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Intuit - QuickBooks 2015
New Insights Page in QuickBooks 2015
"All in all this is a pretty cool new feature...."
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Intuit - QuickBooks 2015
The new Insights tab of the QuickBooks 2015 Home Page
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Intuit QuickBooks 2015
Insights Display - Customize
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Intuit QuickBooks 2015
Insights Tab - Change Display Dates
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Intuit - QuickBooks 2015
Insights Tab - Create Bill Link
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Intuit - QuickBooks 2015
Insights Tab - Create Invoice Link
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Intuit - QuickBooks 2015
Insights tab - Print Graphics Option
QuickBooks is striving to become more ‘business management friendly’, and also have greater appeal to executives and management than just the bookkeepers in mid-sized businesses. The new Insights tab of the Home Page is an example of this (Figure 1) new direction. This new ‘Insights” page is full of colorful information about your business.
If it reminds you of the presentations you have seen in both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks for Mac then you are right, there are distinct similarities. Could it be that Intuit is trying to get everyone, including their loyal desktop fans, use to the QBO way of looking at things? Only time will tell. More likely they are just trying to standardize the basics of the product line to keep one group from going “why don’t we have what the other product has?”
For a lot of executive, management and owners the types of depictions shown on this page are exactly what they are looking for in the way of ‘management reports’. The days of looking at page-after-page and row-after-row of ‘just numbers’ is hardly exciting for someone who commutes to work by helicopter and gets to their next job by private jet. In today’s world of ‘everything visual’, this new Insights view is more like the digital display of a Boeing 777 than our old familiar QuickBooks.
I’ve never even seen so many pretty colors in my QuickBooks; this is professional dashboard quality graphics, with a lot of ‘eye appeal’. Now if we only had some meaningful analytics like business ratios, or true income trending, or realistic projections of net profit over time, not just historical numbers.
Unfortunately, that’s where the similarities with the Boeing 777 cockpit end. You see the jet cockpit displays not only tells us our present condition and where we have been, but more importantly ‘where we are going’. As of yet this new ‘insights’ page provides no real insights into where our business is headed.
Scroll through the various displays (Intuit has always called these little snippets of information) ‘sprockets’ using the right and left arrows in the top panel in figure 2. There is a wide variety of presentations available based upon your QuickBooks data.
But I had better get on with my review.
Click the gear-icon in the upper right corner of the Insights page to customize the presentation. You can display Profit & Loss, Previous Year’s Income Comparison, Top Customers by Sales, Income and Expense Trends. (We’ve outlined both the gear-icon and the customize window in red in figure 3.)
Change the periods reflected in your graphics with the click of a button. (figure 4 illustrates this option) Too bad there are options like ‘rest of month’, or ‘next six months’ or ‘through balance of fiscal year’ (projections) as options.
From the Expense Sprocket, click on the Create Bill link (highlighted in red in figure 5) to open the Enter Bill window. Could it be that some executives might not need to ever leave this Insights page to perform simple QuickBooks tasks?
A similar functionality exists on the opposite side of the accounting equation; from the Invoices Sprocket you can click the Create Invoices link to open the Create Invoices window (figure 6). For those management types who have a practice where ‘if they even think about a customer, it is billable time’, this might be a good way to get them to actually ‘invoice’ their billable hours.
One of the best things about this new Insights feature is that you can ‘print’ it (the print button is circled in red in figure 7). All those pretty graphics can be printed to accompany the old ‘number based’ reports. Maybe some readers of those financials will be so enamored with the new colorful insight in green and yellow and blue and purple that they will hardly notice the red ink on the profit & loss; ya think?
My conclusions and how to get training on the new feature:
All in all this is a pretty cool new feature, I really like the graphics and color presentations, I just wish it 'did more.' The Insights page is probably a great landing page for all those management types who want access to QuickBooks and need to be granted rights so they can sit around and view data, just so long as they keep their fingers out of the ‘real accounting’; after all, “we don’t want them changing something and throwing the trial balance out of balance, now do we?”
Let's not forget that I wrote this review based upon a pre-release copy of QuickBooks 2015, there could be some slight differences or updates to this new feature by the time QuickBooks 2015 is actually released, but for the most part I suspect that it will work exactly the same way as I have described it here.
While Intuit has started releasing 2015 versions of QuickBooks to QuickBooks ProAdvisors this week, your first real opportunity to receive training on this new feature will be at the Intuit QuickBooks Accounting Virtual Conference to be held on September 22 and 23, 2014. See the website for more information or register here.