I would like to point out that this is a very new release of the overhauled
QuickBooks Online user interface, so there are bound to be some glitches here and there. Intuit is rolling this out very slowly and carefully, so that they can work out any issues that people might find early on before it reaches a wider audience.
Red is a Warning
When you are in the home page, QuickBooks Online Harmony uses red to alert you to things that need to be addressed urgently. As you can see below, there are overdue invoices highlighted in red in the income bar, bank transactions that need to be addressed flagged in red on the right “bank feed” side, and a list of transactions marked in red in the “activities feed” on the right (including the impending end of the QuickBooks Online subscription) that need attention.
Dropdown List Type Ahead
This is a VERY useful change to the way that you use “dropdown lists” in QuickBooks Online Harmony. As you begin typing a value, the program gives you hints about what records might match. This is NOT limited to a simple left-to-right search.
Here’s the customer dropdown in an invoice, before I start typing.
Type an “S”, and it filters for ANY customer name that has an “S” in it, showing you the matches.
Add an “A”, and the list is filtered even further.
These are the kind of user interface improvements that make a product much easier to use, with a feature that provides power but doesn’t require additional clicks or search windows.
Consistent URL’s for Navigation
Here’s an interesting change from the Classic version. As you navigate through the program, the URL at the top of the browser changes. This address is unique to the location that you are at – so if you bookmark this, you can use it to return to that same spot as long as you are logged in to your account. So you can use your browser to save specific locations in the product, NOT just limited to “custom reports”.
Improvements with Registers
In QuickBooks Online Classic you can view your register for accounts by selecting Banking and then Registers, then selecting the register to work with. Here’s an example:
With QuickBooks Online Harmony you can select Registers from the Transactions tab on the left, and this will give you a summary list of all the registers, along with their type, balance in QuickBooks Online, and bank balance (if applicable). This is a nice addition as it gives you a quick way to get an overview of the balances of all the registers at one time.
Select the register and click the Go To Register button and then you see the full register.
My thanks to Barbara Sonin for pointing this out in the Sleeter Group Member’s Forum.
QuickBooks Online Harmony on an iPad
I’ve never been able to get QuickBooks Online to work very well with my iPad. It just never seems to display correctly, and it freezes in odd places. Some features just don’t work.
One of the goals for the Harmony release was to get QuickBooks Online to work on Tablet computers. They’ve gone a long way towards that, although there are still a few rough edges to work out in the early releases.
Here’s a screen shot of this revision running on my iPad 2
I had to upgrade my version of iOS to the most current, as the older version that I still had there wouldn’t support the program (I had an older version of the Safari browser). I didn’t have as much luck on Chrome on my iPad, although I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to figure that out. I did notice that there were some glitches – at one time the program told me that Internet Explorer wasn’t supported (while using Safari), and there were some times when I couldn’t access all of the data in some dropdown lists. Intuit told me that I would probably see some glitches in these early releases. I wouldn’t count on Tablet Computer support right away, but it is clearly a focus of Intuit go get their product available here.
The “Panel” is Useful But Needs Work
In my prior article I talked about the “Panel” that comes in from from the right side on transaction windows. My example in that article showed a bill that I selected to pay, and how OTHER bills for the same vendor would show, in case I want to add them to the payment. This is a very convenient feature, but the folks at Intuit pointed out a few other ways that the Panel provides value.
For example – several employees have entered timecards and these include some “billable time” for a client. When I start an invoice for that client, the Panel slides in from the right to show me all of the billable time for this client. This is an interesting use – rather than having a separate overlay window – although I hope that in future revisions they can provide me with more information about the billable time entries (this is an early release, so things like this will be worked out as Intuit moves forward).
At this moment there is a problem with this implementation, which I’m sure will be worked out soon. The phrase “Billable time” for each of those records in the Panel is actually a link to the time entry. On one hand, that is good – it is a way to “drill down” to see what the time entry involves. On the other hand, with the version I’m testing, if you click that link you are asked if you want to lose your changes. This is NOT good.
Another point about the Panel is that if you are using an add-on product that posts billable time to QuickBooks Online, like Mavenlink, THOSE time entries are going to automatically show in the Panel as well.
I just wish they were still calling this the “drawer”, which was the early name for the feature.