Is QuickBooks 14 Release 8 Worth “Rolling the Dice” Over?

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Intuit has issued ‘Release 8’ for the QuickBooks 2014 (desktop) product line including QuickBooks Enterprise 14, but the question is, should you ‘roll the dice’ and install R8, or should you wait to ensure that the update is not more full of bugs, than the bugs it resolves?

Timing may be a primary consideration, especially since this release reportedly fixes an issue that caused Box 7 of 1099’s to not map correctly.  But since most people never produce 1099’s until January 15 or later, you still might have time to wait before rolling the dice.

Another issue that R8 supposedly resolves involves the bank feeds process for an American Express Account which resulted in sync failures.

Release 8 reportedly fixes an issue that caused QuickBooks to close unexpectedly when you tried to upload a customized form template to your on-line copy of data using Sync Manager. 

If it is becoming obvious that this release is all about ‘bug fixes’, then you are starting to see the writings on the wall and there are more.  One of these dealt with Arizona Unemployment UC-018 form e-filing, which triggered an ‘unrecoverable error’ that yielded a message “QuickBooks has stopped working” message. 

With R8 installed QuickBooks should display the correct due date on the warning message for exceeding $100,000 in federal taxes.  (Please note I used the word ‘should’.)

Release 8 reportedly improves the Rebuild Data Utility by providing routines to resolve various issues with duplicates:

  1. Verify Customer message list, duplicate name encountered.
  2. Verify Custom template list, duplicate name encountered.

For users running Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 on their computers, the R8 update is also designed to improve the performance of the QuickBooks internal browser.

So the question is, ‘should you roll the dice’? Just when I think that Intuit has re-earned trust with respect to maintenance release stability, they go and publish a release that makes the product worse than before the update.  It seems when they have releases that are focused exclusively on bug fixes, the emphasis is on dealing with those bugs and they ignore how the release impacts other functional areas of the program.  The most recent release for the 2015 product line is such a case.

I have considered QuickBooks 2014 - R7 stable (for the most part) for quite some time, and the ‘bugs’ that R8 supposedly fixes have had almost no impact on any of my 430 (2014) installations at this time. I mean it is great that Rebuild has routines in R8 to fix duplicates, but why would the duplicates have been allowed to be created in the first place, that’s my point!

Obviously the 1099 box issue will be a problem next month, but does that mean I want to risk the update for all my 2014 product users at this exact moment?  No way.  I will have my clients wait for a few weeks to see how ‘the dice roll’ for other players.

If you are experiencing issues with any of the reported bugs R8 supposedly fixes in your QuickBooks 2014 R7 on a regular basis, then you may want go ahead and update, remembering to perform a complete backup prior to installing the new release.  Hopefully if you ‘roll the dice’ and proceed with R8, you will be a winner, and won’t ‘crap out’.