Here’s what I’m seeing today when I click the gear icon:
Rather than linking to a website as I expected before, a new QuickBooks window will open. It is going to list “experimental plug-ins” that work inside of QuickBooks.
As I said before, I would be very cautious about using these. “Experimental” is not something that I want to try with my company financial information. Think about this:
- You can’t make your own backup copy of your QuickBooks Online data, so if this “experimental” plug-in causes problems, you have to rely on Intuit to secure your data. If a plug-in causes problems you don’t have the ability to “roll back” your database yourself. Sure, Intuit makes backups for you. Do you know how often they make backups? Do you know how to “roll back” to an earlier backup? Few QuickBooks Online users know the answer to that.
- There is no Company Settings option that your administrator can set that will prevent any of your users from enabling one of these features, as far as I can find.
- There is no setting in the User Information settings that can control access to this particular feature for a user who has “regular” user access.
- As you can see from the messaging in the window, “sometimes experiments break or disappear”. That means that not only can they be dangerous, if you happen to like one don’t get attached to it because there is no guarantee that it will stick around.
Things like this are great for people who test QuickBooks Online, but I would never recommend that you try one of these in a “real” company file.
Let’s Try an Experiment
What the heck, let’s give the Autocomplete widget a test to see how this works. Clicking on the graphic shows a short YouTube video (no sound in this case), clicking on Learn More takes us to an Intuit Labs page (see, I told you it was Intuit Labs!) that has the same video. Click the button to enable the feature.
Now the plug-in is a part of the program, seamlessly integrated. Note that these are developed by Intuit employees, these are not outside products developed by third party software companies.
With this installed, when I create an invoice and start typing in a company name that doesn’t already exist in my customer list, you see a list of “suggested business matches” that you can select from.
Select one from the list, the address information is filled in for you without any typing.
A customer is added to my customer list. It even fills in the company phone, website and a note about the company.
Is this a good addition? Sure, it seems to be. I like it. Now, if I see a problem, where do I leave a comment about this to tell them what I’m seeing? Shouldn’t there be a feedback option if this is an “experiment”?
I understand that this is a way for Intuit to try things out, but without feedback options I’m not sure what they will get out of this other than their peering into your usage logs to see what you did. I can see the advantages to Intuit, and to us as users, but you must understand what the consequences could be. I don’t think that Intuit makes that clear enough. At the very least they should have this locked down so that only the admin user can see and enable these things.