IA Rewind: QuickBooks Desktop 2023 Product Summary

It's time for the new QuickBooks Desktop Product Line-up.

Intuit's QuickBooks Accountant Leader Ted Callahan recently announced Sept. 6, 2022, would be when the new products would become available to ProAdvisors and the accounting community.

Insightful Accountant wanted to proceed with its annual series of articles on the new and enhanced features you will find in this year's products.

For 2023, you will find four new or enhanced features available to QuickBooks Desktop Plus (Pro & Premier) users, and all users of QuickBooks Enterprise and Accountant. These features are the new Cash Flow Hub, the enhanced Track Vehicle Mileage feature, Reports Optimization and improved Banking Connectivity.

Depending on subscription level, you will find three new features available to Enterprise users: the Item Categories feature; the Expiration Dates feature for Advanced Inventory Serial/Lot tracking users; and the Intercompany Transactions feature.

Two new Payment features are available to all 2023 QuickBooks Desktop subscribers with active payment subscriptions. These are Payment Links enhancements and a new Node Card Reader.

There also are two new Payroll features for 2023 QuickBooks Desktop users, although the subscription type will determine feature availability. These are Equifax employment/income verification and HCM with Guideline 401(k).

Since I have had access to various pre-release versions of QuickBooks 2023 for months and exchanged multiple communications with Intuit development team members and product managers, this article—and the following series—are designed to help you learn more about the new products. 

This article provides a synopsis of the new features that Insightful Accountant will publish over the next two weeks. The series will conclude with my annual "My Favorite Newbies," which tells which of the specific product changes I liked best for 2023.

Insightful Accountant will again host Laura Madeira for a special edition of QB Talks when she presents "A First Look at QuickBooks Desktop 2023," Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022, 2 p.m. (EST).

In an earlier article, you will find more information about QuickBooks Desktop 2023 Prices.

So, let's look at QuickBooks Desktop 2023.

Plus, Enterprise and Accountant Features for 2023

The following features are available to all 2023 QuickBooks Desktop Pro and Premier Plus, Enterprise (v 23) and Accountant users within the US (and Canada, where indicated) as of the initial (R1) product release.

Cash Flow Hub

Cash Flow Hub lets you explore, manage and track your cash flow at a glance. It is your one-stop location, which provides visibility into the accounts you monitor to track your cash position, including bank accounts, credit cards and loans. From here, you also can manage your money-in and money-out transactions.

The Trends section of Cash Flow Hub graphically shows how your balances vary over time so you can identify key cash flow indicators that impact your future cash position. This helps you plan for the future by understanding upcoming transactions affecting your cash flow.

Users can:

• Review account balances
• Add accounts to the monitored list of accounts
• Examine cash balance trends
• Track cash performance over a specified time period
• Manage overdue payments and bills
• Examine reports related to any cash flow details

Cash Flow Hub is available to all 2023 Desktop Plus, Enterprise and Accountant users within the US as of the initial 2023 product (R1) release. It can be accessed from either the Company or Reports menus. It also is accessible by selecting Cash Flow Hub from the shortcut sidebar on the Home Screen.

Track Vehicle Mileage

I know what you're thinking: "Vehicle mileage isn't a new feature to QuickBooks." That's true. But while tracking mileage isn't new, the method of tracking the mileage for 2023 is entirely different.

QuickBooks Desktop 2023 provides an enhanced experience for tracking and managing vehicle mileage where users can add trips from a mobile device (as well as their desktop) and get them approved.

You heard me—a new (iOS) mobile app works with QuickBooks to track vehicle mileage and incorporates it into your QuickBooks Company file. Unfortunately, the new app is available only from the Apple App Store.

With this new mileage app, you don't have to worry about manually tracking the odometer readings of your business trips. Simply enter the "start" and "end" trip locations, and the miles will be calculated for you.

You also don't have to worry about tracking the current IRS mileage rate since QuickBooks will fetch the rate for you and use it to compute each trip's mileage expense.

And while employees are using the QuickBooks Desktop Mobile app (or Desktop) to keep track of their trips, they are available for approval by their supervisor (or other approving authority) when they are sent to QuickBooks Desktop. Once approved, you can easily bill them to your customers.

Track Vehicle Mileage is available to all 2023 Desktop Plus, Enterprise and Accountant users within the US as of the initial 2023 product (R1) release. It can be accessed from the Company menu.

Report Optimization Enhancements

Users with large company files often experience issues related to report compiling time with some of the more complex reports within QuickBooks. The A/R Aging Reports are an example of these types of reports.

For 2023, QuickBooks has made enhancements on the back-end that will afford better report compilation performance for larger company file sizes (>300 MB).

While users won't see any changes to the reporting interface, they should perceive these reports loading faster than previous versions of QuickBooks Desktop.

Report Optimization is available to all 2023 Desktop Plus, Enterprise and Accountant users in the US and Canada as of the initial 2023 product (R1) release.

Improved Banking Connectivity

Hundreds of thousands of businesses using QuickBooks Desktop have downloaded their bank and credit card transactions using the traditional methods of bank connectivity via bank servers Desktop offered. 

Traditional methods are prone to security concerns and connection stability errors, which is why many banks have been moving toward API-based connectivity—the method used by QuickBooks Online.

New for 2023, QuickBooks Desktop offers improved banking connectivity using a modernized platform to resolve security and connectivity concerns.

With Improved Banking Connectivity, online banking is improved in at least three ways:

1. It now will be possible to connect to many banks that previously did not offer direct connectivity but only made bank downloads available.
2. Banking connections now will be more stable, have fewer interruptions and have less downtime.
3. Automatic downloads of banking data on a user-determined frequency can be configured and QuickBooks Desktop will fetch the bank (or credit card) information.

Improved Banking Connectivity can be set up from Bank Feeds under the Banking menu. It also is accessible by selecting Bank Feeds from the shortcut sidebar on the Home Screen.

How it works:

• Find your Bank
• Connect/Authenticate with your Bank
• Link your bank account(s)
• Download & review your bank transactions

This improved Bank Connectivity is available to all 2023 Desktop Plus, Enterprise and Accountant users within the US as of the initial 2023 product (R1) release.

Enterprise and Accountant User Features for 2023

The following features are available to QuickBooks Enterprise (v 23) subscribers depending upon their specific subscription level. They also are available to all QuickBooks Enterprise Accountant users. Unless otherwise specified, these features are available to users only within the US as of the initial 2023 product year release.

Inventory Item Categories

Until now, users of QuickBooks Desktop have had only a limited number of ways of defining inventory items:

• Item Name/Number
• Purchase Description
• Sales Description
• Manufacturer's Part Number

The only way a user could establish a hierarchy of their inventory items was to define the item as a sub-item of another item.

But QuickBooks provided no practical way to track or report on items using this type of naming/numbering convention. 

New for 2023, QuickBooks Enterprise provides a more effective way for users to manage their Inventory with user-defined Inventory Item Categories.

Furthermore, users can establish a hierarchical system for their Inventory items by creating up to four (4) levels of subcategories.

Using the new Inventory Item Categories:

• First, Company file Administrators must turn this feature on in the Items & Inventory Company Preferences.

• Second, users can easily create and assign categories to their Inventory Items.

Item Categories are accessed only from the Add/Edit Item option of the Item list. In addition, the Item list can be accessed from either the Lists or Inventory menus or the Items & Services icon under the Company section of the Home Page.

• Third, users can run various Inventory item-related reports, including the new Category field in those reports and view (sort or filter) report items by category.

One advantage of this new feature is that it will enable users to define items almost any way they want to represent them and help limit abuses of the item/sub-item naming convention that sometimes render reports meaningless. For example, when they post transactions to the parent item rather than only sub-items.

Still the same, I think it is good that ProAdvisors have a couple of weeks between the Accountant release of QuickBooks 2023 and the General release to work with this new category feature developing Best Practices for their clients.

I'll discuss this more in my follow-up article, drilling down on this feature.

Inventory Categories are available to all QuickBooks Enterprise (v 23) subscribers, including Enterprise Accountant subscribers, in both the US and Canada as of the initial (v23) product (R1) release.

Expiration Dates

A long-needed feature for QuickBooks Enterprise users requiring sophisticated inventory controls has been expiration date tracking. New for (v23) as of the initial product (R1) release, Enterprise Platinum and Diamond subscribers, along with Enterprise Accountant users in both the US and Canada, will be able to manage their inventory more effectively with expiration dates.

Until now, businesses have used third-party solutions to track inventory expiration dates or attempted to use QuickBooks custom fields for this purpose. But while custom fields within QuickBooks Enterprise could be configured to record dates, the existing reports were not designed to track custom date fields chronologically, rendering them incapable of expiration tracking.

With the new Expiration Date feature, these issues are resolved since users cannot only add Expiration Dates to lot or serialized products and view those dates in sales transactions, but also can get reporting based upon expiration dates.

Using Expiration Dates:

• First, the Company file Admin must turn this feature on in the Items & Inventory Company >> Advanced Inventory Settings >> Serial/Lot No. & Expiration >> Expiration Date preferences.
• Second, add expiration dates to inventory items with serial or lot numbers during receiving/purchase.
• Third, view the expiration date on sales items with serial or lot numbers.
• Fourth, run a serial/lot numbers report and access your products' expiration dates.

Many QuickBooks Enterprise users will highly welcome this long-needed product enhancement.

Intercompany Transactions

Until now, businesses with multiple related companies have needed to manually create the same transaction in multiple QuickBooks company files to record intercompany financial activities correctly. This created a significant duplication of work and, in many cases, resulted in errors stemming from mistaken information entry.

Duplication of entries between entities compounds the complexity of a multi-faceted company's record-keeping. Accountants and bookkeepers had to struggle to guarantee that transactions were correctly recorded to ensure the accuracy of the primary company's books.

The ability to combine the data of multiple QuickBooks companies and get a complete view of the financial status of a company was difficult at best. In addition, it often required using third-party software to fully view the financial health and consolidated set of accounting reports.

New for (v23) as of the initial product (R1) release, Enterprise Platinum and Diamond subscribers, along with Enterprise Accountant users in the US, will be able to create relationships between multiple QuickBooks Company files, post intercompany transactions (bills/checks) with the related companies and keep track of all intercompany transactions.

Using Intercompany Transactions:

• You must create an Intercompany relationship between two different, but related QuickBooks Company files. For example, this might be a Parent or Holding company and a subsidiary.
• You must sign in to your Intuit account for both company files before you start creating the relationship within QuickBooks Desktop.
• You will create a relationship from the Parent Company using the Intercompany Transactions menu item under the Company Menu or the Intercompany Transactions icon of the Company section of the Home Page of QuickBooks Enterprise.

• As part of the setup, you will either Add or Select "Due to" and "Due from" accounts for this initiating Company file.
• You then send a request to the related/destination Company to become part of the relationship.
• The Related (Destination) Company must accept or reject the Parent Company's pending intercompany relationship (request).
• To send an Intercompany Vendor Bill (or Check) from the parent company to the related company, enter the bill transaction normally after selecting the "Intercompany Transaction" button on the right side of the top Main menu.

• Once saved, the transaction is posted in the "Sent for Approval" section of the Parent Company's Dashboard and the Pending section in both the related (receiving) company dashboards.
• The related (second) Company receives the transaction within the Pending section of the Intercompany transaction Dashboard.
• The Related company can approve or reject the transaction from the Parent company. Approval of the transaction causes a journal entry to be posted with the Due To and Expense Account.
• The transaction is posted to the Related company's "Approved" or "Rejected" section of the Dashboard. If approved, the corresponding journal entry may be viewed from the entry within the Approved section of the Dashboard.
• Simultaneously, the Parent Company's Intercompany transactions Dashboard shows the transaction to the pending has been moved to the Approved tab and is with a status of Approved. If rejected, the transaction is moved to the rejected section.

This outstanding new Enterprise feature has been needed for a long time. For those businesses with multiple related companies, it can save a great deal of time when entities share a lot of business expenses.

QuickBooks Desktop 2023 Payment-related Features

These features require QuickBooks Payments accounts, which are subject to eligibility criteria, credit and application approval₁.

Enhanced Payment Links

Intuit released Payment Links for QuickBooks Desktop as part of 2022 as a way to send a payment request to a customer and accept money without producing an invoice. Additionally, for 2023 QuickBooks Desktop, an active QuickBooks Payments₁ account, has had enhancements to this feature that lets users accept payments even easier and quicker.      

While QuickBooks Desktop users still can create and send a payment link (trackable within QuickBooks) and accept payments or deposits, they now can do so without needing any form/invoice (or other transactional forms) because you can directly link those payments/deposits to your customer.

With the enhanced Dashboard, you also can keep track of all Payment Links and their payment statuses, and follow up on any existing links by sending reminders of an outstanding Payment Link.

This enhanced functionality will be available to all QuickBooks Desktop 2023 users, Pro/Premier Plus, all QuickBooks Enterprise (v 23) and all QuickBooks Accountant versions in the US. However, Send Payment Links requires an active QuickBooks Payments ₁ account.

New Node Card Reader

There is a new card reader supported for QuickBooks Desktop. That's right, a new reader which lets you take contactless cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and multiple other forms of payment in person from your customers for your services. 

And because you use QuickBooks Payments with QuickBooks Desktop, when you begin using the new QuickBooks Node Card Reader, the payments you receive are automatically recorded and matched so that your books stay organized without extra effort.

The new Node Card Reader for QuickBooks Desktop requires an active QuickBooks Payments₁ account. Contact your QuickBooks Payments representative for more information.

QuickBooks Desktop 2023 Payroll-related Features

These features require QuickBooks Desktop Payroll subscriptions, which are in addition to any standard QuickBooks subscription unless they are part of a combination package. The type of payroll subscription may differ with the payroll-related feature specified.

Equifax Employment/Income Verification

While the security of personal information has become an increasing concern for everyone, and employers have a fiduciary responsibility to safeguard their employees' personal information, they are frequently requested to provide this information to lenders, creditors and governmental agencies for authorized inquiries.

In addition, employees often may request the employer verify their employment and income information to these agencies for public assistance, loan approvals or other purposes.

New for 2023, QuickBooks Desktop has partnered with Equifax to automate the verification of employment and income information requests for active Desktop Payroll subscribers.

As a result, providing information requests of this nature now is quicker and easier due to the automation of the verification process. The process also is much more secure since it takes place through the safeguards of Equifax. 

This also means employees typically can get assessed for a loan/credit or aid decision quicker.

A new Benefits and HR tab has been added to the Preferences of QuickBooks Desktop. Within those preferences is an Income & Employment Verification section of the Company Preferences (QuickBooks >> Edit >> Preferences >> Benefits & HR >> Company Preferences >> Income & Employment Verification).

Suppose a Company with an active payroll subscription chooses not to participate in this new program offering. In that case, the Company file Admin needs to "Opt Out" of this new feature by unchecking the box within this preference.

HCM with Guidelines 401(k)

Retirement plans are an excellent benefit for your employees. QuickBooks partnered with Guideline to offer affordable, fully integrated 401(k) plans in QuickBooks Desktop when users have a QuickBooks Desktop Assisted Payroll₂ subscription.

Users can select a plan that works for their business and employees and set it up within QuickBooks Desktop. Once they are set up and run assisted payroll with their new contributions, the info and contributions are sent automatically to Guideline, so there are no extra steps for them to take.

• This new offering makes it easy and affordable to offer your business a 401(k) for your employees through QuickBooks Desktop Assisted Payroll₂.
• You can choose from a list of plan options that best suit the needs of your business and your employees.

• QuickBooks Desktop Assisted Payroll makes setting up the 401(k) plan contributions and deductions easy.
• Guideline administers the plan and does all the reporting, compliance and retirement plan maintenance for you.

Our article provides more information about other QuickBooks Desktop Payroll changes for 2023.

Remember, we will continue our series on QuickBooks Desktop 2023 tomorrow with the first of our in-depth articles on the various features summarized in this article.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my good friends, Esther Friedberg Karp, and Laura Madeira, for reviewing the content of this article for both technical accuracy and readability. 

I also must thank Ted Callahan, Intuit's QuickBooks Accountant Leader, for his leadership in providing ProAdvisors and Accountants with another high-quality Desktop product for 2023 via the entire team composed of hundreds of Intuit personnel.

Countless product managers, team leaders, developers and members of the Alpha/Beta testing teams working behind the scenes strive every year to deliver a new and better experience for the user, and we too often forget to say thank you.

So, to everyone involved at Intuit, "Thank you." A special thanks also goes out to Intuit's Kim Amsbaugh for continually keeping me in the loop.

Footnotes

₁ - QuickBooks Payments account subject to eligibility criteria, credit, and application approval. See Important Info, Pricing, Acceptable Use Policy and Merchant Agreement. Feature access may require the latest QuickBooks release (R) update.

₂ - QuickBooks Desktop Assisted Payroll subscriptions are in addition to any standard QuickBooks subscription unless they are part of a combination package. It may require a unique setup; contact your QuickBooks Desktop Assisted Payroll support specialist for more information.

Disclosures

Materials within this feature, including graphic illustrations, were developed from various pre-release versions of QuickBooks Desktop 2023.  Therefore, the final product version you may acquire may appear, act, or be functionally different from that illustrated or described herein.

Portions of this feature have been adapted from Intuit QuickBooks Desktop 2023-related content. All such source materials were adapted by Insightful Accountant solely for educational purposes.

As used herein, QuickBooks, QuickBooks ProAdvisor, QuickBooks Payroll, QuickBooks Payments, and QuickBooks Desktop (products) refer to one or more registered trademarks of Intuit Inc.; a NASDAQ publicly traded "INTU" corporation, headquartered in Mountain View, California (USA).

Any or all other trade names used herein, including any other vendor (app/software) products discussed within this article, may be registered, trademarked, or otherwise held by their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged. They have been referenced for informational and educational purposes only.

This is an editorial feature, not sponsored content. None of the vendors within this article have paid Insightful Accountant or the Author any form of remuneration to be included within this feature. This article is provided solely for informational and educational purposes.

The publication of this article does not represent any form of endorsement by either the Author or Insightful Accountant.

_{Note: Both Registered Trademark ® and Copyright © symbols have been eliminated from the articles within this publication for brevity due to the frequency or abundance with which they might otherwise appear or be repeated. Every attempt is made to credit such trademarked products or copyrighted materials within our respective article footnotes and disclosures.}

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