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What Are the Changes To QuickBooks Attached Documents For 2012?

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Coinciding with the release of QuickBooks 2012, Intuit is making a variety of changes to QuickBooks Attached Documents, a cloud-based document storage system that has been available as an extra-cost add-on for users of QuickBooks 2010 and QuickBooks 2011. For QuickBooks 2010, Intuit’s document storage feature was called QuickBooks Document Management, and the changes impact users of that service as well.

For 2012, Intuit is phasing out the online QuickBooks Attached Documents and including a capability for free local document storage.

Let’s summarize the changes based on the year of your QuickBooks version and the impact of those changes based on whether they add capabilities (good), remove them (bad), or it’s too early to assess the impact (unclear):

QuickBooks 2012

Good: Local document storage on the computer running QuickBooks is now free, and the new Doc Center supports a drag-and-drop interface, including the ability to add Microsoft Outlook emails to Doc Center. Supported documents can be attached to QuickBooks lists or transactions. Users of QuickBooks Attached Documents have access to a tool to migrate online documents to local storage.

Bad: Users can no longer sign up and pay for an extra cost, cloud-based storage solution from Intuit. Users requiring cloud-based solutions will have to turn to third-party add-ons, some of which have been in existence longer than Intuit’s cloud-based storage.

QuickBooks 2011

Good: Intuit has lowered the price of QuickBooks Attached Documents, where the maximum monthly fee is now $9.95 for unlimited document storage.

Bad: Since QuickBooks Attached Documents is being phased out, existing users of the service can continue to use it subject to Intuit’s sunshine policy. Under that policy, and assuming Intuit keeps the service live until that point, QuickBooks 2011 users can continue to use QuickBooks Attached Documents until May, 2014 – provided that they continue to run that same version of QuickBooks. Once QuickBooks 2012 is formally available to the public, QuickBooks 2011 users can not sign up for new subscriptions to QuickBooks Attached Documents. This change effectively limits the users of this version of the program to 2 undesirable choices: don’t upgrade QuickBooks and keep the Attached Documents service for a limited time or upgrade QuickBooks and lose the ability to attach documents and store them on Intuit’s secure servers. The first blocks access to new QuickBooks features, and the second blocks access to a service that may be important to an organization. It should be noted that users that do opt to upgrade QuickBooks will only lose the ability to attach documents stored in the cloud; they will not lose access to the documents themselves, since access in all likelihood will be preserved until May, 2014.

Unclear: While users of QuickBooks 2012 have access to a tool to migrate existing online documents to local storage, it’s not clear if that tool will be made available to users of QuickBooks 2011 without first upgrading to QuickBooks 2012. Without such a tool, there is no obvious way to migrate documents from Intuit’s cloud storage other than saving them one by one, which would be a time consuming process for active users of the service.

QuickBooks 2010

Good: For users that have stuck with Intuit’s Document Management, there is little good to report. For those that have migrated to Attached Documents before the introduction of QuickBooks 2012, the lower pricing of Attached Documents is a benefit to QuickBooks 2010 users.

Bad: Similar to the fate of QuickBooks 2011 users, QuickBooks 2010 users of online document storage (either Document Management or Attached Documents) can use the service subject to Intuit’s sunshine policy. However, since QuickBooks 2010 was released 1 year before QuickBooks 2011, the sunshine date is 1 year earlier, or May 2013. New, free subscriptions to Document Management with a cap of 100 Mb can be created, but these were intended to allow evaluation of the service when it was first introduced; it’s unlikely anyone would want to evaluate a service that is being phased out, and the 100 Mb cap has little practical value outside of evaluation testing.

The changes to document attachment are significant, and many QuickBooks users that have avoided attaching documents in QuickBooks because of cost considerations will be pleased at the free local document storage in QuickBooks 2012. On the other hand, organizations that have used Intuit’s cloud-based system will be disappointed to see that low-cost service disappear, but they’ll have ample time to implement other approaches to document storage.

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Does QuickBooks 2011 Offer New Ways To Send Forms?

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Yes. Starting with QuickBooks 2011 and Enterprise Solutions 11.0, in addition to Outlook and QuickBooks Email, QuickBooks users can choose to send forms, such as invoices or statements, via web-based email systems, including:

  • Gmail
  • Hotmail/Live
  • Yahoo
  • Other SMTP email

Here’s a screenshot of the Send Forms sub-menu of the Edit->Preferences menu selection:

QuickBooks 2011 Preferences Send Forms

Users of versions prior to QuickBooks 2011 have more limited methods to send forms.

With the addition of new web-based email options, Intuit removed QuickBooks Email as an option unless you’ve paid more to be an active subscriber to another Intuit supported service, including:

  • Intuit Payroll
  • QuickBooks Merchant Services
  • ProAdvisor Program
  • Accountant’s Copy File Transfer
  • QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions Full Service Plan
  • QuickBooks Billing Solutions
  • Intuit Solution Provider Program
  • QuickBooks Pro/Premier Plus
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Can I Use My Own Email Client To Send Reports And Forms Via Email?

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Beginning with the 2008 series of products, you can use your own email client to send reports and forms via email – provided that you have a preference set correctly, and provided that your email client is one of:

  • Microsoft Outlook
  • Microsoft Outlook Express
  • Microsoft Windows Mail

To use any of the above email clients, choose the Outlook setting on the Send Forms sub-menu on the My Preferences tab on the Edit->Preferences menu selection.

Whether you send a report or form via your email client or QuickBooks E-mail, QuickBooks will send the report or form as a PDF attachment.

Users of 2007 series and older are limited to using QuickBooks E-mail, which is an online service provided by Intuit.  Access to this service will no longer be available to QuickBooks 2007 users after May 31, 2010.

Online services are only available to users of a current QuickBooks version, so it’s important to monitor Intuit’s service discontinuation policy regarding the availability of online services for your version to avoid unexpected disruption to certain program features. 

If you need to upgrade your QuickBooks software to continue to be able to send important forms and reports via email, see the links on our Buy QuickBooks page.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Preferences Send Forms Email

The principal advantage of using your own email client is that you can automatically preserve a copy of the emails you send in a folder in your email program.  With QuickBooks E-mail, you need to be sure to send a copy to yourself.

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Is QuickBooks Compatible With Microsoft Office 2010?

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The simple answer is yes, but, judging from posts on Intuit’s community forums, there’s a lot of confusion on the topic. 1 Most of the initial reports of incompatibility were due to users running a beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, running a 64-bit version of Office 2010, or not having updated QuickBooks to the latest release.

Microsoft Office 2010, like many products, was initially released as a beta version. Intuit generally does not support beta releases. When Microsoft Office 2010 was released as a final product, it offered users the ability to install either a 32-bit or 64-bit version; either version can be installed from the retail Microsoft Office DVD. While the 64-bit version makes more system memory available to applications such as Excel, Microsoft itself cautioned that the 64-bit version is incompatible with many add-ons for Office and recommended that most users install the 32-bit version of Office 2010.

With the 32-bit version of the publicly released Microsoft Office, QuickBooks 2008 (Release 10), 2009 (Release 12), 2010 (Release 9), and 2011 (Release 1) are compatible with Microsoft Office 2010. We’ve tested the basic functionality of using Microsoft Office 2010, such as sending reports with Outlook and exporting to Excel, with each of those QuickBooks versions and observed no problems.

Intuit continues to address compatibility for the 64-bit version of Microsoft Office 2010, as discussed below.

As of the availability of Release 8 for QuickBooks 2010 (released on 9/2/10), QuickBooks 2010 products support some functionality with the 64-bit version of Office 2010, including such popular programs as Outlook 2010, Excel 2010, and Word 2010. However, Intuit points out this functionality is not available in Enterprise Solutions 10.0 or QuickBooks Premier Accountant 2010, an industry-specific version of the QuickBooks Premier product.

Earlier releases of QuickBooks 2010, as well as older versions of QuickBooks, are not compatible with the 64-bit version.

To prepare letters, export reports, synchronize contacts, or send emails (other than using QuickBooks E-mail), QuickBooks 2010 running Release 7 and earlier products also support Office 2002, 2003, and 2007.

See our article on how to determine your release of QuickBooks for more information.

For more information, see this Intuit knowledge base article.

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