Sometimes it's what they don't tell us that leaves us wondering "what's up". Or they tell you in such a 'tiny little footnote' that you fail to realize they are telling you. This is the point where it would be really neat if the 'theme music' from that GB&U movie could start playing as you read this.
Case-in-point # 1 - The Red (payments) Make Deposit Badge
With the release of QuickBooks 2017 Desktop, one of the feature enhancements was the addition of a 'payments to deposit' badge on top of the Make Deposits icon. I wrote about this as one of the 2017 minor features calling it "Keep Deposits in Order".
QB2017 - Payments Badge on Make Deposits
This 'red badge' displayed the number of pending payments that needed to be deposited. Obviously that's a very 'good' enhancement because of its potential impact upon helping to prevent 'undeposited funds error'.
Unfortunately there was something 'bad' about the new feature, it didn't really work in all cases. Some users reported never seeing the little red badge even though they had payments sitting in undeposited funds. The obvious answer, 'something must be broken', there is a bad installation of QuickBooks going on, or there must be some type of file corruption. But according to Intuit technical support, the feature is "working as intended."
You see, the 'ugly' is something that Intuit didn't really tell us when this new feature was promoted. Apparently, if you have an Intuit Merchant Service account attached to your QuickBooks Company file this feature simply doesn't 'work at all'. It doesn't work for pending merchant deposits, it doesn't work for 'other undeposited funds' when you have other merchant deposits pending, and it doesn't work for 'undeposited funds' pending deposit even when there are no merchant deposits pending. So, if you have an Intuit Merchant Account this feature 'is no feature at all.'
Case-in-point # 2 - The Red Payroll Liability (reminder) Badge
The brand new QuickBooks 2018 Desktop release included another Home Page enhancement, this one displays a visual 'red badge' reminder when you have impending payroll liabilities.
QB2018_payroll_liability_reminder
The 'good' about this feature is it's intent to help Payroll users avoid missed liabilities by displaying the red alert badge on top of the Home Page Payroll Liabilities icon whenever a payroll liability is within 7 days of the due date.
The 'bad' aspect of this is that it only works with 'Enhanced Payroll' for Desktop. It doesn't work with 'Basic', 'Standard' or 'Assisted' Payroll subscriptions. I clearly mentioned the Enhanced Payroll requirement in both my article and webinars on this feature, but apparently some people still didn't realize that 'enhanced' payroll was the key to this functionality.
Even though this new 'badge' is prominently listed in the 'What's New' feature list on each of the product websites (Pro, Premier and Enterprise) at Intuit, I don't guess I can really give them an 'ugly' on this one because each of the listings has a tiny footnote number. When you drop down to the bottom of the web-page and click on the tiny little 'Important offers, pricing details, & disclaimers' link, the tiny little footnotes are displayed and contain the "Enhanced payroll subscription required" footnote.
So, I guess this really is more of an 'enhanced payroll feature impacting QuickBooks 2018' than a QuickBooks 2018 feature.