Happy New Year 2020! Well, happy new year in the QuickBooks sense…
QuickBooks Desktop 2020 is now available, and we are proud that our team was an integral part in the development of the new features of this new release. Mendelson Consulting has been part of the QuickBooks Enterprise Product Council longer than any other consulting practice. The QB Enterprise Council is a select group of less than 10 consultants across the country who Intuit entrusts to work closely with the QB Enterprise product managers in the development of new features and functionalities of the program.
Here are the changes and improvements that make the most sense to highlight. Unless otherwise noted, all new and improved features are available for all versions of QuickBooks Desktop 2020 (Pro/Premier 2020, Accountant Edition 2020, and Enterprise 20.0). These are listed in the order of how impactful or useful they will be for most users (in declining order):
Landed cost (Enterprise Platinum only)
The cost of acquiring inventory products includes more than just the material costs of the items. With the new Landed Cost feature, QuickBooks Enterprise users have greater visibility into actual product costs by factoring in freight-in, duties, insurance, and other related costs incurred during the purchase cycle, calculated by quantity, value, weight, or volume.
Collapse columns in reports
If you have complex reporting, you can now easily hide and unhide multiple columns in reports that use jobs and classes to view customer totals or class totals without having to scroll or export to Excel.
Alternate vendors (Enterprise only)
This is an enhanced way to manage items and vendors and make sure you are choosing the right vendor when buying inventory items. The centralized vendor information center now contains vendor contact and pricing data, helping to make more informed purchase decisions. And you can easily create purchase orders with vendor information automatically included.
Automated Payment Reminders
If you spend a lot of time following up on accounts receivable, payment reminders automate the most painful part – identifying overdue invoices and composing emails. You can schedule, review and send payment reminders to your customers for their due/overdue invoices.
Express pick-pack (Enterprise Platinum only)
You now have flexibility with the sales order fulfillment process to save time by consolidating the picker/packer roles, actions, and approvals. In prior year’s release of the Pick/Pack/Ship sales order fulfillment function, each task had to be done in sequence separately. Now, you can choose to complete the Pick and Pack process as a single workflow, making the process faster and enabling the same individual to perform the picking and packing tasks as one.
Combine multiple emails for a single Customer:Job
You now have the option to combine multiple invoices for the same Customer:Job into a single email message. This means simplifying payment processing by the customer by consolidating multiple invoices into one email, something not available before.
Inventory cycle count (Enterprise only)
This was added mid-year in Enterprise 19.0 (in release R3). Depending on the amount of inventory a company must manage, cycle counts in QuickBooks Enterprise provides added efficiencies. Cycle counts are less disruptive to daily operations, providing an ongoing measure of inventory accuracy and can even be tailored to specific high value inventory items, for example. Cycle counts means counting a subset of the inventory products currently in stock, in contrast to a traditional physical inventory count where operations are halted to count the entire list of inventory items in stock. Cycle counts with QuickBooks Enterprise can be integrated with the use of a mobile scanning device (requires Enterprise Platinum edition).
Payroll status for direct deposit enabled customers
Be confident of your payroll run by viewing the detailed status of direct deposit processing without having to check emails or calling support.
Automatically add customer PO Number to Invoice emails
If you work with customers who need to connect purchase orders to their invoices, you can make life easier for them by adding their PO number as the first thing they see in the subject of an invoice email.
Conclusion
After trying the new features and improvements in 2020 – for several of which we helped by directly interacting with the Enterprise product managers as they were developing the particular functions – you will agree that it keeps with the philosophy of the power to grow that QuickBooks has professed for years, helping to facilitate integrity in financials and efficiency in operations.
Happy QuickBooks 2020 everyone!
…MARIO
