QuickBooks 2014 R7 Released

Intuit released the QuickBooks 2014 R7 update for the U.S. version of QuickBooks today (7/3/2014). This is available as a manual update from the Intuit support website. It doesn’t appear to be going out as an automatic update yet; I’m guessing that Intuit will release it that way in about a week from this date. I don’t have any information on non-U.S. versions.

This is an emergency release that addresses a number of problems with the 2014 R6 release as I described in the article “QuickBooks 2014 R6 Has Bugs!”.

Here’s what has been fixed as far as I know:

• QuickBooks stops working when you open files with the R6 update. Intuit KB article SLN86691.
• Certain reports, when printed, don’t show the full values of titles for some sections. These might be vendor or customer names, for example. Intuit KB article SLN86630.
• Various errors that would prevent you from running third-party add-on applications, the QuickBooks Statement Writer, or the Accountants Copy File Transfer when running on Windows XP. I’ve seen a variety of different errors occurring; how this shows up depends on the application. Intuit KB article SLN86786.
• Some inventory reports wouldn’t include any subitems. This would include the Inventory Valuation reports, Stock Status by Item reports, and others. Intuit KB article SLN86719.

I don’t see any indication that Intuit has addressed the “fuzzy or blurry logos when emailing” issue that R6 introduced for some people in the R6 release (KB article SLN86785). In addition, there was an issue on Windows XP with R6 (confirmed by an Intuit contact) where the Record Deposit option for Merchant Services may not work correctly, and I don’t see any mention of that (I don’t have a KB article for this).

There have been a lot of reports of other issues people have been attributing to R6, but it isn’t clear if these are truly new problems introduced by R6 or just issues that have been around for a while and just happened to hit people when they were running R6. Just because you happen to see a particular problem at the time you’re running R6 doesn’t prove that it was caused by R6, even if you hadn’t seen the problem before.

So, Should You Install This Update?

Wow, that’s a tough question to answer. I haven’t had time to test this release in detail so I can’t be sure how good it is. So, some thoughts on the subject:

• If you’re running the 2014 R6 release and are running into the issues listed above, I would go ahead and install this as a manual update. Be bold, take a chance! If it causes more problems, you can still go back to R5 in many cases.
• If you are not having any problems with whatever 2014 release you’re running now, I would wait. Let’s see if there are complaints after a couple of weeks. Did Intuit introduce any new issues with R7? Let other people find out.
• If you’re running an older version (such as R5) and are seeing any of the problems I list below, and they’re causing difficulties, then I would consider updating to R7. The R6 update did fix some serious problems, so going to R7 will fix those same problems and hopefully not create any new ones. The big problems that R6 (and therefore R7) fixed were:
  • SLN86334 – Crashing when working with Bank Feeds.
  • SLN76905 – Crashing when emailing/mailing invoices through QuickBooks Billing Solutions or web mail.
  • SLN77622 –Unexpected crashes due to various causes, memory leaks.

Many people have been wondering why it took Intuit so long to get the R7 update out once they knew what the problems were in R6. Personally, I’m glad Intuit took some extra time to get this out – quickly but not in a rush. I’m hoping Intuit took extra care to be sure the problems were fixed without introducing any new problems.