Emailing Reports and Forms from QuickBooks
One of the new features in QuickBooks 2008 is the ability to send invoices and other forms directly from QuickBooks with Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. There is a fairly simple way to do this in current versions of QuickBooks. And you can use any email program.
With the form (invoice, sales receipt, estimate, purchase order, sales order) or configured report in the top active window, select File then click Save as PDF. Save in your documents folder or other location of your chosing.
After saving, you can attach to any email you send. The benefits to this method are being able to send multiple forms and reports in one email and having a record of when and to whom the email was sent.
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Comments
You’re right. And you can no longer send directly from QuickBooks using 2005 and older versions either, even using Pro, Premier or Enterprise. Intuit’s “sunset” policy (retiring older versions) can be found here.
http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/DiscontinuationPlan.aspx
Here’s another, only slightly more complicated, solution for you.
It requires the download of free software that allows you to save any printable document as a .pdf file. I use (and love) CutePDF. It is completely free and contains no ads, popups or watermarks. There are other programs out there. Just do a search for “pdf creator” and you will find both paid and free options.
These instructions are for CutePDF. Other programs should work about the same but refer to product instructions to be sure. Once you have downloaded and installed your PDF program it will appear in the printer options whenever you print a document.
- Create or open your invoice / document to be printed,
- Select print from the menu (clicking the instant print button will not allow you to follow the next steps, be sure to use the File >Print option in the menu),
- Select CutePDF or other program as the printer in the print options screen,
- Save your file in a location you can remember with a descriptive name,
- Attach as you would any other document in emails,
I more frequently use this to capture a screen online or to save documents for my fax-by-email account. Let me know if this method works better for you.
HAs anyone worked a patch to allow the email option in QBPro2005 to be used with an external program -Outlook or others.
The above suggestion works but requires re-entry of the customer’s email, the separate generation of a PDF and filing thereof.
The sunset policy would seem to permit Intuit to -unilaterally disable other features - and essentially “gut” QB2005
All this without consideration of the users. I have absolutely no need to upgrade.
A customer centric company would have provided a “patch” to work around this issue.
Given the cost associated with replacing 4 operational copies of QBPRO2008 (which would have the same designed in obsolescence ) so in less than 3 years after purchase features are disabled … makes the decision to go to another accounting package much easier.
So anyone have a simple patch????????????
From the QuickBooks Basic 2005 help screen:
“In the QuickBooks Pro, Premier, or Enterprise Solutions editions, you can also save forms and reports as PDF files. In QuickBooks Basic, the menu choice File - Save as PDF is greyed out. Learn how to upgrade your version of QuickBooks.”
Thus, this tip won’t work for QB Basic users.