Murph, have you seen the new error message, "You cannot associate an item with Sales Tax Payable, Undeposited Funds, accounts receivable, accounts payable, or non-posting accounts. Usually, if you sell an item, use an income account; if you buy it, use an expense account."?
I use Discount type items for Customer Down Payment Applied, or Gift Card Used, or Layaway Deposits Applied so it will automatically insert a negative. I would use a payment type but they don't allow a Liability account. The policy change is not just disallowing the specific accounts mentioned in the error message, but ALL Balance Sheet accounts.
Obviously the programmers took the easy road (I know, I used to program accounting packages in the 1980's) and cut them all out instead of the specific ones they were supposed to. The main reason I did not embrace QB Online was because of the lack of foresight of the new programmers - no asset account allowed for Employee Additions nor Deductions - hence no Cash Advance account usage inside the payroll module. The customer who had the current desktop issue that brought this to light was using 2017 QB Pro Desktop and had recently got an update. It has been escalated and my customer did the work around of inactivating his current Discount Items and entering them as Other Charge Items and will now have to remember to enter the negative.
The work around is urgent for anyone whose clients use a discount type of item for their Gift Cards Applied or Customer Deposit Applied items. The work around is to use an Other Charge type and then remember to add the minus - so my customer has to remember to enter minus, after doing it for 10 years with auto minus.
I was worried when I found out Intuit's QBO Development Team was going to be focusing on the Desktop product now. Instead of working on needed things like Smart Column Sizes or access to the Cleared Stmt Date field, they are making changes to the inner workings of QBD and taking away options.
The error message may be correct to what the management wanted, but the programmers took away access to all balance sheet accounts. Similar to QBO's limitation to balance sheet accounts for Employee deductions and additions so that you cannot run employee advances through payroll.
Sincerely worried about the desktop product,
Melissa Bryant
Empirical Consulting
Editor's Note(s):
We thought this comment was more than 'news worthy' to bring you, and we want to thank Melissa Bryant for bringing it to our attention so that we can bring it to your attention. Thanks Melissa.
Well folks... I am off dodging severe local weather this afternoon and this evening (5/20) here in Central Oklahoma... after all, it is 'prime Tornado Season' here in 'The Sooner State.'
Murph