Skip to main content

Advisory

QuickBooks Connect Innovations Roundup: We go Further Together

QBC-Brand-1024x565

Intuit hosted its first virtual QuickBooks® Connect on Nov. 18, where the theme was “We go further together.” Thousands attended to take advantage of the many opportunities to grow, learn, and share.

To help grow your practice and serve as a true advisory partner to your clients, here are the highlights of the product innovations presented to attendees in QuickBooks Online Accountant, QuickBooks Online, and more.

Month-end review

Month-end review in QuickBooks Online Accountant is the first end-to-end workflow built inside any accounting software, and is specifically built to help you clean up your clients’ books each month in a fraction of the time and with higher accuracy.

Month-end review lays out a three-stage process starting with transaction review. It starts with categorizing all transactions being brought into QuickBooks and accepting them into your clients’ books. Then, QuickBooks automatically surfaces issues to you: uncategorized transactions, transactions without payees, missing receipts, undeposited funds, unapplied payments, expenses that may be assets, and duplicate transactions. It also highlights anomalies in each step of the process, such as account balances that deviate from the six-month average and material accounts with balances that exceed 10 percent of net income.

Each row in this view is a deep link, so you can see exactly which entries make up each number, and can act on them as needed. You’ll be able to customize your month-end checklist by adding or removing actions you want to take or review each month, and easily track what you’re doing with built-in progress tracking. If you’re managing a team, you can keep an eye on how the whole team is doing right from your firm’s client list.

Soon, you’ll be able enhance your month-end review process with management reports and visualizations.

Performance Center

You can now access the Performance Center (previously only available in QuickBooks Online Advanced) for all of your clients’ books. Any QuickBooks Online Accountant user can access it to advise their clients, regardless of which version of QuickBooks Online they are subscribed to, as well as use it to assess the performance of your QuickBooks Online Accountant firm. Industry benchmarks will continue to bring a new degree of expert-level industry insights to your advisory services, enabling you to better identify areas for business improvement and set smarter goals for clients.

Performance Center calculates key ratios, provides metrics, and visualizes your clients’ financial performance automatically. You can also review client performance across 10 key metrics, then build a chart customized to your clients’ needs.

Statement Auto Import

With no additional work from you or your clients, you can now pull in bank statements from financial institutions right into reconciliation history. Statement Auto Import supports more than 2,800 banks worldwide, including Bank of America, US Bank, TD Bank, Charles Schwab, Fifth Third, Regions, American Express, Discover, Bank of the West, and very soon, Wells Fargo. For banks not currently supported, you or your clients can upload and attach the statement to the specific account so they are available for you when it’s time to reconcile.

Custom Tags

With custom tags, now available for all new QuickBooks Online accounts, your clients can start tracking the most important information about their business. Tags are customizable labels that let you track money however you want in order to gain deeper insights into a business. Clients can add tags to money in and money out transactions, such as invoices, expenses, and bills to understand where they make and spend money.They can also create tags to track any part of their business, such as job types, ad campaigns, sales reps, or project managers.

Automatic Sales Tax Center

The new Automatic Sales Tax Center calculates sales tax on invoices and receipts. When creating an invoice, QuickBooks automatically calculates the sales tax rate based on what you’re selling and where you’re selling it. And, when it’s time to pay sales tax, transactions are organized and easily reviewed.

Amazon Business integration

Amazon Business is now seamlessly integrated into QuickBooks. It makes tracking and categorizing expenses easier than ever. All of the details of your Amazon Business purchase – item details, quantity, shipping costs, and sales tax – are automatically in QuickBooks.

QuickBooks Online Advanced

QuickBooks Online Advanced provides the flexibility your more complex and growing clients need with more users and controls, deeper insights and stronger reporting tools, and more apps to run their whole business.

  • Enter, edit, and send multiple invoices, checks, expenses, or bills at once – and if you’re already working in Excel, you can easily cut/paste right into the QuickBooks transaction sheet. 
  • Create tasks and assign them to a specific employee with Task Manager.
  • Filter, group, sort, and rearrange your data on any attribute so you get the insight you need to make the best decisions for your business with Report Builder.
  • Configure reminders, approvals, and more based on how your team works with customizable and automated workflows. For example, If you want CEO sign-off on any invoice more than $50,000, simply create a workflow to trigger the appropriate approvals.
  • Leverage deep integrations and customizable workflows with key apps such as HubSpot, LeanLaw, Bill.com, and Salesforce.

The QuickBooks Online ecosystem never stops improving. Stay tuned to more articles for enhancements and innovations to grow and scale your practice.

 

See inside December 2020

Potential Workplace Changes Under a Biden Administration

The most significant proposed legislation is the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. It was passed by the House of Representatives on February 6, 2020 but has stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate. One pro-union publication described the ...

Previous

Streaming Entertainment: What We Love to Watch

As we wind down the year of COVID-19, we thought it would be a nice gesture to share with our readers some ideas for what to stream while we’re all locked down for the holiday season and the months ahead. Here's what some of our readers are ...

Next