Intuit QuickBooks 2011 – Some Really _Neat_ Features

Keeping in mind that we have had our fair share of issues with QuickBooks (Blog Label) in the past, this post is actually quite refreshing.

We delayed migrating our own QB 2007 company file to any new version of QuickBooks (QB) due to the number of times we would be migrating our own network (SBS 2003 –> SBS v7 NDA bits –> SBS 2011 RTM) as well as due to the need to rebuild all of our custom forms for invoices, purchase orders, sales orders, and others _each migration_.

We finally broke down and ran through the backend setup on our SBS 2011 RTM VM making all of the necessary firewall exceptions (Previous Blog Post).

We then installed QB 2011 on a Windows 7 VM that we use for management and ran through the QB 2007 to QB 2011 database upgrade locally on that VM. That process went through without any issues that we can see (our bookkeeper and accountants will have the final say on that).

We moved the database over to the SBS 2011 server share and opened the database in Multi-User mode with no issues too while still logged in.

We then installed QB 2011 Premiere on our Remote Desktop Services server to test its RDS and RemoteApp compatibility. To our pleasant surprise QB 2011 came up without issue while logged onto an RDS session as a Standard User. While logged in with an admin account IE’s restricted mode would cause QB to choke.

So, we published QB 2011 Premiere via the RemoteApp manager and created an RDP file for connecting via our RD Gateway and another RDP file for internal users.

QB 2011 is RD RemoteApp Friendly

We are happy to report that our QB 2011 is running via RemoteApp both internally and via our RD Gateway without a problem:

• QuickBooks 2011 Premiere Taskbar RemoteApp Icon

The process of customizing our forms was not too painful using the built-in Layout Designer.

One of the neat things with the new QB GUI though is the ability to change the Invoice or PO input GUI columns around to make them larger or smaller:

Invoice entry before:

Invoice entry after:

Note the increase in the width of the Item column. What this means is that we can actually _see_ the part number as QB always appends a prefix indicating the location of the part number (we have yet to discover that this feature can be turned off).

Now that we have had a chance to use the software, overall we are quite impressed with its responsiveness and the major GUI improvements.

Barring any issues with the books themselves, we are happy with the changes in the software and our own user experience.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer