The new QuickBooks 2015 brings more functionality. While there are some new features, many are simply improvements (that have been on wish lists for a long time).

Get information about your business – While new to desktop QuickBooks, this has been a popular feature in QuickBooks Online (aka QBO). This dashboard is a tab on your home page and allows you to quickly see how your business is doing. (FYI, I still prefer the company snapshot, but it may be in the minority.)

Better track income and expenses. If you liked the Income Tracker, you will definitely like the Income and Expense Tracker. What’s great about this feature is that you get both a total dollar amount of unbilled time and expenses and the number of customers with unbilled time and expenses. When you see it dollarized, that could help you bill faster! One feature I liked about Premier is seeing all your time and unbilled expenses in one place, but it doesn’t have totals, which the tracker does.

Better billable expense and time alerts – One of my complaints in the past was that if I had time and / or billable expenses and used QuickBooks Pro, I had to click on each type of expense to see if there was anything there. Now you can easily know what types of expenses you need to bill; It not only has an indicator that there is a billable expense, but also how many.

Easier-to-use reports with 3 enhancements.

1. Modify has become simpler with the addition of a search box (for filters and display columns) and the filters are now alphabetical (yes!)

2. Background shading and horizontal lines make it easy to read large reports.

3. Now you can comment directly on the report; just click the comment button and select where you want to comment.

Reminders and notifications now grouped for today and soon in the redesign of Reminders.

Keep a note in sight with the “pin” note function.

Log out of QuickBooks from a workstation. Has anyone ever logged into QuickBooks and then left their session open and now they can’t get into single user mode? With this feature, you can log in as an administrator and log out of that person; this is done through the QuickBooks Messenger window. Use it with caution as it will not save a transaction that has been created / edited and not completed.

Add the manufacturer part number (MPN) to a purchase order or sales transactionn – finally! This should have been added a long time ago for those using part numbers

Select which items to invoice from the sales order (Premier and Enterprise) – Finally! Just click next to the items. Before, you had to enter an amount of 0 and then manually remove it from the invoice.

If your version of QuickBooks is retiring in 2015, I think you will like a lot of the improvements. Those of you at Premier who deal with inventory can find the manufacturer’s part number and the characteristics of the sales order make it worth updating soon.