The R5 patch to QuickBooks 2010 should deliver the following improvements, all made based on your feedback:

1.  The “Recommended for You” widget in the Snapshot can now be turned off with one click. Just click on the “X” on the upper right side of the box.
2. The “Accept payments” sidebar on the Receive Payments and Sales Receipts screens can now be closed with one click.  Just click on the “close toolbar” on the upper left side of the box.  Alternatively, you can show or hide this sidebar through your preference settings.
3. You can now use the “turn off pop-ups” preference in QuickBooks to turn off newly added pop-ups in QuickBooks.  Please see our instructions on how to do this.
4. You can now turn off the “Payment Interview” permanently.  Just click on the “X” on the upper right corner.

The R5 patch was pushed to any version of QuickBooks 2010 which had updates turned on.  If you prefer to get the update manually, you can access that here.

The Intuit Developer Network has released the beta for a Software Developer Kit (SDK) to support creation of cloud computing applications within the WIndows Azure Platform.

For more information see this posting on the Intuit Developer Network site.

An exernal take on this development can be found on a posting in the ZDNet blog by Mary-Jo F0ley.

By: Intuit

In recent interviews, Enterprise Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors® tell how they delight clients with Enterprise Solutions by increasing productivity, often at a lower cost.

Videos Straight from QuickBooks ProAdvisors  to You

Intuit spoke with Enterprise Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors (identified below) on why accounting professionals should consider the solution for their clients, and one common denominator was productivity.

Most of these interviews were conducted during the 2009 Sleeter Group Conference last November. We talked with Certified Quick Books ProAdvisors who are delighting clients with productivity gains with Enterprise Solutions.

In the first video (5:55 min.), look for

	Esther Friedberg Karp on More Services		MB Raimondi on More Services
	Robin Hall on Training		Amy Vetter on Faster Performance

Next Step: Watch the video here.

Bonus Video: Busting Past Transaction Limits  In this video (1:04 min.), Mario Nowogrodzky talks about greater capacity, not just for the number of users but for the number of names in lists. [Note 1]

 

Practice Tip: The Magic Number of Users. In our first video, Amy Vetter and others note that some clients can save money moving to Enterprise Solutions. If a client is already updating QuickBooks Premier for three or more users each year, it is actually cheaper (after the first year) to move to Enterprise Solutions and acquire the Full Service Plan for future upgrades. [Notes 2, 3]

 Learn more on how to delight clients with QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions here.

1. Enterprise Solutions allows you to add up to one million names (e.g. customers, vendors, employees) and up to one million items (e.g. inventory, non-inventory, and service items). Some performance degradation is likely as your lists approach these size thresholds.
2. The Full Service Plan is good for 12 months from your QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions purchase date or Full Service Plan renewal date. The Intuit support team is available weekdays from 4 A.M. – 7 P.M. Pacific Time. Intuit reserves the right to limit each telephone contact to one hour and to one incident. Support availability subject to occasional downtime for systems and server maintenance, company events, observed U.S. holidays, and events beyond our control. Terms, conditions, pricing, service offerings, and availability of the Full Service Plan are subject to change at any time without notice. U.S. only. See terms and conditions at www.qbes.com/terms.
3. Additional fees may apply. Use of QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions with Remote Desktop Services requires certain hardware, Microsoft Server operating systems, Microsoft Windows Server software licenses, and Remote Desktop Services Server Client Access Licenses, which are not included with the QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions product and must be procured separately. For multiple remote users, a Remote Desktop Services Client Access License is required for each user. Requires purchase of additional licenses, sold separately in 5-user increments. All users must be on the same-year version of QuickBooks to access the same company file.

Living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I work with a lot of gallery owners selling unique pieces of artwork. The most difficult issue I run into is how to properly increase the value of an inventory item once improvements are added. 

In the art world, this happens when, following the initial purchase, a piece is restored, cleaned, and/or reframed before display for sale. 

I can imagine a similar problem faced by car dealers who purchase old cars and then restore them for subsequent sale. Maybe you’ve run into a similar issue for a company selling unique inventory items. 

Working with Improvements to Inventory 

Here is a good way to make sure that the proper inventory value is in QuickBooks® and subsequently the proper cost of goods sold value appears when the item is sold. 

Gallery Example. I will use a painting for this example. When a gallery buys an old painting, it is booked as a typical inventory purchase in QuickBooks, i.e. enter a Bill using the Items tab to show the addition of the inventory item at the initial cost. 

Start with the Original Painting 

Our painting cost $500, so QuickBooks shows the inventory item “Painting #3456” with a quantity of 1 at a value of $500 in the Inventory Assets account on the Balance Sheet. So far so good. 

Figure 1. Inventory Item Booked as Purchase 

Figure 2. Paintings Inventory Asset 

Improvements (Cleaning and Reframing) and Common Bookkeeping Missteps 

The gallery owner next sends the painting out to be cleaned and reframed. 

At this point, the bookkeeper usually tries one of two things, neither of which is correct. 

• Cost of Goods Sold. Some enter the bill for the service and post it directly to a COGS account called Restorations. This is incorrect since the cost should not be recorded until after the painting has sold.
• Inventory Item. Some enter the bill and post it to the inventory item under the Items tab. This is incorrect since, although no quantity is entered, QuickBooks assumes another of the same item has been purchased and suddenly there are two paintings in inventory.

Recommended Handling  

I’ve only found one way to record the changes properly in QuickBooks. For every cost associated with increasing the value of an inventory item, two entries must be made into QuickBooks. 

Preparation 

Before you make the entries, you will need to set up an equity account called Suspense. A suspense account is usually used as a temporary holding place for accounting adjustments. In no case should the suspense account carry a balance other than zero. Debits should always equal credits. 

Once the Suspense account is set up, you are ready to post. 

First Entry – Booking Improvement Cost 

The first entry is simply the bill to pay for the improvement to inventory. We had the painting cleaned and reframed for $1,000. Enter a Bill for that amount, but post this bill to the Suspense account. Do not post the bill to a COGS, Expense or Inventory account. 

The correctly entered bill results in a debit to Suspense (credit Accounts Payable). 

Figure 3. Bill to Suspense Account 

Second Entry – Adjusting Inventory Value 

The second entry is to adjust the value of the inventory item. 

Go under Vendors – Inventory Activities – Adjust Quantity/Value on Hand. Enter the same date as the bill date entered above. Enter the Adjustment Account as the Suspense account. 

Note: Click in the lower left hand box (see Figure 4) to select Value Adjustment. 

Enter the New Value for the “Painting” to be the current value (i.e. initial cost) plus the improvement for a total new value of $1,500. 

You’ll see at the bottom of the screen the Total Value of Adjustment which should equal the cost of the improvements from the bill above. Save and Close. The correctly entered adjustment results in a credit to Suspense (debit Inventory Asset). 

Figure 4. Adjusting the Value on Hand 

Double-Checking 

Now it’s time to double-check your entries. Here are two quick tests to make sure you are good to go. If results fail either test, find the entry that is incorrect and correct it. 

Test One. The balance of the Suspense account should be zero. 

See Figure 5.. 

Figure 5. Checking Suspense Account Balance 

Test Two. The count and average cost remain accurate. 

You can check these figures in one of two locations. Pull up the Inventory Valuation Summary (or the Inventory Valuation Detail) report by going under Reports > Inventory. Check that there is still only one (1) “Painting” On Hand and that the Average Cost of the “Painting” reflects the total cost of purchase plus improvements, i.e. $1,500. 

Figure 6. Inventory Valuation Summary 

Figure 7. Inventory Valuation Detail 

You can repeat steps 1 and 2 above every time improvements to the item are made. 

Sales 

Now you are ready to sell the painting. 

When the sale of the painting is recorded on an invoice/sales receipt for $2,500, you’ll see the income post as $2,500 and the appropriate COGS post as $1,500 with a Profit Margin of $1,000. Exactly as it should. 

Figure 8. Creating the Invoice 

Figure 9. Profit & Loss 

Conclusion 

The above process can be adapted to many other situations in which clients purchase inventory, improve its value, and then sell it. 

Enjoy accounting in QuickBooks! 

Challenge Ends Feb. 12. Take the challenge, and read the full rules and regulations, at

www.chooseqb.com/CDRChallenge

Stay Current. Tax deadlines show up as events in a unique calendar that sits next to your online appointment calendar. The calendar is meant to be a helpful reminder for accountants of important tax deadlines.

How It Works. You simply click on the following link, which takes you to a page with the image shown above.

Subscribe Here: The Intuit IRS Tax Calendar

When you click on the image in the Web page, you can choose from several options when the following options box appears:

From here you can choose the calendar format you would like to install.

More in the Way of Help

Some users miss the help link available above, and click directly to their preferred destination, so we want to repeat that help link here:

Help in subscribing to this calendar.

Managing the Intuit IRS Tax Calendar in Outlook

We also wanted to share some further tips for the many readers currently using Outlook. (Screenshots following are from Outlook 2007.)

When you first download the calendar to Outlook, the new tax calendar may take up more real estate than you would like. To manaage the display, you can overlay the tax calendar with your existing calendar by clicking on the arrow in Outlook.

This step allows you to access the tax calendar from its own tab but carries your main Outlook calendar on top.

After that step, the calendar should look like this in display:

If at any time you don’t want to see the IRS calendar, you can always uncheck it here:

R10 restores the Sales Tax Liability Report. Intuit is working on R11 now to complete the fix to the other sales tax report afffected, the Sales Tax Revenue Summary Report.

This and related issues are discussed in more detail in today’s QuickBooks ProAdvisor Alert, which the ProAdvisor team is allowing us to make public, here.

Editor’s Note: Intuit is making QuickBooks 2009 R10 available today as an Automatic Update to users of QuickBooks 2009.  R10 was created to fix a potential issue with certain Sales Tax Reports (see previous posting here), an issue introduced in R9. But the fix to Sales Tax Reports is not complete in R10. The following is the first part of an Alert, with a link to the full Alert on the Intuit Website, that will be going out shortly to QuickBooks ProAdvisors, among others.

Critical notice: After this R10 update, the Sales Tax Revenue Summary Report may not display all of the line-item detail you may need to prepare sales tax reports for tax authorities. If you need to prepare sales tax reports for tax authorities before the next update is available, click here to determine if you are affected by this issue and need a workaround to get the information you need to submit your sales tax filings.

Alert continues here… 

Intuit confirms it is working on an update to fix this issue and will release it as soon as it is available.  Despite the issue with the Sales Tax Revenue Summary Report, Intuit strongly recommends upgrading from R8 to R10 to take advantage of the database upgrades that improve the stability of QuickBooks and receive important updates for our Intuit Payroll Service. If you or clients are still on R8, be sure to see guidance on installing R9/R10, especially where the software is implemented over a network.

Also: The extra steps for network installations are required only once. That is, if the user has updated with R9 on a network, the R10 update can be handled without additional steps and without updating the QuickBooks Database Server.

However, if network users have not updated to R9, when they update to R10 they will have to make sure all machines are updated, including the QuickBooks Database Server, using the Administrative login, as explained on the Intuit Website.

The patch was pulled after normal business hours but the pullback appears now to be part of a decision related to the R4 update itself, and not related to a temporary update to the Website.

I’m hoping by later this morning I will know more that I can share via blog and QuickBooks ProAdvisor Critical Alert.