Intuit has just made available the initial 'maintenance update' (R3) for the 2018 Desktop QuickBooks Products. You can download this update from the Product Downloads and Update website, or you can wait a few days and Intuit will begin pushing it out to users with 'Auto Updates' turned-on. By the way, if you don't want to get updated then NOW is the time to make sure 'Auto Updates' is turned-off.
Let's begin with one of my favorite things, the Verify (and Rebuild Utility) and the related reporting. This release supposedly fixes an issue that was associated with certain errors being listed in the Verify and/or Rebuild Report as being both 'fixable' and 'not fixable'. (The specific terminology in those reports is 'Can be fixed' and 'Can't be fixed', so which was it?)
Last weekend I had a file from a client and Verify listed more than 27,000 errors as both 'fixable' and 'not fixable'. I will give you one hit as to what Rebuild 'couldn't do'.
The R3 release supposedly fixes an 'instability' (that's my word, not Intuit's) in QuickBooks that resulted in Unrecoverable Errors when working in several different areas of the program including the Customer Center, the Item list, Checks and Invoices (and I believe a few others). Over the next week or so I will be testing this with some known files that had problems of this nature.
Another R3 update is intended to deal with one of the new 2018 features that got a lot of interest, 'Multi-monitor support'. It seems there were some glitches in the GUI (that's graphical user interface) for short were resulting in what Intuit terms 'inconsistencies' in multiple-monitor display. Personally I never witnessed this, but they tell us 'it's fixed now'.
I sometimes wonder if they 'dream up things' so that they can tell us they worked hard to fix things that nobody ever saw. I bet you wondered the same thing too at times.
Our old friend QuickBooks File Manager is back and 'working' now in the 2018 versions of QuickBooks Accountant and QuickBooks Enterprise Accountant. I wrote an article about it being 'on sabbatical' a few weeks back, but now we can see if we can figure out what is supposedly different about it, because Intuit didn't tell us.
Inventory GUI goofs are supposedly resolved in R3. This fix is intended to prevent the New/Edit Item window title bar from disappearing. I must admit, I never saw this either.
Enterprise Inventory users got a 'fix' for an issue that prevented users from sorting on the Class column within the Auto Create Purchase Order window when multiple items were listed.
It's a bit unusual to see something 'totally new' appear in a 'maintenance' release of a desktop product, but it seems that Intuit intended to do this from time-to-time. Some of these 'newbies' will apparently be available in all versions, and some may be rolled out to only Enterprise or Accountant versions.
With that said they introduced a new Employee Pay Adjustments History Report. This report tracks changes to employee pay rates for hourly, salary, bonus and commission items over time. An example is shown below. The link above provides detailed information on the new report.
Source: Intuit
New 2018R3 Pay Report
To access the report go to Reports > Employees & Payroll > Employee Pay Adjustments History.
Should you, or shouldn't you, that is the question?
The R3 release is typically the release where we actively begin evaluating the new product year versions to see if they are ready for 'prime time.' Personally I have found less wrong in the 2018 products then I have with desktop versions in the last several years. Like I mentioned, some of the 'fixes' in R3 I have never seen yet in the 'initial release' candidate.
If you are running any of the 2018 versions and have experienced any of these problems then you might want to go ahead and download and install the R3 update. Otherwise I would just continue to 'wait and see'.