QuickBooks for Mac and Mountain Lion

Wait to Update

First – a word of advice – Don’t update the OS on your business’ computer the day, or even week, it comes out.  As much as I love Macs, I only do that on my test computer for the first couple of months.  I prefer to let everyone else be the guinea pig.  And I know that there are going to be issues with applications, utilities and drivers that didn’t crop up until it was available to the general public.  I want to wait until all the related updates have been released.

QB 2012 Only on Mountain Lion

2011 and below is not supported with Mountain Lion.  Before you panic, however, it is important to understand the difference between “supported” and “works”.  Intuit is not saying you have to upgrade to 2012. They aren’t saying that 2011 and below are going to be buggy.  All they are saying is that if you have an issue running QuickBooks for Mac 2011 on Mountain Lion, and you call the support line, they won’t be able to help.  In my mind, this isn’t a big deal.  Intuit doesn’t “support” a lot of configurations that work great – QuickBooks for Mac 201o on Lion for instance, or my favorite – running QB for Windows on Parallels.  Not being able to call support is not a big loss in my book; I find the telephone support for the Mac version of QuickBooks to be pretty dreadful.  And as a “Diamond Level” ProAdvisor, I get access to top tier support.  I can only imagine what others have experienced.  On the other hand, you can use the user forums to get help for any issue – which is a much better option.  Not only are there knowledgeable users  there who may be able help, the QuickBooks for Mac team from Intuit often drops in to answer questions.

So let’s wait and see what issues may crop up with 2010 and 2011 versions before we worry about Intuit “making us upgrade”

So far I haven’t seen the huge number of issues related to running QB for Mac on Mountain Lion, that we saw right after Lion came out.  One in particular is of concern, though, because it affects people who use Intuit Merchant Services within their program to process credit cards.

Known Issues with 2012

Keychain Issues – This affect Merchant Service, and Online Banking.  You’ll get error messages like this: “The operation couldn’t be completed. Merchant Services was enabled for this company file, but the Connection Ticket was not found in Keychain.”

This turns out to be an Apple bug that is going to affect a lot of programs that store passwords, or in this case the MS token, in the KeyChain.  I would expect this to be dealt with fairly quickly, but in the meantime, one workaround is to log into your Merchant Service account and process the cards there.  You’ll be able to download the payments into your QB file and match them up with invoices or create Sales Receipts from there.  Postpone downloading transaction from your bank, until this has been fixed.

The other is to revert to the R9 release, which you can download from here:  http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/Support/ProductUpdates.aspx  Not perfect, but I did tell you not to upgrade the OS on your business computer, right?

Here are some other issues that have been identified:

• To Do Notes are not syncing to iCal, they now sync to the new Reminders app
• Drag and drop of Layout Designer templates can cause an unexpected quit or crash
• Each change to a Calendar enabled transaction, adds another alert to the event in the Calendar
• QuickBooks hangs when changing view options of an Open dialog in Mountain Lion
• QuickBooks hangs when closing the Home Page if using a Retina MacBook
• Product Information window has a white rectangle where the company name should be
• Bars disappear from Company Snapshot graphs if using a Retina display

None of these seem like as big an issue as the Keychain problem, and are unlikely to be fixed immediately.  By the time I’m ready to install Mountain  Lion on my main computer, I would expect them to be fixed.