Just in case you somehow managed to avoid all of the hype and hoopla, Intuit released QuickBooks 2012 this week! I attended a webinar on Wednesday covering most of the new features and I can honestly say this is a worthy upgrade.

I usually tell people that they don’t need to upgrade because frankly, the new features each year usually aren’t all that exciting. But there are several new features in QuickBooks 2012 that make it worth a look. I’ll be releasing a series of blog posts, articles and videos covering some of these new features in the coming weeks but for now I’ll just mention a few of them.

There is a new calendar view feature that lets you see your upcoming bills, invoices and to-do lists in a calendar format. I believe that this one, single feature will make it a worth-while upgrade for a lot of small business owners. This gives them a quick and easy way to see what’s coming up without getting lost in reports.

Improved export to Excel features – you can now export a report to Microsoft Excel and it contains a “live” link back to the QuickBooks data. This allows you to go back into the exported spreadsheet and refresh or update the numbers from the QuickBooks file. This will be one of those features that’s useful for a lot of tasks like quickly getting totals of accounts or calculating ratios.  You can now also customize the formatting of your export to Excel and save those customizations as a pre-set to use in future exports. Another big time saver!

Memorized transactions have been improved. Now when you get the pop-up window telling you that there are memorized transactions to enter, you get to see what they are and manually choose which ones to enter.

There is a new Lead Center that allows you to track sales leads with some custom fields. You can convert a lead into a customer if need be.

You can batch time sheet entry if you have several employees with the same time. This could be a huge time saver for certain businesses.

The Document Center has been improved to allow local storage of the scanned documents and has a new drag and drop interface.  I can’t wait to get a look at this!

There are other improvements for accountants too. Improved condensing, the ability to “export” one single year’s worth of transactions, using one QB file to set up a new, blank company file and more.

If you’ve been holding off on upgrading QuickBooks for a few years, I really think you should check out this new version. It might just be time to pull the trigger!

Of course, if you are interested in upgrading I would appreciate it if you purchased through a link on my site. I do get a small commission on each sale and it really helps me maintain this site.

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This post was written by Michael Debyah.