SOLVED: Quickbooks 2012 and Windows 10 PDF Invoices

If you’ve been using QuickBooks for any length of time, you’ve become familiar with the problems that seem to plague QuickBooks  PDF functions such as invoicing. After upgrading to Windows 10 this week, I went to bill my clients only to find that once again I couldn’t get PDF’s to create properly. I had a couple of different error messages come up instead.

And also

I went promptly to the online QuickBooks knowledge base and found a QB Print and PDF Repair Tool. I excitedly downloaded it and ran it only to find that it didn’t actually repair anything.

Don’t be dismayed though. The first thing you should know is that printing PDF’s in QuickBooks 2012 DOES WORK in Windows 10! It may just take some puzzling around to get it working.

Windows 10 isn’t all that fundamentally different than Windows 8.1 and so I figured the process should still work in some fashion. After opening the Print Management tool and looking at the properties, here is what I’ve found has happened.

• When installing Windows 10, it creates a new Microsoft XPS Document Writer with what I believe is a new driver and attaches it to a port called PORTPROMPT:

In order to get QuickBooks to print properly again, I did the following:

1. Open the Print Management program (you can do something similar in Devices and Printers but the steps will be slightly different)
   
2. Delete the Microsoft XPS Document Writer
   
3. Add a new printer using the following steps
   1. Right click in the white space below the printers and choose Add Printer
      
   2. Choose Create a new port and add a new printer and select Local Port
      
   3. Name the port XPS
      
   4. Choose Install a new driver
      
   5. Click Have Disk and browse to the location of where you have probably previously downloaded a new Microsoft XPS Document Writer driver (C:WindowsSystem32Microsoft XPS Document Writer in my case) and select the driver prnms001.inf. If you don’t have a copy of the driver, feel free to download it here.
      

      Microsoft XPS 64-bit Driver 87.36 KB

      Download
   6. 
      
   7. Make sure the Printer Name is Microsoft XPS Document Writer, with no additional characters
      
   8. Click Next and the printer should be added.

After adding that back in, get back into QuickBooks and try creating a PDF and you should be good to go! Let me know if you were successful in getting this to work.

However, if after all of this it doesn’t work, my recommendation is that you purchase QuickBooks 2016. The best price I’ve found it legitimately is here.