Update item prices in recurring invoices

Hi stobonet, thanks for posting on the Community

In QuickBooks Online UK, you'll see the option to 'Update price in recurring templates, too' after editing the product/service price (Sales > Products and Services > Edit > Enter the new sales price/rate).

If you don't see this option, this may mean that you're trying to edit a P/S that isn't included on an active recurring template. 

You can also check for any browser issues that may be impacting the display by opening QuickBooks in a different browser or incognito window. Hope this helps :) 

No & No! This appears to indicate hopeless confusion at QBO.

Specifically, the tick box does not appear and we do have many active recurring invoices which include the relevant products or services. I am using Chrome  (on Windows), which is QBO's recommended browser, but the same problem is apparent for a colleague who uses Firefox on a Mac.

I spoke to QBO Support and was given the answer that updating product/service prices would & could not update recurring invoice templates. The only way forward was to: edit each invoice, add a new item with the new price, and then delete the old item. Extraordinarily tedious for 100s of recurring invoice templates. This advice was based on screen-sharing inspection of the recurring invoice templates.

The inconsistency in advice given leads me to suspect that there is something about the format of the templates or their age or something similar which gets in the way of the links that would be required for automatic updating.

I understand that support staff are trying to do their best to provide help, but there are clearly configuration or other issues which mean that well-intended advice doesn't work. My strong suspicion - as a software person as well as a longstanding user of QBO - is that QBO doesn't really understand how its own system works a lot of the time. It may know how it wants it to work but that is an entirely different story. The reference to browsers, which has been a longstanding issue, illustrates the complexity of the interactions.

Hi stobonet, thanks for getting back to me. 

I appreciate you checking this over with colleagues. I am able to use the 'Update price in recurring templates, too' function as expected on my UK test system, so appreciate the confusion being caused. 

This feature is relatively new (released around a year ago) and so may not work for any recurring templates or stock items that were created prior to this. Apologies that this doesn't offer any firm explanation or easy workaround. 

If you would like to submit any feedback to our product team on this, please do so via the Cog > Feedback in QuickBooks. Thanks!