The embargo of secrecy is now lifted and I can give you guys some first thoughts on the new 2012 QuickBooks.

First and foremost, Inventory capabilities has been greatly enhanced. FIFO and Serial OR Lot tracking is now an option!!! That will mean a lot to some people who need those options. In QB 2012, Inventory is elevated to customer and vendor status with its own Center. Intuit spend a whole lot of time add capabilities to the inventory center. In addition to FIFO and Serial or Lot, you can add images to the inventory profile and do automatic price markups (based upon cost).

A sales CRM has been a weakness in QuickBooks. To that end, they are adding a customer classification of "leads" which allows you to keep them separate from actual customers. To do lists are enhanced so that it could be possible to run a very simple sales management process directly in QuickBooks.

Document management is now free if you save your images locally! We've been asking for this for years! Why should we paid Intuit to store images when we have perfectly good storage space on our server.

There are many more features in the upcoming release, and I'll have plenty more to say in the next few weeks. This release is shaping up to be a major release and probably worth upgrading for. If you are a QBES user with a full-service plan, you'll receive your copy of the software sometime late this month. If you let your full-service plan lapse, you may be able to reinstate it. Please contact me to see if that is possible.

Watch this blog, the facebook page and the tech library. There will be much more to come!