New features in QBD 2021

The new QBD 2021 features included in QuickBooks Pro, Premier, and Enterprise are as follows:

• Improved Bank Feeds: Improvements have been made to allow you to quickly auto categorize and batch-editing. There's more flexibility and efficiency with bank rules and you are able to quickly review and resolve discrepancies.
• Customer Groups: This new feature allows you to create customer groups based on a set of rules. You can manage communications with specific groups and add a new customer using select criteria and the customer group will update automatically.
• Payment Reminders: This new feature is also known as automated statements.  Create an automatic reminder to send recurring statements out on a specific day or date every month or as often as necessary. Create reminders for specific customer groups based on a set criteria.
• Customize Payment Receipts: A new template is available that allows you to customize customer payment receipts. You can add your company logo, add color, and select from various receipt formats.
• Improved Email Invoice and Attachment Preview: This feature was introduced in 2020 and has been improved to ensure confidence that the correct documents are attached to an email before you send it out. 
• Improved QuickBooks Desktop Manager: This tool makes it easy to find and install all of your owned QuickBooks Desktop software assets. This is ideal for accounting professionals that may need to install an older version of QuickBooks. This is also helpful to a small business looking for license details and a download link. You can access this tool by using this link: https://downloads.quickbooks.com/app/qbdt/products
• Improved QuickBooks Tool Hub: This is a resource center where you can obtain answers to fix common issues related to installation, file, network, and password issues. Click on https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/ and search for Tool Hub or QuickBooks Desktop Tool Hub.
• Improved Simplified Employee Payroll Setup: This is a guided payroll setup with an option to invite employees to set up their personal information such as home address, W4 tax withholding, and direct deposit details. Business owners can approve the information supplied by the employee and import it into QuickBooks.
• Improved Auto Matching of Merchant Payments: This tool has been improved to better match merchant payments to invoices so users can focus on specific transactions that need attention. Faster funding of credit card payments is also included.
• Improved QuickBooks Capital Funding: Business owners can access transparent, flexible business funding from within their QuickBooks file. There are no origination fees, prepayment penalties, or hidden charges.  From within your QuickBooks file, click on the Banking menu and select Get Financing.

In addition to the features and improvements noted above, QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise 21.0 includes the following additional improvements/new features:

• Data Level Permissions: This new feature adds functionality to customer and vendor groups.
• Batch Delete Sales Orders: This new feature allows you to void/delete unlinked sales orders. 
• Bar Code Label Prices: This new feature automatically includes an item's default sales price on printed barcode labels. This supplements the item name and description and helps to improve the shopping experience for customers by giving them visibility of the item's sale price.
• Improved Alternate Vendors on Reports: Alternate vendors can now be included in inventory reports. 
• Improved Landed Cost Controls: Landed costs increase the cost of recorded inventory items to include shipping, freight, duties, and other similar costs. There is now an option to allocate landed costs in closed periods. 
• Improved Required Lot/Serial Numbers: This feature has been improved to allow you to globally set the preference to require the lot/serial number selection on all transactions, or you can set the lot/serial number to be mandatory on selected items only.

Now that we have a better understanding of the new features and improvements included in the QBO and the QBD product lines, we're going to dive into a few bookkeeping basics. While you don't need an accounting degree or a bookkeeping background to use QuickBooks, you should be familiar with some basic bookkeeping terminology and key concepts.