Intuit Enterprise Suite Updates | Summer 2025

There may be errors in spelling, grammar, and accuracy in this machine-generated transcript.

Alicia Katz Pollock: In this episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast. I am excited and delighted to have back our recurring guest, Hector Garcia. Hey Hector, how are you?

Hector Garcia: Excited! It's been three months, but it feels like forever.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I really love that you keep coming back for these and Intuit Enterprise Suite updates, because it's not just exciting to hear what's happening [00:00:30] in the software, but it's exciting for me to happen to hear what's going on in your world. So welcome back. I mean, we went from like talking every single day to just talking every so often, and I kind of miss you.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, I miss you too. And, um, you know, congratulations on the 100th episode. That was awesome. And I could only join for a couple of minutes. I was literally driving across state, which, by the way, um, driving from North Carolina to Tennessee, through that particular road through the Smoky Mountains is This is absolutely [00:01:00] beautiful, so I don't regret missing the episode because I was experiencing, you know, natural beauty with my family. But congratulations on the 100th episode.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh, thank you very, very much. Thanks for getting the podcast. Um, you know, up and running with me. And then thanks for pulling over to the side of the road while you're driving through the mountains to join us briefly for that episode.

Hector Garcia: Well, I would say let's let's all rejoice that the time and the world that we're living in where that's totally possible, right? You know, that's it's we gotta appreciate [00:01:30] the fact that that's even, you know, something that we can do. So take advantage of it. Right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: I love that, absolutely love that. Yeah. So what have you been up to since we've seen you last?

Hector Garcia: Yeah. So I was in North Carolina because we had an event called the Right Tool Retreat, uh, which was started as a 30 person event that ended up being like a 60 person event. It was super awesome. It was similar to, like, one of those Intuit, um, you know, so I learned a lot from going to Intuit councils and the influencer sessions [00:02:00] where they do that. Brainstorming to go. Here's a broad problem let's narrow it down. You know, how would you think about solving the issue? And we did a lot of sort of how to fix QuickBooks challenges and does right tool have a have a presence there? Uh, our friends from anchor were there and they did their own sort of session like that, a workshop. And then our friends from from Right Works did that as well. So it was just it was an incredible three days. And I kind of wish I could go back and and relive it. And we were in a very special property called the Greenland state, [00:02:30] which we, we kind of landed on by accident. So like the whole thing put together, uh, sounds the heat. We had a heat wave, which made the experience very specific. But, uh, the workshop itself was was amazing. You know, the amount of ideas that we have for right tool in the next six months to a year, like it's going to blow your mind like the stuff that we're going to develop that's going to come out of our company. It will blow your mind and it will. It all has been crowdsourced by those 60 accounting professionals that were were very generous with their time and their [00:03:00] ideas.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's really exciting because right tool for me is essential equipment. So I can't see where it goes next.

Hector Garcia: And the next thing for me is going to be reframe. Like right now I'm heads down, just concentrated on the event. I'm so excited that you're going to be doing table facilitation there. So if you haven't signed up yet, there's a few tickets left. Reframe accounting Comm in Miami. Thank you for letting me plug it in. Uh, you know, I do want to sell out. We sold out last year. We sold out the year before. We don't think we'll have a challenge this year, but reframe [00:03:30] pricing with confidence will be significant. Um, to help 150 professionals evolve their thinking when it comes to pricing their services, especially in this post, I narrative that I will take over accounting type of world.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, I'm really excited to be there. Pricing is so crucial right now in this time and so learning. You know, I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say about it and then couching it in a way that we can help. I can help everybody at my table transform their [00:04:00] own practices.

Hector Garcia: And here's my hot take on that before we get go into into an enterprise suite. The evolution of pricing for professionals is not necessarily pricing up, right. It could be some version of pricing down because we are you know, we're now working, you know, neck and neck with AI. And then maybe possibly some of us want to have simpler lifestyles and not with the promise of I want to spend more time, you know, in ourselves, in, in with our families or [00:04:30] whatever, and shouldn't always be about going up, going up, raising your rate, charging as much as possible, like, you know, getting the bigger whale clients. You know, pricing is it's both. It's both to grow, to expand your customer base, to focus on different services, and also maybe to simplify your practice and leverage some of these AI tools. And you might be able to simplify, you know, your workforce. And even though it's kind of sad that a lot of accounting professionals that don't jump on the I train will be deemed irrelevant [00:05:00] pretty soon. Like it's really going to happen beyond the narrative. So like how US accounting leaders, accounting firm leaders we think about, you know, how that's going to affect us, whether it's to raise the price or lower the price. The conference is going to be about that. So I think that's going to be interesting because I don't think anybody has ever, you know, in thought leadership said, you know, lower your price. And I'm not saying I'm not advocating for that. I'm just saying there is a place for parts of your practice that could be a higher price and parts that maybe not so much. [00:05:30]

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, that's a really refreshing perspective. And it actually really shows why reframe is the right name for this project that you're undertaking, because we're really reframing our perspectives on how the world is working and how the industry is evolving. And for the last ten years, it has been about about growth and about increasing our prices and getting value for what you're worth. But now the tools are changing. And so there's a whole new dynamic that we have to take into consideration.

Hector Garcia: Exactly. So let's move over [00:06:00] to into the enterprise suite. Um, so let me start. Alicia. Do you know where a compliment sandwich is?

Alicia Katz Pollock: A compliment sandwich. That's when you give somebody a compliment, and then you break the bad news, and then you say, why? In the end, it's all really good.

Hector Garcia: Perfect. So we're on the same page. So I'm going to give Intuit a compliment sandwich. Right. Because it's a really big piece of feedback I have to give it about Intuit Enterprise Suite. So let me start with the first compliment. The product development team at Intuit dealing with Enterprise [00:06:30] Suite is incredible. The speed in which they're innovating. It's nothing like I ever seen before. And I've been doing, you know, QuickBooks stuff for like 16 plus years where I've been like, you know, in the depth of looking at QuickBooks every single day, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner, you know, QuickBooks dreaming and QuickBooks, like I have been. And I've never seen it move so fast, so efficiently Only with really, really powerful tools. And and this is the third update, right. That they just did summer of 2025. They've [00:07:00] done three major updates where they added more features. And I'm I'm blown away. So compliment. Now here comes the feedback. Intuit Enterprise Suite still has mysterious pricing. You still have to talk to someone first before you get a price. There's no rhyme, logic, or reason to frame you. Know why this is worth two and a half to three times as much as an advanced edition. When you add additional companies, it's as much as an advanced add on [00:07:30] for the add on. So there's no economies of scale compared to QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise. Also, because it bears the enterprise name and Intuit at the same time, there's a certain expectation that this is a replacement for QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise, which strategically it is. The problem is the messaging is a little bit less than forthright, I think. I don't know if I don't have I haven't sat with a salesperson that has said this, but I can tell you, I've been there.

Hector Garcia: I'm a I'm a I'm a witness of this, but [00:08:00] I have enough customer, um, anecdotes about them kind of saying that desktop is being phased out, that it's going away. It's time to make a change. Now, don't get caught with your pants down type of stuff. And then kind of misleading the customer into prematurely moving from desktop, uh, enterprise to IIs because quote unquote it will replace it. And then what ends up happening is there's a huge shock, uh, for the users. And there's two types of shocks. One is, oh, this [00:08:30] is just QuickBooks online, which I tried converting to two years ago. And I got so frustrated I went back to desktop. So that has been a few client interactions. Where it is basically is QuickBooks online. It's got more stuff and it's more valuable than QuickBooks, but it's but it's QuickBooks online. So if you don't set the expectation, if you don't ask the person, hey, have you ever tried to convert, you know, from desktop to online before what your experience is like? You don't know what that person is coming from. So the shock that I just signed a one year contract for $10,000 a year, software that [00:09:00] is QuickBooks online, you know, it could be very negative if somebody comes with that negative experience. And the other facet of level of disappointment is that if it's framed as feature by feature parity, it's just not there. Even in construction, where truly, truly is, is making leaps and bounds. I mean, like is is really awesome and amazing for construction, much better than Qbo advanced.

Hector Garcia: And in certain cases I could say it's got more stuff than QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise, [00:09:30] but some really simple fundamental things that you see in QuickBooks desktop Enterprise and reports and stuff for construction still work there as a one click and with ease. It's a bunch of workarounds. And there's a there's a shock, right, when people when you're sold this efficiency increase but they tell you, sorry we haven't done that particular thing. There's this very inefficient way to, to to get to that. So that has really negative, um, value for the customers. So I think those two pieces of advice I give into it in this compliment [00:10:00] sandwich are really important. And then I'll let me finish it with a compliment, which is, um, good job into it. And not also changing is to have the new interface. So Intuit made the decision to keep eyes on the old interface, which has a whole slew of side conversations we can have. But since is is so new, remember if the Oldest Eyes customer has only used it for a year, so so to to change the interface [00:10:30] on those people, that would be, you know, a lot. That would be a lot. So I kind of like the fact that they kept the at least the old interface, even though some of the new functionality is the same. The the left navigation bar hasn't been changed to the new, you know, codename fusion model. So I like that decision. However, it's going to be a little bit of a challenging coming October where I industry. I mean, a company wide changes everything. Are they going to do the same thing with eyes? I'm not sure.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, I mean, that logic though kind of undermines [00:11:00] their the idea that they're not changing it for the sake of just doing something new. I mean, they have been saying that they're changing it, and I've been saying that they're changing it so that we can reorganize the menus into a more logical progression. Um, but that makes it seem like it's changed for the sake of change.

Hector Garcia: You know, into it. Um, on the qbo side, I don't know how many customers they have, but I think it's like 5 million or 6 million. It's a big number, right? So when it comes to like, like [00:11:30] testing things because they have the sheer numbers, they can do all these kind of interface changes and all that stuff and quickly kind of gauge behavior into enterprise suite. I don't know how many customers they have, but I know I created my account like four months ago, and I'm transitioning my firm to my multiple businesses to is and I was like customer 500. So or at least, you know, my company ID was like 507. So like, I could I can imagine, you know, like there is [00:12:00] a, you know, maybe a thousand customers that they have or 1200 customers. So it's a very more sensitive customer base from my perspective. And again, I don't know how many customers I have. And this could be completely platitudes. And I'm, you know, maybe, you know, completely guessing. But I you know, it just doesn't feel that they have the hundreds of thousands of customers that they have in, in desktop enterprise. And I think they're still struggling, you know, with the messaging, with the understanding what the migration looks like, what you're missing, the process. And Intuit does a really good job [00:12:30] from a marketing perspective as sort of selling ahead of the product and selling the, you know, the, the selling, the, the dream of what it could be. But like not being very realistic on what they're learning. The reality is when when Particularly for converting desktop customers to IIs. Qbo. Customers or Qbo. Advanced customers moving to IIs. Those are typically super excited and they have severe challenges. It is the desktop customers moving to. Is that that I'm seeing from my customer feedback [00:13:00] to be a little bit more challenging?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And, you know, I'm sure that once the new interface and all the feedback and all the development has settled down, you know, a year or two from now, it'll move over as well. You know, I actually wanted to, you know, something that you said kind of triggered for me that I just did a desktop conversion to online this past week. And we're not talking IIs, we're just talking advanced. But for all the people who are kind of in upheaval about all the changes because human beings don't like change, I will tell you that [00:13:30] this new company, as soon as they saw the new interface and the dashboards and all the stuff, they are beyond excited. And so the the challenge is for the people who are used to something, not because there's an actual problem with the interface, and I really want to put that out there to people that it's your mind shift that's making the struggle, not the actual issues with the interface, with the exception that I have to. It's a little slow right now.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. But yeah, that's a different challenge. Like qbo. Like it [00:14:00] feels bloated, right? I don't know if it's the pop ups or all the AI stuff or the things that like swing from the side to say, hey, do you want to automate this, automate that, or the a whole bunch of things that they added to the bank feeds, like there's just all of Qbo just feels slow. And I again, it's one of those things that are so difficult to measure, like I don't have like a first of all, I don't have time to measure, you know, like do a time study to see if old version, a new version is faster, but it feels slower. And I think that when it comes to speed, [00:14:30] feeling is more important than than reality, right. And I illustrate that with like one of my favorite books is called Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. And he was hired by by um, by the UK government to discuss the challenge with the speed of the trains and. And they wanted to speed the train between, I don't know, in London to Manchester or whatever. They wanted to to change the pace from 3 hours to 2 hours and, and it would cost like 60 billion pounds or something [00:15:00] like that. And then he argued that, hey, if you were to give everybody, you know, champagne and the fastest Wi-Fi out there and TV screens and more comfortable chairs, people would literally ask to slow the train down. So like, so funny. But it's also real. Like speed is not so much like, you know, what you can measure mechanically is how it feels. And like Kubo doesn't feel fast right now on the new interface. And I'll tell you, many [00:15:30] accounting professionals agree with that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Well, I'm going to say it's a little bit more than feel like I'll open up a form and I'll have to wait for the content to show and like, actually like have to sit sometimes and wait. And I'm on a T1 line. So, um, so yes, everybody we know it's slow. My, my thought is that it's slow because right now there is so much development and so many, you know, there's so much activity on the server during this transition that I'm hoping that that's what's causing the slowdown and that into it will speed up their servers [00:16:00] or do increase their throughput or whatever that they need to do. But I just want to kind of wrap up this section with going back to that original point that we are in a time of upheaval and change, but it's our attitudes, not the software itself, that is at issue. And so let's, you know, put in feedback for everything. They've got little thumbs up, thumbs downs on all the different features. Use them. You know, hey, I do like this. No this isn't helpful. And give them those thumbs [00:16:30] up where they where they're good so that they keep them and thumbs down the things that are not useful for you. And so that way we can craft it because right now they're paying like Hector said, They're in fast development right now. This is the time to get your voice heard, put in feedback about everything because they're listening.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, yeah. Especially because if most people when they give feedback, they say, this new screen sucks. That doesn't help. Like that doesn't help anybody, like I understand. You know, you feel that it sucks, but that's not a [00:17:00] technical term that developers can turn into something tangible. Right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: So so an example the new the new customer screen. My feedback is the search box has to be prominent and it has to be dynamic. So it searches while you're typing not you type. And then click enter. So make it front and center and dynamic. That's good feedback. That's something actionable. They want things that are actionable. They want to know like what they can do. Not necessarily how you feel about it. They want to know what the programmers [00:17:30] can sit down and change for you.

Hector Garcia: That being said, you know, which version of QuickBooks is pretty fast Are so, so and again, I don't know if QuickBooks online, I mean, Intuit Enterprise Suite is on different servers or.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I think it's on its own server and there's not a lot of load.

Hector Garcia: Maybe because he has less customers, but also it's got the old interface. It just feels more efficient. So let me go through, like all the new things that have been released in the past quarter of IIs. [00:18:00]

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So. So before you get started, I'm really looking forward to hearing this. You sent me your document of the stuff that you were going to talk about, and I was reading through it last night going, oh my God, oh my God, that's really cool. That's really cool. So all y'all you are in for a treat. Go ahead.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, it's really cool. Yeah. So let me start by saying that if you're a qsp, uh, QuickBooks solution provider, whether you're a primary or a secondary and, Alicia, I know you're a secondary under, I believe, uh, BCG or something. Um, you know, I have a I'm [00:18:30] a primary, have a couple of secondaries if you're a qsp. They just released a certification program for IIs, so finally, there's a thing that you do. You watch something, you read something, you take a quiz, you pass it, and they give you a PDF that says you are now certified. Now, version one of this is not something that you would be impressed by as an educator. And I wouldn't be impressed with an educator, because I still think that the advanced certification or the level two certification, it's a lot more robust, so to speak. So this [00:19:00] is not like a level three certification. This is really more for okay, you know what is has that advanced doesn't. And now you're ready to sell it or to speak to its features. So it's not something that really talks about solving, you know, mid-market client problems. It's just detecting the potential clients that would be best for IIs. So this first version is very light, but it's a good first start if you want to be certified in IIs.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And now you're saying that this certification is for specifically it's not a ProAdvisor certification.

Hector Garcia: Not for ProAdvisor only.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And [00:19:30] ProAdvisor.Can't go to a Qsp to take it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right? Yeah.

Hector Garcia: So the ProAdvisor needs to needs to become a qsp and most qsp is nowadays uh, the primary ones because of volume, can have that market control, but because there's limits and thresholds and how many, how much, how how, how much you have to sell in order to be a primary. So you can reach out to a qsp and you can become a secondary. Basically, you have all the same thing a qsp has, but you kind of you count on that qsp [00:20:00] to be listed as a, as a service provider. So they basically most primary qsp have been grandfathered basically.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. Excellent.

Hector Garcia: Okay. So I want to start with, um, what what it's one of the most practical things that Intuit has created with I, where I go, oh finally it looks like they actually leveraging AI for a practical thing which is contextual searching. So you can actually in the search bar [00:20:30] you can type transaction type, reference number contact, which could be customer vendor, employee, date or amount, date ranges or amounts. And you can use natural language and it converts that into a search query. Super cool. Okay. And this started as a as an IAS thing. And in some of the tests that I've been doing in my regular Qbo files, I'm starting to see it work in those files as well. So I'm not sure if they're advertising it is, [00:21:00] but it's working across qbo. I have a feeling this will work across Qbo, so it's actually great news.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Um, I have been using this new search in all the different versions, like I typed in invoices under $1,000, and it gave me a list of all the invoices under $1,000.

Hector Garcia: Exactly, exactly.

Hector Garcia: So this started as an IAS innovation, and I think that they realized that this this could work for, for everything because their, their, their biggest budget for AI stuff is in the IAS team. So it could be [00:21:30] it could be a happy accident that Qbo gets Get some of this stuff so you can type, you know Bill from Home Depot last week or something like that. And it will run the filters like you literally open the search bar for you. It would select the date range. It would select the transaction type or select the contact and run this for you automatically. I also like the fact that you can say, uh, bills between 500 and 1000 and even the in between search. It understands what that means. So it actually goes and does the you know. You [00:22:00] put the two numbers you say in between and it knows or less than or more than. So I actually absolutely love that. And I love that particularly because I don't do a lot of typing. I actually, um, I have a, I have a hot button in my computer where I just press a button. It enables my, my, uh, my microphone. So I talk to my computer a lot.

Hector Garcia: So, like, I can imagine myself when I'm, like, doing deep work, I'm doing stuff and I'm like, I need a transaction for 500 bucks. And I turn on my microphone and it literally just put it on the search [00:22:30] bar, press enter and save myself the time of looking, you know, looking to where I want to go and typing it. So like using natural language now nowadays is going to be a huge enhancer because now I'm thinking this is going to be the gateway into doing work with Qbo with voice. So they are able to achieve this. They'll be able to achieve this where you're doing bank coding and instead of clicking on the dropdown and looking for advertising, you just say advertising. Next you say you know car expense. Next. So imagine [00:23:00] a world where you're doing a combination of using your mouse, your keyboard, and your voice and you're interacting with the software. So I think this is going to open the floodgates to an amazing future of being able to now use another tool, which is your voice that we haven't literally not been using for years as accountants and bookkeepers.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I'm big on dictating. It kind of feels to me like with if it's developed in in eyes and floats down to qbo, it's kind of like NASA, [00:23:30] like space travel, gave us Tempur-Pedic beds. So I like the idea that the development happens at the high level, and that some of some of those innovations will will trickle on down. I know that, however, most of those innovations, they're going to keep up in eyes because that's their value proposition.

Hector Garcia: Yeah.

Hector Garcia: And I've spoken to enough people at Intuit to tell me, get prepared, I didn't do I connect this year we're going to announce some really, really, um, amazing AI innovations. And I don't doubt that they will be amazing. Will they [00:24:00] replace an accountant? I don't I don't think so, but I don't doubt that they will be amazing. Next thing I want to talk about is multi entity. So this has been the flagship um sort of uh value proposition of, of of is as a matter of fact the reason why is, is it's, it's very much a viable business proposition for Intuit is because, uh, they want to have revenue per company and they want to deal with, uh, companies that deal [00:24:30] with multiple entities. Right? So when when you deal with multiple entities, uh, whether it's an operating company, a holding company, a real estate company, which is a real typical kind of setup for these mid-market businesses, you know, that's when they think of revenue. They think of revenue per per business, right. There's 32 million businesses in the United States. That's what they want to tap into. That's what they project to. Right. So they have 6 million customers. They want to be able to have ten. And if they do serve multi entities and they solve the problems of multi entities, that's a huge revenue opportunity for Intuit. [00:25:00] And right now desktop users have unlimited company files. And Intuit is not getting any of that revenue like like any of that additional potential revenue per company. Now one thing I do want to add at least I don't know if you know, but kind of silently they change the, the the the user agreement on QuickBooks desktop where it says that you can have a maximum of 99 companies that you can be working with. Now, I don't know how they're going to enforce. I don't know how the enforcement will happen, but this [00:25:30] is a preamble to most likely in the next few years, an actual hard lock on how many companies you could open with a single desktop subscription. So obviously it's coming and so in eyes is the reason why that's coming.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Interesting. Okay. Good to know.

Hector Garcia: Okay. So in the multi entity world um the multi entity dashboard is great I think we talked about it on the on the last episode. Uh you can, you can see a consolidated PNL as a dashboard with the graph, you know, for all companies [00:26:00] for some of the companies. So you could choose, you know, which of the companies you want to, uh, visualize in the dashboard and only show you the dashboard for those companies that you choose. So either the entire, you know, enterprise and all the entities or the whole portfolio or specific companies, you have a PNL, you have expenses and income chart, you have accounts payable and accounts receivable. And now they add it, uh, to complement the accounts payable and accounts receivable graph, because in the last release [00:26:30] they added the graph but not the report a consolidated AP summary and a consolidated summary. So this is going to be this is a new way to visualize reports in in in is because now when you look at a consolidated AP summary or a consolidated summary, now these vendors are now grouped by the entity. So you're going to see entity A has all these open bills. Entity B has all these open bills. And they [00:27:00] and they're both summarized and grouped by the entity. So you can basically in a single report see your accounts payable aging across all your entities. And also you can expand each one and and see them individually by vendor and the same same thing with AR report.

Hector Garcia: There's also they added a new elimination line which we're going to talk about. That's the new intercompany Bernie eliminations is actually really, really interesting. Um, you know, last time we talked about intercompany [00:27:30] eliminations, mostly within the context of a journal entry. Now they're transaction level. So we'll get into that. And because that's really cool. The other so I'm going to kind of just list all the consolidated reports that they just they just added. So they added consolidated. Ah summary AP summary the detail version. So consolidated AP consolidated ah consolidated balance sheet which that's not new. Consolidated PNL not new consolidated cash flow. That's new. Very interesting. Consolidated [00:28:00] trial balances. Great consolidated expenses by vendor and consolidated transactions report. However, even though the consolidated transactions report is great. So in other words, you go to reports and then you look for there's now a consolidated grouping of report. You go to consolidated transaction report. And it's kind of like a transaction detail report. The only challenge with this report is that the normal QuickBooks behavior is. We look at a transaction and we want [00:28:30] to double click. Double click to see the transaction. You can't because they would have to now devise a mechanism for you to click on the transaction. And it log you out of that company, log you into the other company for you to be able to do that. So I'm not sure how they're going to solve that problem.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So you can't drill through the reports.

Hector Garcia: Yeah you can you can drill down and see the details, but you can't open the transaction from it because remember these are multiple entities. So it would have to literally log you out and log you back in. So that's the challenge. [00:29:00] So they haven't figured they haven't figured out what that mechanism would look like. But the one thing you do see it's a brand new column is imagine a transaction detail report that now has a column called Company Name. So you can actually see which company name the transaction belongs to.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. That makes sense.

Hector Garcia: Yeah.

Hector Garcia: Another thing that's a little bit frustrating is that when you go into a consolidated. And again, they might fix this by the time we talk about next quarter. But when you go to a consolidated PNL, [00:29:30] which you would, you would say, okay, if if they figured out how to do a consolidated transaction detail report, I should be able to drill down on the consolidated PNL. So right now, as of today, you cannot drill down even in a summary consolidated report into the detail report. So it's two separate reports that you have to run separately. So one thing that's frustrating about this, especially for people that have been using QuickBooks for a long time, is that you'll be double clicking until you die, literally, to try to make that that report open. So like, we're just so [00:30:00] used to that behavior where I'm looking at a summary, clicking to see the drilling down to see a detail and drilling down to see a transaction that currently, as of now, that's not there. It doesn't make the reports useless, but it really, really hurts the experience because that's kind of what we're used to when we're when we when we when we use QuickBooks.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay, I get it. It's definitely inconvenient, but from a programing level, it's kind of a, you know, it makes sense.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. [00:30:30] Um.

Hector Garcia: We're also hoping crossing our fingers that this is a short term issue that they're going to fix at some point. The other thing that's really interesting is you can run a consolidated PNL also by class or by dimension. So the reason why this is interesting is because you kind of have to tell you imagine this. Imagine you have 4 or 5 entities, but you have the same classes across all the entities, right? Admin overhead, you know, operations, [00:31:00] sales and marketing, whatever class you would have or whatever dimension. So let's say these these companies have dimensions of classes in common. So now you can run a consolidated report. So remember multiple entities. And then you can you can use uh a class or a dimension Mentioned to to to run that report. So you kind of have to imagine, you know, imagine a situation in which you kind of have, you know, consolidated entities and they all kind of follow the same [00:31:30] class or dimension type across the board. So that's actually super interesting where it can now cross consolidate the PNL, but also break it down by, by class or dimension.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And just to fill people in if you aren't already familiar, dimensions are a feature in Intuit Enterprise Suite, where it's kind of like having multiple classes. So instead of just one class, you can have a starts with four, and then you can have, I think, up to 20 different dimensions. And so it's just basically [00:32:00] operate like classes.

Hector Garcia: Exactly.

Hector Garcia: The next thing is called a the KPI library. So if you're using Qbo advanced you might have already seen a little tab that says KPIs in Qbo advance. However, those KPIs are limited to growth, profitability and cash flow. Those are actually the two. The three categories they have on their KPIs on Qbo advanced under is, they added a whole [00:32:30] slew of additional KPIs into the library. So you have revenue, cost of goods sold, total expenses. Um, you know, operating expense ratio, operating expenses, uh, net profit margin, expenses as a percentage of revenue, um, current assets liabilities, uh, cash on hand. So they added additional, uh, sort of like a, like a, like a shopping cart, a library of multiple KPIs. And you can just add them to your scorecard. And none of these things, unfortunately, [00:33:00] are available in. Well, most of these things are not available in Qbo advanced QB advanced gives you gives you the basic KPIs. There's actually a lot more sort of powerful KPIs. So you could really construct a, a um, a customized report that only shows real summarized data by using all these additional ratios. So it's a little button that says KPI library on the top right of the KPI screen.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And so for those of you who aren't familiar with KPIs, those [00:33:30] are your key performance indicators. And those are used in analysis of your company. There are different calculations and statistics and ratios that show how your company is doing, comparing your income and your expenses or your costs or different segments of your business. And so it's a whole new way of looking at your company. And when you are, for instance, taking out loans from your bank, they're going to ask for a number of your KPI stats to [00:34:00] see if you are solvent and to see if you are going to be a good investment or not. So if you're not familiar with KPIs in that kind of analysis, go check out those features in Advanced and Eyes.

Hector Garcia: And here's probably the biggest thing. Um, it was my biggest criticism to the developers when we were talking about multi entity consolidated reports. The biggest challenge is when you have 4 or 5 companies and they all have different chart of accounts. That's a challenge [00:34:30] right. So what they added was kind of two things. One they added a tool to help you uh, remap your your chart of accounts across multiple entities to make it match one of the entities. And simultaneously, an AI tool that does some of that mapping for you. Okay. So when you go into the multi entity section, you're now going to see um sort of a little AI advertising that says, hey, you know, using the chart of accounts of your main entity or your principal [00:35:00] entity as a guide, I now have a structure that your other chart of accounts should follow. And if they have different chart of accounts, it will remap the chart of accounts for you. So you go into the next screen that says review. And what it does is it lists all the, um, all the entities that you have available. So whether you know company A, company B, company C, and then you pick which is the one that you want to work on, and then it will give you broken down by assets, liabilities, equity, expenses. It will give you the accounts that it automatically mapped [00:35:30] for you. So it tells you, hey, I found something to map materials to. And if you say yes and if you approve. So there's literally an approve button which is great. So if you approve it it will merge the accounts. It will rename accounts. It will reorganize accounts across all your entities again to match or mimic the one the same, uh, main principal entity. This is something I recommend profusely when it comes to panels, and maybe not so much when it comes to balance [00:36:00] sheets, because balance sheets are a bit more unique. But if you want to run a consolidated PNL, that makes sense. You got to have at least higher level chart of accounts they all need to match.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay, I have I have questions. Yeah. So first what? The first thing it's going to try and do is rename them. So if it finds two cost of goods, supplies and materials, but they have different names, it will give them the same name.

Hector Garcia: So it will use your principal accompanies chart of accounts as the guide. That's the that's the [00:36:30] important piece okay. So you so to keep to keep in mind you don't get to create a consolidated chart of accounts that works sort of in a separate space where all the accounts map to. That's where they want to get to, but they're not there yet. What this does is that it finds the accounts that have direct name matching and say, okay, we're good to go. We matched it. We don't have to do anything with this. But I see these other accounts. That could be [00:37:00] what, the other account. Uh, what the main what the account in your main chart of accounts is. And I'm going to go ahead and map them and merge the balances if need be in order to rewrite the chart of accounts on the subsidiaries to match the structure of the chart of accounts in the primary.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh, so you don't have to sit there and go through manually and do. Correct?

Hector Garcia: Correct. So it will help you through that process now.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay.

Hector Garcia: Um, doing this is highly destructive. Like there's no [00:37:30] going back because, you know, there's no undo when you rename accounts and when you merge accounts and, and that sort of thing. So and it will tell you, you know, what it's doing if it's if it's merging, if it's matching to another account and all that stuff. Like for example, I have an account called Direct Cost in my, in my, in my main account. And then I found materials lumber, metal and PVC in one of my subsidiaries. And it's attempting to merge all those into my one direct cost account. So you have to be very careful that you might be approving something [00:38:00] that you don't want. You maybe you don't want that. Maybe you want maybe you want the subsidiaries to have a unique subset of accounts that are in the second layer of subaccounts, where maybe you just want the first layer to match. So it's a lot of thinking that you have to do. And unfortunately it's not like super obvious, like, like it would be great if it shows you this is what your PNL looks like with your old chart of accounts. And here's a simulated PNL, what it would look like if you accept this, this, [00:38:30] uh, this mergers and all these restructurings. So that's not there. All you all you have to do is either approve or not approve. There is a button that says see balances where actually does, uh, show you, but it's not structured like, like clean, like a PNL. It's just like a, just like a chart. Um, and it's hard to, you know, in a podcast format. It's hard to hard to state. But it would be nice to see it like like a PNL report.

Hector Garcia: Right.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Uh, another question. What if you want to add or delete categories like as you're moving [00:39:00] forward, will it if you add a category, do you have to then go in and push it out to all of the other entities, or will it add across all.

Hector Garcia: The current the current system right now is a cleanup tool. It's not a control a consistent chart of accounts tool. So eventually what they want to get to and we talked about this with the product managers is I would like to have a single place where you create a chart of accounts. And that would be like in your principal company. And then all the [00:39:30] other companies have a chart of accounts, but you can't change them like, like you like the admin of the multi entity uh system has a locked in. So there's only one place to have a chart of accounts. And then you know, maybe the admin can create individual sub accounts but they're still thinking through that. So right now it's just a cleanup tool. So so if you like you said if I, if somebody goes into one of the entities and adds an account, uh, you would have to go back into this tool and find the potential, [00:40:00] you know, restructuring and press a button and approve it and go to the process.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. So that's still manual.

Hector Garcia: It is semi manual.

Hector Garcia: But but I'm this is a this is this is really, really big. I mean like, it's it's I've, I've done multi entity work before and I gotta tell you um, without this you, you really don't have a multi entity uh platform. So this is a, this is a great first start of that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah I think it's really cool.

Hector Garcia: Now I want to move into, um, [00:40:30] expense allocation. So they introduce expense allocation. On the last update on the I forgot it was March or April of 2025, but they brought it and brought it to the next level. So let's say, for example, you're in one of the entities and you have an expenditure that really needs to be allocated across multiple entities. So you click on allocate. And then because you have multiple companies attached to it, you say you know what this one cash outflow that I'm paying for my principal [00:41:00] company really belongs to, you know, all the companies I'm going to split across from it. So one classic example is I got a holding company and I got 27 entities that are all real estate. And then I have one expense, like, you know, the tax preparation fee that is for the the whole entity. And I want to spread that across all the entities. Right. So that's a classic example. Or I could have other, you know, situations in which I use very specific percentages. So now when you click on allocate before you [00:41:30] literally just pick, you know which companies you're allocating to and then pick the percentage and that's it. So you manually go in there and put 20%, 10%, 15%. Now QuickBooks will go back, read financial data from each of the entities and then choose the allocation for you based on that criteria. So for example yeah go ahead.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Are you saying that you can go back historically and then allocate.

Hector Garcia: No.

Hector Garcia: So [00:42:00] this is this is allocating a single transaction.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So you're creating a new transaction. And now you're going to burst. I want to go.

Hector Garcia: I want to go through i want to go through two scenarios. Scenario one I own three entities. Entity A it's about 50% of, you know, the effort or the work, the wealth, the sales, however you want to think it. Entity A is like 50%, entity B is like 40%, and entity C is like a little tiny thing. And I [00:42:30] only do 10%. So you can go in there and say, you know what, I am going to, uh, I am going to select the percentage and I'm going to manually go and say, hey, for entity A is going to be 50%. For entity B, it's going to be 40% for entity C, it's going to be 10%. So you manually putting in there how you want to allocate one expense. You're paying from one company across all the entities and put it in the do to do from. So that's.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Great.

Hector Garcia: That's scenario A, scenario B I don't have a fixed percentage like I don't have like it's not [00:43:00] like in my mind, it's not like always 50, 40 or 10. Scenario B could be you know what? I am going to proactively change the percentage dynamically based on the results or performance of the multiple entities, right? So instead of um, so instead of you choosing the allocation percentage, you have, uh, is calculated for you. So when you go allocate and you pick the, you know, the entities that you want to grab the historical [00:43:30] information from, it gives you a couple of options based on sales based on expenses or based on assets. So if you say based on sales, you have unfortunately they didn't give you that much in this particular dropdown, which is the different options I wish they could give. I wish they had year to date or year to last month. Right now you can do current month, last month or last year. So the most typical scenario here would be like last year or last month realistically speaking. But this year to last month could be another one. That's it's [00:44:00] just missing right now. So you say last year so what. So if you click apply, it goes and reads the panels of all these entities. And then based on the sales of each of the entities, it does the allocation for you.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh that's fantastic. That's you know, like I'm used to having to do that manually at the end of the year, like splitting things across classes. And so it's that same kind of concept where I want these expenses to be proportional to the revenue that was generated so [00:44:30] that we have apples to apples.

Hector Garcia: Exactly.

Hector Garcia: That's exactly what it's doing. So it's it's amazing I love it I mean, it's just it's just it's just awesome. You know, there's a couple challenges here, which is you have to pick it each time. Um, so, like, it would be awesome if there was a setting where you say this is the fixed allocation setting, you know, so that way I don't have to click and last year and choose they said is it sales, is it by expenses. Like right now you have to choose, right. Because it assumes that every single transaction you're going to make this decision. But [00:45:00] it would be awesome if it's just global, right. Like as a company you decided? Hey, guys, all allocation will be based on last year's sales. Technically, last year's sales won't be affected for the whole year. They will be doing accounting. Therefore, it should just automatically choose that for me instead of me having to, like, manually pick it each time.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Or at least at least make it sticky so that you set it one time and it doesn't change until you.

Hector Garcia: Make it the default setting. And then you can change it if you want to, or automatically do it like that and then let you edit it. You know, there's obviously multiple ways of doing that. [00:45:30] But my my challenge with it is you only have last last month, last year and current month. And I don't know I'm missing I'm missing this, you know, quarterly or this year to last month or this year to date. Like if current month is relevant then this year to date is should be relevant to. So I found this strange that they only had like three options there on the timing, on the timing. But it's absolutely fantastic. The fact that you get, um, you know, percentage of sales, percentage of expenses, percentage of assets, [00:46:00] that's amazing. I mean, that's really like.

Alicia Katz Pollock: It really is. Yeah.

Hector Garcia: Okay. Staying within the same theme of, uh, inner company, multi entity, this new concept is really awesome and I won't take credit for it, but I, I spend lots of hours with the development team thinking through this. And I think they first of all, they did listen to me and they, they, they did take some of my ideas and my ideas were not revolutionary, I think. I think they will probably come to the same conclusion. [00:46:30] So these are this is called intercompany sales. And essentially prior to this, the only way you could do intercompany transactions would be through this concept that I call a three dimensional journal entry, which is you go and create a journal entry, and then the journal entry itself allows you to choose whether or not this is an intercompany transaction. And inside the company that journal entry, you pick for every line item, which company are you affecting. And you're doing [00:47:00] a single journal entry that's writing, you know, two, three, five journal entries depending on how many entries. And it's doing all they do to do from for you automatically. That's all amazing okay. It happens. It's incredible. Super awesome. And the allocation tool that I just talked about, it does the journal entry behind the scenes. So like you don't have to go into the other company and put that you have a payable. So like a single transaction the source of the expense transaction gets allocated on the other side of the company that do to do from and the expense [00:47:30] is being allocated as well. So that's amazing. However, the challenge is what happens if there's a sale. So we're ready. So we got the expenses.

Hector Garcia: Take care. What if there's a sale. But we're talking about an intercompany sale. We're not talking about that. One company is is selling in behalf of other companies because that's that's all wacky. We're saying company A is selling to company B, right. Or company B is selling to company C. And then when I look at my my consolidated PNL, I don't want to see the revenue and cost of goods [00:48:00] sold for these entities because it's like moving. It's just like moving money across entities. So if we're looking at the total revenue of consolidated entity entities, you can inflate your revenue even though the cost, you know, kind of makes the net income the same, you could potentially inflate the revenue of a consolidated PNL if you don't eliminate intercompany sales. So you have to do a journal entry. You have to find out how many, how much did I sell from this company? That company. And you have to do it. Manual journal entry. What they've solved is to do [00:48:30] the the manual that that elimination on the PNL natively naturally on the transaction. And they also solved the automation of the other side of the transaction. So again company A invoices company B now when the invoice company B, they're going to pick a customer from the drop down menu. And all your multi entities will be created as a customer, as a normal customer. But it'll have a little parenthesis at the end that says I see customer. [00:49:00] So you know that this customer, any transaction you write to, this customer, any invoice you write to, this customer will create the bill on the other side automatically.

Hector Garcia: Okay. Yeah.

Hector Garcia: Super awesome. So we start with creating the invoice. So we'll just again um company A invoices. Company B, company B is a customer in that company A's um list of customers. You invoice it, you hit save and you're done. It's like a natural invoice. And then when you get paid, you receive a payment. All that stuff happens natural. [00:49:30] But when you go and you switch over to company B, and this is kind of the neat part, when you switch over to company B and you go into bills. Now bills is split into two sections. We have our what they're calling our internal bills and our external bills. Now if I kind of would prefer honestly to have inner company bills to be its own category and not like have the inner company bills be also matched with my external bills. Different personal preference, but you go and then bills. [00:50:00] Remember when they added, um, the concept of approving bills, whether you're using a qbo advanced workflow to approve a bill or you're using the receipt feature to bring the receipt in and approve that bill to be written into QuickBooks. The bill, the invoice that you wrote from the other company shows up as a potentially intercompany bill that then you click on review and you approve. Now, right now, they don't have a mapping system where I can say, hey, if I use [00:50:30] this item, you know, make, make it that item on that side, or if I use this account, make that account on the other side, they haven't created the sort of preemptive mapping. So when you go approve that bill you have to manually choose the category. So it would be it would be good to automate that part. But you still have to choose the category. But what's really cool Alicia is automatically in the attachments, the invoice from the other company, the PDF gets.

Hector Garcia: Attached to the deal. So like.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. So so it's not at the point yet where it [00:51:00] will make the bill. And the line items on the bill are good. You still have to go in and verify them. But at least the bill is there as the placeholder. And then you go in and allocate either the category or the products.

Hector Garcia: Correct the bills there as a placeholder. The bill date is uh uneditable because it will it should match the invoice date. On the other side, the, um, the due date can be changed, which I find it kind of interesting. I, you know, I think that should be [00:51:30] also kind of locked in by the terms maybe in my examples, I didn't lock in a term, uh, before the, um, the description comes in like if there was a description of the invoice, the description comes in. But you do have to select the category. And this is the reason for that because it's possible. And look, there's all sorts of logics that you can go into and use cases. But it is possible that in company A I'm going to invoice 17 different lines. Right. Because I want to break it down [00:52:00] that way. I want to say, look, you know, 17 of these units and 14 of these units and 13 of this unit, but for for company B, I don't need to break it down. I just want to have one. It's all cost of goods sold or it's all direct cost or it's all labor or whatever it is. So it's possible that you don't care about a line breakdown and you just want to have a single line as possible. But the problem is, you will never get to true automation until you do 1 to 1, one on one line mapping where the account or the item being used is being [00:52:30] mapped with the, you know, account chart of accounts or the item on the other company. So I'm going to think I'm thinking to myself, this is going to be version two. Maybe in a couple of months or something. They'll, they'll, they'll crack this nut.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I mean, it sounds like once they get that chart of accounts mapping dialed in, maybe they can apply the same technology and structure to products and services that, okay, the product and service in this company maps to either this product or this cost of goods sold account in this other company, and then you can totally [00:53:00] automate all of that. So I think once they get, they nail down the chart of accounts. Hopefully they can leverage that and do it for products and services too.

Hector Garcia: I agree. Um, and that's a great idea. And that actually was never been a discussion with the product development team. So hopefully if they're listening to the podcast this is great. Like if you figure out, you know, account mapping and you are using accounts, you know, you should use the same logic to at least suggest, even if you're not mapping it for the purposes of intercompany transactions, at least suggest it based on that library of mapping [00:53:30] that you already have for items. It gets a little bit more complicated because, you know, item lists are just very different. And the other thing to keep in mind is, um, when you when you create an invoice, you're using items, you're not using accounts. So it's not obvious to the user which account is being used unless you know, what's the underlying account matching that item. But I guess it should be able to read that and use the mapping to then select the expense account.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right. I mean so so hopefully like this gets implemented a couple of years and it's my idea. We invented it right here first. But I would like but [00:54:00] I think it would actually work really elegantly that if you that the choice is not just a product or service on the bill side, it can also just be an account category. So you have an either or right.

Hector Garcia: It's still it's that's how it is now. But it's not being automated for you. Right. It just just brings in the dollar amount and the description, the other piece of this that uh, that's worth mentioning. It's not out there yet yet, but the ultimate goal was to not just have a unified chart of accounts across [00:54:30] the board, but also have a system in place to have a unified customer list, a unified vendor list, a unified item list. It's not out yet, but they have they have put it out there into the world that this is something that they're, um, that they're shooting. They're shooting.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's really cool. That's great. Also.

Hector Garcia: Okay.

Hector Garcia: The next thing is called an AI powered cash flow forecast. And I gotta tell you honestly, we probably should dedicate an episode to just talking about the philosophy of what the hell is cash flow, [00:55:00] right? Because, you know, every customer in the world goes to an accountant and you say, hey, what do you need from me? And they say, I need cash flow. And you're like, I don't know what you mean by that. Like, like everybody has a different definition of what cash flow is, what Intuit is trying to do, and they're kind of working off what they've been trying to do for, I would say at least ten years, which is try to predict the cash flow. Right. So they're using AI now instead of using trends. So like if you remember before, it really wasn't using AI. It was using it [00:55:30] was using pattern recognition. So it was looking at your monthly expenditures in your bank feed and assuming they would happen again, plus outstanding bills, plus outstanding invoices and using the due dates and triangulating those things, try to guess how much your cash flow would be a month from now. Um, so it now has the ability to not just forecast it for you using AI, but now you can actually create a cash flow forecast budget, so to speak. So you actually [00:56:00] have a full grid where you go in there and you actually say, you know what, I think I'm going to get this much in cash flow here.

Hector Garcia: So it's almost like it's similar to a budget, but instead of being a budget that you compare in a sort of, you know, actual versus instead of comparing an actual versus budget type of report, it's actually a cash flow forecast. And instead of being organized as, um, as, you know, income, cost, expenses, the way a budget would be is organized as money in, money out. Okay. So money [00:56:30] in will have all the money in categories and money out has all the money out categories. What I haven't seen yet and I don't know if it's maybe my file or maybe they haven't done this yet. I haven't seen them add a balance sheet accounts into money in and money out. So out. So like money in. We have I have a loan coming in right. That would be a balance sheet account or money out I have. I'm going to pay back a loan or I'm going to, you know, distribute some dividends. So I haven't seen that like you're shown explicitly in there. And maybe it's [00:57:00] just a function of me not using it, but I think that might be coming in like sort of like phase two where there would be an actual, um, cash flow forecast that you can, that you can create.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I mean, that's always been an issue with just budgeting in general is, you know, you don't there's no way to budget for your loan payments or your sales tax payments as, as money out. And so, you know, in my budgeting class, I talk about some ways of approaching that and making some dummy accounts. But that's [00:57:30] a different topic for a different day, right?

Hector Garcia: But even though it's hard and it's okay for things to be hard and difficult to, to, to to fix and all that stuff, if you have a I forecast that's organized as money in and then money out and then money in are just your income accounts, and then money out are just your expense accounts. That's a PNL. That's a budget, right? So there's really no difference between a true cash flow forecast and a budget if you're not including [00:58:00] a balance sheet movements in the process. So, um, where they kind of miss the mark, in my opinion, on, let's call it version one of this is treating an, ah, forecast as a PNL or as a budget. I think they need to add. I mean, it's more complex, but they need to add those layers of complexity where money in and money out could also be affected by, by, um, by that. And honestly, listen, there is money out on income accounts. So like I've like I'm going to give a refund, right. That [00:58:30] would be a money out on an income account or a vendor's going to refund me something that would be money in on an expense account. So I like the concept of money in, money out because it's very easy to visualize. But making money and money out a PNL doesn't fix the problem. So again, that's why I say, you know, maybe this is a very long, deep philosophical discussion of what what a what a what a what a cash flow forecast is or is supposed to be.

Hector Garcia: The other interesting thing, kind of in this same sort of like [00:59:00] forecast world, they added what they're calling three way forecast. So in the last episode that we discussed this, we saw that they had, uh, forecasting capabilities, uh, beyond uh, just budgets and, and quite honestly they have that in qbo advanced anyway. So they added forecasting Qbo advanced. So that was technically not, uh, a new thing. But what they had added in, in Enterprise Suite is the ability to forecast a balance sheet, which is, I mean, which, [00:59:30] um, advanced doesn't have. And you can also forecast a statement of cash flows. And granted, I'm a CPA. I got 16 years of experience. I've been doing bookkeeping for even longer. I've never built a forecast for a statement of cash flow. Like I've like I've never I've never been tasked to do that. So that's that's super interesting. The fact that you can actually, uh, do that. But what's, what's really cool is it does it for you automatically based on your forecasted PNL or balance sheet. [01:00:00] So you, you enter your values in your, in your forecasted PNL and balance sheet, whatever, whatever, whatever the values are. And it'll automatically project what that future projected statement of cash flows will look like. It does that for you automatically. So that's super cool because again, you know, I never, never seen, you know, a quick way to build this. And maybe this is why people don't create, you know, um, forecasted statement of cash flows just because it's just so challenging to build. [01:00:30]

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. Cool. Um what's next.

Hector Garcia: So the next thing is, and unfortunately, this is going to make you very jealous because I know you're not using a lot of is. And this is something that it makes me both jealous and a little bit frustrated. It's an amazing feature that would save people so much time, and in my opinion, it really has nothing to do with Enterprise Suite. It's really a basic bookkeeping functional tool. So this might be something that maybe possibly crossing, [01:01:00] you know, um, kind of crossing my fingers here that, that we'll see this in, um, in Qbo as well. So let's say, for example, you have a bill, an expense where you have multiple lines, right. And so you pick the account for each line, but then you want to go down and select the same class across all the lines. So when you hover over any of the classes. So this works both with classes and dimensions, there's now a little pop up that shows up that says apply to all or apply to empty lines.

Hector Garcia: So if you click apply to [01:01:30] all, it basically copies down the class across every line item in that transaction. Now we've solved this with right tool and shameless plug for right tool. We solved this with right tool, but now that QuickBooks has seen has been inspired by right tool to add this into is. We would love to see this in regular qbo as well, because it's like this is really, really useful stuff now. Good news. It works beautifully with classes and and dimensions. Bad news only works with IIs. Other bad news it doesn't work with categories [01:02:00] or customer project or any of those other things. So it's only working with classes and dimensions for whatever reason. There's also an option to. So you have an option to apply all which basically copies down. And this also apply to empty lines, which is really cool. So if you have like say two classes and you went and manually chose the first line is class A, the third line is class B, the seventh line is class A, and then the rest should be class C. You just pick class C and click empty lines, and it just [01:02:30] fills in all the empty lines with that. It's incredible. It's it's amazing. I can't believe how excited I am for something that I'm never going to get to use, because I got like one IIs client like 200 show clients.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, this is one of those tools that I think would be a great trickle down because it's not like it's a missing feature. It's just an efficiency tool inside something that we're already doing. So this one has definitely my vote for showing up downline.

Hector Garcia: Yeah.

Hector Garcia: And the reason why this exists is because of dimensions right. Because remember [01:03:00] the big value proposition on is is the additional dimensions. And we're not gonna talk about dimensions. We talked about that in every other episode. So now you have classes and up to like 5 or 6 other dimensions. People are doing a lot more data entry. You know, on on on is especially when you're so, so people were saying, hey, it's taking me forever to fill in all these dimensions because, you know, garbage in, garbage out. So if I don't use dimensions, I don't get the dimensional report. So they scream real loud and they say, you know what? We'll add that in dimensions. [01:03:30] But it would be ideal just to see that in category, to see it in amount, to see it like that copy down feature that like applied to all feature should work across the board in every anything that has a grid with multiple lines that should be there.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I completely agree. Hey Intuit. That's a good one.

Hector Garcia: Yeah.

Hector Garcia: The last one here is, which is really interesting. It's called request deposits on estimates. Now this has been advertised as an IIs feature, but I haven't I haven't [01:04:00] confirmed whether that's in advance.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I think that this must be in advanced also and maybe even plus because they did actually talk about this in in the know. So this might not be IIs.

Hector Garcia: Specific, but they.

Hector Garcia: Advertise it in IIs because it was part of like the projects category. So maybe we'll skip to the next projects thing. But this is pretty interesting right. So you can you can you can create an estimate for $10,000. But then at the bottom there's a little box that says request deposit. You could put 300. So when you send it to the customer they [01:04:30] actually all they're getting is the deposit side. And then they click on approve. And if you have payments attached to it It will direct the customer to just pay that deposit. So I like that workflow. It's great.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I really like it too.

Hector Garcia: What is not clear to me because I haven't tested it, um, because it's only showing up in my IIs account and I don't have my merchants hooked up to it to test it is when that payment comes in. How does it come in? I assume it comes in as a negative. Ah, right. Because there's no invoice yet. But [01:05:00] I don't know what the workflow looks like. Do you know?

Alicia Katz Pollock: I do know, um, it puts it in as a liability. Um, and then later on you can subtract it from the full invoice. It will actually automatically when you, when you turn the estimate into an invoice, it will invoice for the whole estimate and then subtract the deposit out of the liability category.

Hector Garcia: Now do you know if that deposit could be unapplied from the invoice? Like I know it's applied automatically.But.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I mean like detach it and move it somewhere [01:05:30] else.

Hector Garcia: Well, yeah because I'm just thinking out loud that the only condition in which that liability is moved back to R is when the estimate is converted to an invoice, but if that gets detached somehow, it won't know when the estimate.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Let's not spend time troubleshooting what if scenarios.

Hector Garcia: Well I've dealt with the development team on prepayments for vendors and inventory and all that stuff, and that's part of the challenge anyway. If from Intuit is listening, you know, we got ideas in [01:06:00] terms of like how to make sure that this doesn't get broken. The last piece I want to talk about is called milestones. This is super cool. Now, not super duper useful yet. Um, because I haven't figured out what are the reports. Classic Intuit, right? They'll come up with this amazing, you know, feature, but they can't. They don't know what reports we need, but I'm sure they're going to solve this fairly soon. But basically, when you create a project, you now have a drop down list of milestones you can create under that project. [01:06:30] So just imagine yourself creating a project. And you know currently when you when you go create a project, you you know, you put the project name, you know, the customer, the start date, the end date. But now you have milestones. So you can do like phase one or phase A, phase B, phase C, and then each milestone has its own start and end date. So you could track the progress of a of a project not just in project beginning and project end. Now you kind of have [01:07:00] a little bit of a little bit of like project management software where you can do it by milestone.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, this is also the solve for the fact that your project progress has always been a manual entry, that there was no way of actually keeping track of progress. You had to manually say, okay, I'm at 20%, okay, now I'm at 40% yourself. But if you're doing this by phase, then hopefully that means that it's going to track the progress as you complete each phase. And I don't know whether that's based on time or billing, but [01:07:30] that's really cool that the project progress is going to actually have a mechanism.

Hector Garcia: Great comment. It's something that I thought about too. Um, so right now when you're in the projects, you get to choose whether the phase has been completed or not. But as you mark the phase is completed, the project progress doesn't get automatically changed. You still have to edit that. So you're right, the project progress, which by the way, only is has a project progress. Um, and QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise has [01:08:00] project progress, uh, where you actually manually pick where the project is so you can, you know, gauge that against the financial progress. Because because you have real progress. Right? This is the stuff that a job foreman will observe and go, yeah, we're definitely like not even close to 50%. And then there's all the money you spent where the financials are telling you you are at 50%, but the reality doesn't match. That's why you have these two concepts of the of the accounting progress and then the and then the sort of observable, uh, progress. So there's still a [01:08:30] field where you manually set the project progress, but there isn't a workflow that goes from completed phase to project. They would have to add a proportional weight on the milestone. So when you create the milestones, you would have to tell it. You know this means 20%, this means 30. So you have to actually.

Hector Garcia: Explicitly say.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I got excited about nothing.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right.

Hector Garcia: You got excited by by the prospect of something that that that could happen in the project detail screen. Uh, [01:09:00] now you you not just see the project information, but you see the milestone information with the due dates, with whatever is completed. And they created one report for milestones, which is called cost milestones. So essentially imagine, um, the classic, you know, cost estimated versus actual cost by item in a project. But now it's by by the milestone and by the item. So the items are now grouped by milestones. So when you go and create [01:09:30] a project budget. Now that's a whole nother thing. And I think we talked about project budgets and we, we on the last episode and I think we, we talked about how we were a little bit confused about the project budget itself, because we weren't sure whether the project budget supersedes the estimate. And I'll confirm with you that the new project budget feature supersedes the estimate. The project estimate. So when you create your project budget, which is focused around how much it's going to cost you by [01:10:00] item, you now group these by the milestone.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So so that will allow you to see if you're over under budget on each phase. So if you wind up being over budget on one then you can make up for it in the next phase or vice versa. If you're under budget, it means that you have some more potential spent in the in to allocate forward.

Hector Garcia: Correct. Correct.

Hector Garcia: So so prior to this and in the QuickBooks desktop enterprise world, you know, if you're over and under [01:10:30] by product or by by by item. Now you can do both by item but by item inside the milestone. Because one of the problems that we had, for example, with QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise with estimated versus actual is, let's say, for example, I have a labor, I have I've listed labor 17 times in an estimate, right? Where, you know, I got one type of labor, two types of labor, three types, and I didn't create separate products. When you look at the estimate versus actual, it consolidates [01:11:00] by consolidates it by the item. So you don't know if these items are used in in one context or the other context by separating and splitting it by by milestone. Now you can have the same item used multiple times, but it's grouped by that milestone and that is powered by the way you do data entry. Now in is with projects. So when you create an expense, right. And then you uh, and you use a project, uh, now you also have to choose what milestone [01:11:30] that expense is associated with.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay.

Hector Garcia: So it's part of the data entry process for you to attach, um, you know, the milestone to that particular expense when you do your job costing.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Got it.

Hector Garcia: And that's it. There's probably more little things to mention, but like I think we covered a lot. That essentially is, you know, the what they're calling the summer release of into an enterprise suite for 2025.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, that is fantastic. And there were some amazing nuggets in there. And so thank you for detailing [01:12:00] it all out and breaking it all down for us for sure.

Hector Garcia: Yes. Thank you, Alicia, so much. And what's going on in your world?

Alicia Katz Pollock: So, uh, we are about to have Kristen Giraldo come on as a guest instructor at Royal Wise. And so next week, on Tuesday, uh, she is coming in for a three hour class on restaurant and bar bookkeeping, specifically in QuickBooks. So how to track everything from your food costs and labor costs to those delivery fees, from Grubhub [01:12:30] to just just tips, you know, all of it. And so we're really, really excited about that class. The link will be in the show notes and the recording will also be available. And it's three CPE. And then in September, uh, we are delighted to announce that we are going to start our whole entire Royal Wise Owls training program from scratch from the beginning, starting on Tuesday, September 9th. We're going [01:13:00] to start with our beginner Qbo classes and take it all the way through our entire curriculum now. So what it's going to do is use the new interface. And so if you are having trouble, if you're one of those people who doesn't like change, we're going to show you exactly where everything is and how to get the most out of all the new features, because there are a lot of new features. And I want to encourage all the bookkeepers and proadvisors who are who were listening that from now, from September through December, it's all the fundamentals. [01:13:30] And so your clients are also great for these classes. I don't just teach bookkeepers, I teach small business owners as well. So if your clients are having trouble with the new interface or you've got clients who are brand new to QuickBooks, please, please, please send them to Royal Comm and the Royal Wise Owls. We're going to start with Intro to Bookkeeping. Um, we're going to then go into the boot camp. The all day boot camp is going to be on September 16th. And then bank feeds reconciling [01:14:00] and reporting. And that takes us all the way through December. So hopefully you all can come and check it out and join us.

Hector Garcia: That's awesome Alicia. Well, thanks for sharing all that. And I guess I'll see you in a court in, uh, 90 days next quarter.

Alicia Katz Pollock: See you next quarter.