cannot create recurring transactions in the new customer invoicing experience

I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and feedback regarding the new customer invoicing experience. I understand your concerns and see that this has a significant impact on your workflow and efficiency.
 

Please consider sending your experience to your product developer and share your suggestion to them. By sharing your specific issues and suggestions, you can help the development team understand the impact of the changes and provide insights for potential improvements. 

1. Go to the Gear icon.
2. Select Feedback under Profile.
3. Enter your suggestion. Then, click Next.
   

Additionally, there's an ongoing issue about recurring invoice templates for invoices that aren't being automatically created when set to scheduled. If you're facing the same scenario, please be informed that this has been raised to our investigation team to look into further for you. 

To add you to the lists of affected users, please contact our Support Team. You can provide this investigation number: INV-92256. Within your QBO account, go to Help in the upper-right corner.

1. In the Search tab, click Contact us.
2. Enter a brief description of your concern.
3. Click Continue.
   

Stay in touch if you have more concerns about QuickBooks. We always want to hear from you.

One month after I posted this on 10/2/23, the problem isn’t fixed. And I haven’t been waiting a month, I’ve been waiting since I migrated my client from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online in late June 2023 and was involuntarily assigned the “new customer invoicing experience.”

And remember, it’s not just that I cannot create a new invoice template (“recurring transaction”), but the templates that migrated over from QB Desktop cannot be updated and saved. Let’s say I’m billing a series of five identical fees. The first invoice says, “Fee 1 of 5,” the second says, “Fee 2 of 5” but I cannot save the new wording so that I will know which was the last one I billed next time I use the template. I have to keep track separately where I am in the series. Of course, I already keep a list of all invoice numbers I use because QB Online does a terrible job of assigning invoice numbers, and I have not found where you can put it back on track when it’s out of sequence the way you could in QB Desktop.

Because vendor bill entry hasn’t been given a “new experience,” when I save a vendor bill I created from a template, I am asked if I want to update the recurring template to reflect the changes just entered. As it should do. As customer invoice templates used to do.

Why would Intuit roll out a change (an “improvement”?) when it doesn’t do some really basic things that the predecessor version did?

To Intuit’s credit, I have noticed something that has changed/been fixed, something that was badly needed. Either Intuit fixed it or I just found out how to turn it on; I cannot find again where I was to make this change. It used to be that the invoice did not display on the screen the invoice total as you were creating the invoice. Who doesn’t want to know the invoice total as you’re creating the invoice? This seems insanely obvious. Instead, I had to print the invoice to PDF to see the total, there’s no way to get it to appear. Recently, I got it to show the total on the screen. Again, why would Intuit release an “improvement” that didn’t do what is basic and obvious and that the previous version did?

And as predicted in my previous post, this seriously flawed “new customer invoicing experience” has become standard: “Recently, we gave people the opportunity to try out our new estimate and invoice layout for QuickBooks Online. The new layout offers access to the latest innovations, more automation tools, an ability to preview what a customer sees—and more. We’re pleased to announce that this layout will be available to everyone, starting with QuickBooks Simple Start in October.”

I'm also having this issue and it's enough to make me stop using QBO.

When I create an invoice it forces me into using the new invoicing experience.  OK fine.

But where are my SHIP DATE, TRACKING NUMBER fields?  I had to add a custom field for Tracking Number but I can't use the drop down SHIP DATE calendar to select 12/18/2023 as ship date.

When I ship something, I automatically need to create a recurring invoice in 1 year from the ship date to pay for the subscription they ordered.  If I click on recurring invoice under the AUTOMATION tab, it doesn't copy anything over so I need to create a new invoice from scratch.  But the recurring template is the OLD invoice template that I need back.

Customer service doesn't seem to understand this.  They also seem to love rolling out "new features" without ensuring that the new experience is a good one.  They need to fix this or I am out.

I understand the inconvenience you are experiencing when adding the shipping date and tracking number to your invoices, @Sailah. 

QuickBooks Online (QBO) is always striving to improve our products and software features to provide you with the best experience possible. Please know that the Ship via, Shipping Date, and Tracking No. fields still need to be prepared for the new invoice layout experience.

Checking the QuickBooks Online feature request website, you can keep track of your feature requests.

I appreciate your patience as our product development team is doing their best and fastest way to make this feature available sooner.

For more details on the new updates with invoices in QBO, you can check this article out: See what’s new with estimates and invoices in QuickBooks Online. 

In addition, you can browse this article that discusses closing the fiscal year and preparing for the new one in QBO: Year-end guide for QuickBooks Online. 

Feel free to comment below if you have other questions regarding the new invoice layout in QBO. Just leave a comment below. I’m here to assist you at any time. 

Funny because all I see QB employees do is spend time here placating paying users with the same "send us feedback" BS and it never happens.  Every "improvement" is a step back.  Nothing about this new invoicing feature is an improvement.  There was nothing wrong with what we all were well used to in the old invoicing.  Everything I needed was right there.

I could select ship date, add UPS and Tracking info, see when customer viewed invoice and then set up annual recurring invoice for the annual subscriptions I bill.  It's now more clunky and extra steps.  I guess if I was going for job security at Intuit I would just keep breaking things so there was always something to fix.

Not going to bother replying after this, it's clear we are just dealing with AI chatbots in the comments.  Hopefully this helps someone else.

I'll spend my time looking for alternatives to QB that gives me what I want without the headaches.

To be clear, this is a functionality that currently does exist in the "old" invoicing system. QBO has not built this same, simple functionality into it's new invoicing system. I too rely heavily on this ability to create an invoice adn then simply "create a recurring invoice" that copies the information into a new, recurring invoice template so that I do not have to spend the time to copy and paste over a multitude of lines. 

QUICKBOOKS NEEDS TO PUT THIS FUNCTIONALITY BACK INTO THE NEW INVOICE SYSTEM! INV-92256

Hello there, Jodie. I appreciate you for joining the thread.

Although the feature of creating recurring transactions from within the invoice using the new layout isn't available as of now. I'm here to share how you can send your suggestions to our Product Engineers in QuickBooks Online (QBO) to include this feature in future updates.

It's important that the software accommodates various business needs. I recognize that there are functions from the old invoice layout that needs to be retained in the new experience. With this, I encourage sending your feedback to our Product Engineers to add the function of creating recurring transactions from within the new experience.

Here's how:

1. Go to the Gear icon, select Feedback.
2. Enter your comments or product suggestions.
3. Then select Next to submit feedback.

Once submitted, you can track your feature request through QBO Feature Requests website.

In addition, you can check out this article to learn how to personalize and add specific info to your sales forms: Customize invoices, estimates, and sales receipts in QBO.

If you have further concerns about the new invoice experience in QBO, feel free to come back here in the Community. We're here to assist you 24/7.

How can you force us into a new format for invoicing and remove one the most IMPORTANT parts of it????  This is completely unacceptable. And the only solution is to give Quickbooks "feedback"?  And how long is that going to take?  I make recurring templates for many clients on many different Quickbooks accounts.  We need a better solution or an option to go back the old invoice.  Ridiculous.

Why do you always put it on the customer to contact the developers, shouldn't you have in-house communications, can't you just forward it, or are you really just trying to make the issue go away.  I agree the new experience totally sucks, and I am having the same issues. I have to open two screens and manually copy from one to the other to update the recurring transaction, before it would just ask. I don't think I even have the option of going to the old experience, what used to take a couple of minutes, now takes 20, and manually copying runs the risk of errors. The new invoice is also painfully slow, I have the fastest internet connection I can get in my area, but it is slow. I click save move to go on and it tells me the invoice isn't saved yet. Once again you have ruined "The experience" I gained nothing from your changes. 

Shouldn't you be forwarding the suggestions to the in=house engineers. I mean in-house by the very definition is you are right there to communicate with them. This canned response is just another example of your company lack of customer service. 

As you predicted, it of course became the required only option for creating invoices.  Yet 7 months after your post when they made the forced permanent change, and now another 2 months after that, they still have not resolved this issue.  Sending feedback never seems to actually do anything since they just keep rolling out half-baked replacements for stuff that had been working fine before that, and taking years to add back the missing functionality if they ever even do at all.  If QuickBooks wants to revamp a feature, they need to make sure it does AT LEAST everything the existing feature is able to do before forcing it upon their customers, and ideally more than that so the customers actually look forward to the changes instead of fearing them.  Yet I think every one of their forced changes that I've experienced has actually removed functionality.

I FIGURED IT OUT

For me it was happening because I could not see the Product/Service column in the table when trying to create a recurring transaction template. I imagine the hidden error was something like "put in a product/service" but it wasn't visible because the column wasn't. To fix:

1. Go to the gear in QB, under Your Company select Account and settings.

2. On the Sales tab at left, make sure "Show Product/Service column on sales forms" is on.

3. Try again.

I tried everything else listed here about clearing cache and incognito browser. This was the only thing that worked. Good luck.

QB - now that a retired QA engineer has found the bug, tell your engineers to fix this.

I FOUND IT - it's there but NOT INTUITIVE (pun unintended)

If you are in the new invoice format, go to "manage" then under "scheduling" the option to make recurring and the associated pieces are there. Hopefully you can see the image attached.

I FINALLY FOUND IT -

If you have not completely given up by now, there actually is a way to do it but it is a bit convoluted - 

In the new version there is an option to MANAGE and under that an option for SCHEDULING where you will see the opportunity to select MAKE RECURRING and all of the options for setting that up.