As a QuickBooks Consultant out in the field of helping businesses, especially when it comes to fixing inventory issues, I see and hear the same complaints over and over again. In defense of any good product, I am more apt to extol the advantages and benefits of QuickBooks; however, when I see an important opportunity for the product to be improved,

1. I want Intuit to know how important this is and how much it is impacting many businesses using their product.

2. I want Intuit to act as quickly as possible to mobilize their team of developers to implement these changes.

Having worked in Technical Support of QuickBooks at Intuit, I have learned that the best way to provide a product suggestion or report a bug in QuickBooks is from within the QuickBooks program itself. Of course, if you call technical support, they will oftentimes document the case and submit a suggestion. However, when you go under the Help menu in QuickBooks to Send Feedback Online, your Product Suggestion or Bug Report is automatically documented and recorded and passed on to the developers. I am not privy to the whole process, but I believe these submissions are analyzed, bucketed by percentages, categorized by cost to implement, and then filtered down to a "to do" list for the next market release.

If that is the case, then the more users that submit the same request, then the more likely it will be implemented, assuming it is feasible and cost-effective.

An example of a pain point for me and others for many years that I see has been fixed in the 2009 version of QuickBooks:

After having to do this many times to fix multiple periods (sometimes years' worth of data), in the past doing a reconciliation of a bank or credit card account was such a pain, since trying to match what QuickBooks showed me as a list and what my paper statement showed me, it was so time-consuming (and hard on the eyes) trying to find the match. Now it is possible to Sort by Column in the reconciliation screen. This is so beneficial if you are trying to find an amount: instead of using the Find feature, I can now sort by Amount. Or if I am looking for a specific date, I can sort by Date.

Now that I know for sure that Intuit is listening to its customers, here are a couple of my current pet peeves that I encourage every QuickBooks user to submit a product suggestion:

As every business that uses the Inventory functionality in QuickBooks knows, managing Inventory Items can be difficult:

1. In the Adjust Quantity/Value On Hand Activity, I would love to have a check box for Show Inactive Items. Essentially, if I don't want to see inactive items in my lists, then why would I always want to see them here? I can understand zeroing out all items that I've made inactive, but after that, I would like to only see the active items in the same order that I see them on my Physical Inventory Worksheet. That way, doing an adjustment based on a physical count schedule would be so much easier.

2. Similarly, in the Price Level Type Per Item, I would also love to not see any of the inactive items listed here. I'm not sure if a check box would do well here also, but I can't see why I would ever have a price level for any inactive item if I am never going to use it. Of course, if I make the item active again, then I would expect to see it in a price level so that it can adjusted.

If you agree with me on this, I would urge you to also submit your suggestions to Intuit. Of course, it helps if you explain how this impacts your business and suggest how to improve it, as I did. And if you have any other major issues that you think definitely should and can be fixed in QuickBooks, feel free to comment them here so that I and others can get on board.