In my article on the QuickBooks 2013 R6 update I discussed the new “critical fix” feature, which allows Intuit to push out interim fixes to the desktop version of
Well, here we are, day two of the 2013 R6 update, and it looks like Intuit is using this feature. When I open up my QuickBooks
I didn’t see that yesterday after I first installed it, so this has been changed since that time. I’ll note that I have automatic updates enabled for this file.
If you look at your R6 update you might not see this, for several reasons that I can think of:
- You might not have automatic update enabled.
- You might have a different version of the software. This is the ProAdvisor version of QuickBooks Accountant, which is different than the regular versions of Premier, and even is different from the version of QuickBooks Accountant that you get if you are NOT a ProAdvisor.
- Your computer might not be connected to the Internet (there are still some of you, aren’t there?).
It is interesting to note that if I open up my Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions Accountant product (again, a ProAdvisor version), I don’t yet see a notation like that.
Good or Bad?
So, is this a good thing, or a bad thing?
On one hand, this is a good thing. This “critical update” feature allows Intuit to quickly respond to problems found in the field after a release. If a problem is found in R6, for example, in the old way they would have to wait until the R7 update before it was fixed (actually, I think they have done these kinds of off cycle updates before, we just couldn’t see if it happened). Why would that take a long time? Well (this is speculation based on my experience with Intuit), I’ll guess that the R7 update is already being worked on, and probably was started even before the R6 update came out. Some coding has been done, but not tested yet. If they took that in-progress code and used it to get a fix out, they would be releasing something that isn’t finished, or fully tested. So they won’t. A critical update can be based on the R6 code and pushed out more quickly. At least from what I think they are doing. Critical fixes can be released to us more quickly and that can be a good thing – and I’m glad we at least have some idea if one has been installed.
On the other hand, is this a bad thing? I’m not sure. I get nervous when a patch is pushed out quickly. I also am not happy that updates are happening in the system that I have little control over. These are changes that we aren’t told about other than seeing this notation, so I don’t know what the changes are. So far (keeping in mind that this is a new feature for Intuit) I haven’t seen a place in the support website that tells us what these critical fixes are about.
If I see this as the revision in MY installation, but my client doesn’t see it, what does that mean? Are they out of date, with some problem that I won’t see on my system? Perhaps I worry too much about this kind of thing?
I’m hoping to be able to talk to someone at Intuit about how we might get information on this…
Are Their Bugs in R6?
Too early to tell, but there are probably a few?
- R6 turned off the Accountant’s Copy File Transfer feature. This should already be fixed (and I’m going to guess that this is the “critical fix” that is noted in the product info screen).
- Some people are reporting that they don’t see the Class option in the write checks window. Michelle Long pointed me towards some discussions on this in the Intuit Community Forum – but neither of us have been able to duplicate this particular issue. See this discussion, as well as this discussion where an Intuit employee acknowledged that there might be something going on.
- Michelle Long also found an issue in one of her test files where the Profit and Loss by Class report wasn’t reporting the Class info properly, although the circumstances of that haven’t been worked out. We’ve been exchanging notes on this, but we haven’t pinned down the details yet. When she gets that pinned down she’ll write an article about that in her blog.
Looking at the forums, I haven’t seen a LOT of complaints about 2013 R6 specific problems yet, but then it has only been a day. A number of the comments I’ve seen have been more about things that did NOT get fixed or changed, or that might be due to file corruption or other issues that aren’t specific to this release.
