One month after I posted this on 10/2/23, the problem isn’t fixed. And I haven’t been waiting a month, I’ve been waiting since I migrated my client from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online in late June 2023 and was involuntarily assigned the “new customer invoicing experience.”
And remember, it’s not just that I cannot create a new invoice template (“recurring transaction”), but the templates that migrated over from QB Desktop cannot be updated and saved. Let’s say I’m billing a series of five identical fees. The first invoice says, “Fee 1 of 5,” the second says, “Fee 2 of 5” but I cannot save the new wording so that I will know which was the last one I billed next time I use the template. I have to keep track separately where I am in the series. Of course, I already keep a list of all invoice numbers I use because QB Online does a terrible job of assigning invoice numbers, and I have not found where you can put it back on track when it’s out of sequence the way you could in QB Desktop.
Because vendor bill entry hasn’t been given a “new experience,” when I save a vendor bill I created from a template, I am asked if I want to update the recurring template to reflect the changes just entered. As it should do. As customer invoice templates used to do.
Why would Intuit roll out a change (an “improvement”?) when it doesn’t do some really basic things that the predecessor version did?
To Intuit’s credit, I have noticed something that has changed/been fixed, something that was badly needed. Either Intuit fixed it or I just found out how to turn it on; I cannot find again where I was to make this change. It used to be that the invoice did not display on the screen the invoice total as you were creating the invoice. Who doesn’t want to know the invoice total as you’re creating the invoice? This seems insanely obvious. Instead, I had to print the invoice to PDF to see the total, there’s no way to get it to appear. Recently, I got it to show the total on the screen. Again, why would Intuit release an “improvement” that didn’t do what is basic and obvious and that the previous version did?
And as predicted in my previous post, this seriously flawed “new customer invoicing experience” has become standard: “Recently, we gave people the opportunity to try out our new estimate and invoice layout for QuickBooks Online. The new layout offers access to the latest innovations, more automation tools, an ability to preview what a customer sees—and more. We’re pleased to announce that this layout will be available to everyone, starting with QuickBooks Simple Start in October.”
