A Financial Dashboard for Owners, and a Rebuilt Returned to Vendor

This week the QuickBooks Center grew a dashboard that answers the questions an owner actually asks, the Training Center opened its manuals to every kind of user, and two long-standing pay calculations were corrected.

Your business at a glance, inside the QuickBooks Center

The QuickBooks Center has a new Dashboard. Instead of opening QuickBooks to piece together how the business is doing, you get the picture on one screen, drawn from your own accounting data.

Four cards carry the headline numbers, each written in plain terms:

• Cash, what you actually have on hand, listed one line per account so you can see where it sits.
• What you owe, the bills waiting to be paid, framed as immediate obligations rather than a vague total.
• What you are spending, your recent outgoing pace, so a heavy month is visible while it is still happening.
• Unbilled work, interpreting that has been delivered but not yet invoiced. This is the number most easily forgotten, and the one most likely to be money you already earned.

Below the cards, money owed to you is broken down by how old it is, with the oldest and most at-risk amounts called out on their own, so the invoices worth a phone call today separate themselves from the ones that are simply young. Charts fill in the trend across months, and the header tells you when the figures were last brought over from QuickBooks and when they refresh next, so you always know how current the picture is. The Dashboard is limited to your staff, since these are the numbers you would not hand to a customer or an interpreter.

Returned to Vendor, rebuilt

When submitted paperwork has to go back to an interpreter for a correction, the assignment lands in Returned to Vendor. That screen has been rebuilt on the new platform, and the difference is in how much less hunting it takes to clear the list.

You can find the work the way you happen to think of it. Search by assignment number, interpreter, account, service, record number, voucher, bill code, member number, purchase order, consumer, requester, claim, category, location, or date, and jump straight to ready-made views for what is not submitted, what is pending review, and what is approved. If a correction came in as a duplicate, or the assignment traces back to an original booking, there are views for those too.

Everything you need to do is on the right-click menu. Approve the corrected paperwork, send it back again for another resubmit, mark it submitted, edit the assignment, reschedule or cancel it, clone it, broadcast it, open the vendor or customer invoice, read the assignment journal, check the support documents, or clear it for billing and payment. What used to mean opening three screens is now one menu on the row in front of you.

Two more touches: the screen uses your organization's own wording throughout, so it says whatever you call assignments, interpreters, and accounts, and the search behind it was reworked to return results faster on a busy list.

The Training Center now serves everyone

Last week we announced the September launch of our documentation platform. This week the Training Center caught up to it: manuals are now organized into separate sections for staff, interpreters, and customers, so each person opens the shelf written for them instead of scrolling past material meant for somebody else. If a manual is ever missing or slow to load, the screen now says so plainly rather than sitting blank.

Two corrections in what gets paid

• Rate adjustments attached to a specific assignment now reach the interpreter's pay. When someone attached an adjustment to an individual event, a premium for a difficult assignment, for example, it was applied to the customer's invoice but could be missed when the interpreter's compensation was calculated. Pay now follows the exact same path the invoice does, so an adjustment that raises the charge also raises the payment, as intended.
• Travel time rounds by trip leg, the way people actually travel. Travel to an assignment and travel home are two separate journeys, and each is now rounded on its own by default. Accounts that would rather add both legs together first and round the total once can turn that on. Related: when travel is priced differently at different times of day, the platform now only splits a trip across those time bands if the bands genuinely charge different rates, so a trip that crosses a boundary with no price change is no longer chopped into pieces for no reason.

Smaller things you will notice

• Your search survives a deletion. In the Review Center, deleting a row used to clear the search you had typed, dropping you back into the full list. Your filter now stays put, so you can work through a filtered set one row at a time.
• Mileage entry explains itself. The mileage field now tells you plainly how to enter partial miles, so a decimal point does not become a rejected form.
• Preview a tax form before it goes out. Tax forms can now be previewed as a PDF, so what the interpreter receives is seen by a human first.
• Vendor summaries group by interpreter. The vendor summary now gathers each interpreter's events together and totals them, turning a long list of individual assignments into a per-person picture.
• Billing contacts on record. Accounts can now carry a designated billing contact, so an invoice knows who it is addressed to without someone remembering.

In the works

A rebuilt cancellation and reschedule flow is in testing. Two things make it worth waiting for: you will see what a cancellation is going to do, including whether your policy makes it billable, before you confirm it, and when you cancel several events at once and some of them cannot be cancelled, the platform will tell you exactly which ones it refused and why, instead of quietly doing part of the job.

Also moving: a Totals view that groups and sums the columns you care about, column choices that hide and show instantly when you save your settings rather than after a reload, and table rows that keep long entries tidy until you expand them.

Questions about any of these? Visit our Help Desk and our team will be glad to assist.