Acrobat and Intuit QuickBooks® Blog

Several limitations and bugs of the QuickBooks® interface were found too late to get changes into Acrobat 9.0.  None the problems listed here are nasty and the interface is quite usable!

                . When you try to connect to QuickBooks, you may get a dialog entitled “QuickBooks – Application Certificate”.  Unfortunately the dialog may appear underneath the Acrobat window.  This is actually a bug in QuickBooks, to work around the problem simply switch applications to QuickBooks and continue.

                . When the aforementioned “QuickBooks – Application Certificate” appears; Acrobat is halted and will not redraw window content, which appears messy.  This will be fixed in a future version of Acrobat.

                . When attempting to connect to QuickBooks, you may see a warning containing the message “QuickBooks is not currently running, no company file is open, or the connection to Acrobat was denied.  Please open a company file in QuickBooks and approve connection requests from Acrobat.”  If you are having trouble getting past this warning, try this:

·         Open the QuickBooks Preferences Panel

·         Select the “Integrated Applications” page.

·         Select the “Company Preferences” tab.

·         If you see “Adobe Acrobat” in the list, remove it.

·         In Acrobat attempt your QuickBooks connection again.

                . You can create your own Acrobat QuickBooks templates!  See the document Creating PDF Forms for Intuit QuickBooks. 

. While filling in distributed QuickBooks templates using Reader 7, there are severe performance problems when using the plus sign and minus sign to add and remove rows.  If the performance hit is unacceptable you must upgrade to Reader 8 or higher.

. While filling in distributed QuickBooks templates using Reader 7 there is a limitation of form fill-in.  When you click the minus sign to delete an item, the Subtotal and Total fields do not update.  To fix this bug you can use LiveCycle Designer (included in your copy of Acrobat Pro or Extended) to make the small script change listed below.   Or you can have everybody upgrade to Reader 8 or higher, which really is a huge improvement!  Here is the script change I mentioned:

·         Open the template in LiveCycle Designer.

·         Increase your zoom factor to 100%

·         Select the minus sign.

·         Switch to the “XML Source” tab.  You should be at a line containing name="cmdInvoiceItemDel" in the XML source.

·         Scroll down slightly until you see the following line inside a javascript.  Note that “<x>” is actually a string such as “EstimateAdd”.

xfa.form.<x>.QuickBooks.checkTable();

·         Add the following as a single line after the “checkTable()” call of the previous step.  Make sure to substitute for “<x>” the string of the previous step such as “EstimateAdd”.

xfa.form.<x>.sfmInvoiceLines.InvoiceSubtotal.tblTotal.rowSubTotal.txtSubTotal.execEvent("calculate");

·         Save the file and exit LiveCycle Designer.

·         Use Acrobat to populate the template for distribution.

Overall the QuickBooks interface seems to be working really well and none of these problems are showstoppers!