the Last Page.

This avoids having that blank Total Box show on the first page of an invoice with multiple pages. It suppresses the entire footer with the exception of custom text boxes and page numbers.

It affects Invoices, Sales Orders, Estimates and Purchase Orders. For some unknown reason it is not currently available on Credit Memos or Sales Receipts. Maybe they will add that later.

There are quite a few more changes in Enterprise 2015 – too lengthy to cover in this article – and I am sure that there will be more to follow. At the time of this writing, rumor has it that there will be a big announcement regarding the Enterprise platform at the QB Connect conference in San Jose next week – I’ll let you know what I find out.