Making the Most Out of QuickBooks Upgrade 2024: Tips and Tricks

The 2024 upgrade of QuickBooks promises exciting new features and improvements for small business owners and accountants. With thoughtful preparation and strategic planning, you can ensure a smooth transition that enables you to fully leverage the latest capabilities. This article shares tips so you can hit the ground running with QuickBooks Upgrade 2024.

Evaluate New Features and Decide What You Want to Use

Carefully review the new QuickBooks 2024 features and capabilities to determine what will provide the most value for your organization. Key highlights include improved inventory management, more customizable invoices, enhanced reporting, and smarter bank feeds. Consider where you have pain points today that new features can alleviate or opportunities to work more efficiently. Document what you want to learn and use right away versus nice-to-have items for later.

Backup Your QuickBooks Company File

Before installing the 2024 upgrade, be sure to back up your QuickBooks company file. You can either use the built-in backup feature or manually copy the file to a safe location like an external hard drive. Test restoring from the backup file to ensure the copy is valid. Backing up protects your existing data, lists, transactions and other information, allowing you to fallback if needed.

Review Hardware and Software Requirements

Checkout the system requirements for QuickBooks 2024, including supported operating systems, RAM, hard disk space, monitors, and browsers. Determine if upgrades are needed to fully leverage key features. For example, high resolution or multiple monitors may provide better visibility into reports and dashboards. Upgrading hardware and related software ahead of time ensures optimum performance.

Cleanup Data Before Upgrading

Take time to cleanup and organize your QuickBooks data before installing the 2024 release. Some best practices include reconciling all bank and credit card accounts, resolving any discrepancies, deleting old unused accounts, merging duplicate names/customers, and entering any missing transactions. Tidy up inventory records, paying particular attention to serial/lot tracking items. Entering estimates for deadlines will reduce surprise messages post upgrade.

Create New Backups of Custom Reports and Forms

For custom reports, forms and settings, make copies in your current version of QuickBooks before upgrading. Although these often migrate just fine during upgrades, having backup copies avoids any hassles recreating them. Capture screenshots too incase visual formatting shifts slightly. During your evaluation of new capabilities in 2024, make notes what custom elements you may want to retire that are now handled out of the box.

By being proactive with preparations, evaluations, cleanups and backups, you can smooth the path to QuickBooks 2024. Use their guides, community forums, and webinars to continue gathering tips and tricks for adoption. Leverage new features to save time and operate more efficiently. With a strategic approach, the QuickBooks upgrade will lead to great productivity gains for your organization.