Now You Know: October 2025 QuickBooks Updates

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Alicia Katz Pollock: In this episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, we are going to do a recap of In the Know, which is into its monthly informational session about all the new features that are coming out in QuickBooks online to keep us informed about what's going on. It's always on the third Thursday of the month, and I definitely recommend that. It's [00:00:30] a webinar that you attend. It's always led by Jacqueline Anku, who's the leader of the ProAdvisor Training and Certification program. This week, the three topics on the agenda were improvements to modern reports in QuickBooks and the Intuit Enterprise Suite, some updates on paycheck corrections, and the release of client IDs in QuickBooks Online Accountant. So let's dive right in and give you all of the details. She started with ProAdvisor [00:01:00] Community News, and they announced that Insightful Accountant is now accepting nominations and applications for the 2026 Top Advisor Awards. There are now several different awards that you can apply for. There's the top 100 US Pro Advisors. There's the top 25 up and coming Pro Advisors, the top 50 International Pro Advisors, and the top 25 tax advisors. You are absolutely welcome to nominate yourself, and I do encourage you to nominate your friends. Next, she invited all [00:01:30] of us at Intuit Connect to head down into the exhibit hall to go to the Innovation Circle. This is personally where I'm going to spend most of my time, and I'm looking forward to going around to all the different booths to see what all the different developers are working on.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And I'm actually going to record a lot of those interviews, and I'll share what I see in future episodes. Proadvisor Academy has two new AI courses for you. The first one is understanding AI to learn what artificial intelligence is, what to watch out for, [00:02:00] and how it's changing the accounting profession. It's one hour and one CPE. Then there's a second course for using Intuit's AI agents, so that you can learn about the first five AI agents in QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. That one is too CPE. They also released a new course on QuickBooks payments just a few weeks ago. I'm delighted to actually say that I helped edit the course, so it's one CPE and it really dives deep into QuickBooks payments, so it identifies which [00:02:30] customers would benefit from it. It talks about the different forms of payment, how to use them and all the different rates. It even goes deep into the product, like how do you issue refunds, how do you deal with declined payments and how do you manage disputes? And it also talks about all the different ways that you can receive payments. Now because there's a lot of them. So I'm really proud of the course. Definitely check it out in your ProAdvisor Academy portal inside your QBO. When you're logged into QBO, [00:03:00] look for ProAdvisor on the left hand side and then click on training and that will take you into ProAdvisor Academy.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Now let's go into the product Innovations. The first one they talked about was modern Reports in both QuickBooks and Intuit Enterprise Suite. The speaker was Saponin Sahoo, the senior staff product manager of the Small Business Group. The first thing he did was give a poll, and he was asking the people who were attending whether they were using the modern [00:03:30] version or not. And so the five options were, and there is a reason why I'm going into the poll questions here. The first one was I used the modern version. Almost always it's my primary choice. The second one was I switch between both depending on the report or task. Number three I mostly use the classic version and occasionally tried the modern one. The fourth was I only use the classic version. I haven't switched to modern yet. And five was. I don't really notice the version I just use whichever report opens. [00:04:00] The most popular response from the attendees was I mostly use the classic version and occasionally try the modern one. For me, I'm number one. I use the modern version. Almost always. It's my primary choice, and the reason why I have switched over to it is because the amount of customization that I can do far outstrips what I was able to do in the classic version. So having started with that, the announcements that he made were really, really, [00:04:30] really welcome. The problems that people have been having with the interface that have prevented them from switching over fully, is the fact that you have to manually refresh it every single time.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Sometimes you weren't able to drill down into some of the numbers. If you left the screen and came back again, sometimes your customizations would be lost and it also asks you to save your report a lot. And so they heard us on all of these things. So available now as of October. [00:05:00] Right now they have automated the report fresh refreshes. So when you drill into a number or you change a transaction, then when you go back to the report screen, it will automatically update. If you're using an AR aging summary and you drill down into one of the aging buckets, you actually now can also, if you have a $0 balance in any of the reports, you can now click on it and see the transactions that came and went in that account, making it $0. They [00:05:30] also preserve the customizations across navigation. So if you drill into a screen and come back again, the layout that you had will still be there. Yay! They removed some unnecessary save prompts, so now you can save when you want to save. And they also added page level scrolling so that as you scroll down on long reports, you're going to jump a lot faster. Now, [00:06:00] coming at the end of November, they realized that the complexity of the new modern reports was a little much for some people, and they preferred the more simple view.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So they are updating the interface to make it look more like classic. So printing, emailing and exporting are now going to be right back where they were just above the report. The ability to compare to previous periods is going to be right back where it was at the top, in the center, and then all the filters and grouping and column [00:06:30] options are going to be under a customized button so that you can just click customize, and it will open up the right pane and let you customize further. So it's going to be a more simplified interface, just like it's been in classic mode, but have all the same power as the modern reports. Jacqueline joked. And I love this. She called it the post-modern reports. So that's what I'm going to call them. This is going to be the post-modern interface, and it will be coming out in November. There were a few other little subtle [00:07:00] changes to the reports under the hood, which are also coming out by the end of October. If an account has a $0 balance, it's going to be hidden by default for a more focused view. And then if you want to see them, you can turn them on. There's an improved report order for the general ledger so that you can just quoting off of this, enjoy a more logical and consistent account order across reports. I don't know exactly what that means. I don't it's one of those things that will just be easier for [00:07:30] us to see and understand, but we probably won't even notice it happening.

Alicia Katz Pollock: They are making a more intuitive date picker. If you are having time out and loading errors where you're getting this info isn't available or we couldn't load this report, those errors are going to go away and you'll have a smoother experience. And then the date settings in the accounting tools will now be fully honored in the modern reports, because it wasn't always. And that's actually one of my hot tips, my tips that we do at Royal Wise. I don't [00:08:00] know if you knew this, but if you go up to the my menu and then to reports options, you can actually set your report default dates there. A lot of people don't even know it's there. But instead of defaulting to last month, you can make it year to date or whatever time frame you want. And you can also specify whether you want your reports to default to cash based or accrual based, no matter what the company's basis is. Personally, I like that even my cash based companies, I still want to see the AR and AP in the reports. So [00:08:30] I default it to accrual and then I toggle it to cash when I want to see what's actually reported for taxes. Now they ended the presentation with another poll. And so they asked us do we think it's going to be extremely helpful. It will significantly improve how I use modern reports.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Somewhat helpful I see clear benefits, but some areas could improve. Neutral I don't expect much change in my experience and not helpful. I prefer the current version of a modern modern reporting experience. They said that they expected [00:09:00] it to be extremely helpful, but then they decided not to display the poll results, which means I think they still didn't get the enthusiasm that they expected. But you know, you've heard me talk about the modern reports a lot over the last couple of years, and I am a fan. This is one of the things that I do recommend that you get used to and adopt. Royal wise is actually going to have two reports classes in December, a Basic reports class and an Advanced report class, both [00:09:30] sponsored by fanatical. And I definitely would love to show you how to make the most of the reports. I'm going to be teaching the class completely in the postmodern reports, so please do join me in the next section. They brought us up to date on the new features for payroll corrections, and it was presented by Nitzan Lebovic, who's the staff product manager for the Workforce Solutions team. Workforce solutions is into its name for the payroll and and time teams for QuickBooks [00:10:00] time. So we have long been giving them feedback that QuickBooks Online Payroll was not flexible enough. If you had changes to make that if you had closed quarters or closed year corrections, you couldn't do them yourself. You had to rely on the care team in order to do them.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So they are giving us the flexibility that we need, and that also reduces our dependency on the care teams. So in close quarters and close years, we are now going to be able to void [00:10:30] checks and direct deposits, edit checks, record historic checks, and premium and elite payroll. Users are also going to be able to request amendments directly inside the product. Now the closed quarter corrections are going to be available to all users. Doesn't matter if you're using QuickBooks Online Payroll, Core Premium or Elite, you don't have to wait for them. You can just go ahead and make the changes right in the product. If you are using Payroll Core, you're going to have to file your own [00:11:00] amendments. If you're using Premium and Elite, if you are set up for automated taxes and forms, then it will automatically do the corrections for you. You're going to be able to make these corrections from several different places. You can find them on the run Payroll screen, on the paycheck list, on the Paycheck view. It's live right now. It's been rolled out to core 100%. If you're using QuickBooks Online Payroll Core, you have it right now, and it's currently being rolled [00:11:30] out to Premium and Elite. About 50%, and it is just in the US. The amendment process does take 6 to 8 weeks, but you don't even have to call them. They'll notice your change and start the process automatically, and all the conversation about it will all be in one case number, and you'll receive an email when it's complete.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Basically, what happens is when you change something that's in a closed period, you're going to get a pop up. It will ask you if you want to submit an amendment request [00:12:00] or not, and then give you a box to explain the situation. And then there's a separate option to record it in the books or not. Whether you want QuickBooks to record the amendment or whether you want to enter it in yourself, you'll have that choice. After you've submitted the request, keep an eye out on your email. You'll get an email that says Intuit Payroll has received your amendment request, and the case number will be right in the subject line. It'll even include the business name, the case number, [00:12:30] and the case type, and tell you how many days you can expect it to take. If the payroll taxes have already been paid, Premium and Elite will make the additional tax payments. Or if it's a refund, they'll amend your future payments so that it reduces it by the amount that you would be getting back. There's no additional fees for the process either. Now, do note that if you need to get money back from an employee into it can't do that. You're going to have to work on [00:13:00] that independently. And last but not least about it, information about the amendment cases will also be available in the Resolution Center.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That hasn't been rolled out yet, but it will be soon. If you haven't checked out the Resolution Center, you certainly should. It's up under your settings gear. The Resolution Center is now where they are keeping track of your open cases. The last announcement was about custom client IDs in QuickBooks Online Accountant, or QBO. It [00:13:30] was presented by Caitlin Winchevsky, who's the staff product manager for the Small Business Group. They started with their poll about whether people use custom client numbers to track and organize clients across products. And the answers were yes or yes, but only in some products like a CRM or no. I rely on another identifier like the client name, email, etc. and 78% of the respondents said no, they don't use customer IDs. So [00:14:00] it is a smaller number of people who need it, but this is a feature that large firms absolutely need. You know, if you have a CAS team, you need the client ID to communicate with the tax practice. So this for the people who need it is a game changer. And maybe it's something that you want to implement yourself. Now they had introduced the custom client numbers back in February, but they heard that it was too cumbersome to add them to the clients because you had to [00:14:30] do each one individually. So what they did is they gave us the ability to do a bulk upload of these custom client numbers. So now you can have them in a CSV and then upload them.

Alicia Katz Pollock: The way that you do it is in your QuickBooks online. For accountants. Go to your client list and then you can click select Add Update Client Numbers in bulk. You can also do it from the Billing and subscriptions tab too. So this has been launched [00:15:00] in August. So it's available now. And it's not just the US, it is available globally. They were supposed to end with a series of announcements, but they accidentally clicked the wrong button and ended the session prematurely. I actually I frequently do the behind the scenes Q&A on these in the nose. And so I was like, wait, what happened? And so I pinged the person that I talked to and she's like, oh no, we're still up and running. And they didn't realize that it had actually [00:15:30] gone down. So I got to be the person to let them know that it didn't, that it had it had stopped. But they do have the handouts and the slides from it so I can make their announcements for them. And I do want to mention that the slide deck for In the Know is in the show notes, so you can take a look at it yourself. They mentioned that episode 25 that came out on October 21st is all about Intuit Connect. It's a know before you go episode, so everybody [00:16:00] should tune into that. And episode 24, the one right before that was with Dan Hood, who is the editor in chief of Accounting Today.

Alicia Katz Pollock: It was a great episode. They're also promoting a toolkit and tutorial about all of the changes in the new experience, including some articles and videos by our own Hector Garcia. So definitely check in to firm of the future comm and check out his videos and articles about it. If you'd like to know more about modern reports on [00:16:30] November 13th at 11 a.m., they are having a ProAdvisor solution. Spotlight just about the modern reports or, excuse me, the postmodern reports. So they're going to teach you how to customize the reports to your needs, how to use advanced functionality and navigate the nuances like a pro. So those were all of the announcements on the in the know. I also want to turn over to firm of the future. If you haven't gone [00:17:00] to visit firm of the future. Com it's another place that's a really good resource for things happening, both in QuickBooks online and in the industry. The article about the October 2025 features mostly things that we already knew about, but I wanted to make a couple announcements. The first one is that Intuit Accountant Suite is coming soon. This is going to be the replacement for QuickBooks Online Accountant or the enhancement of it, and it's going to have all of our client files in [00:17:30] one place with a custom dashboard for every one of our team members that's going to focus on the tasks, reminders, and insights that each team member needs every day.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So each person on our team is going to have their own customized hub. It's already out in beta, so you may have access to it. Unfortunately, I don't, so I haven't been able to talk about it yet. Another segment is that they're testing what they call all in one suites within QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online [00:18:00] Accountant starting in November 21st, but I've already seen on some of the pricing pages that we're on, the pages where you go to sign up for QuickBooks online that they are renaming them. And so they're personally, from what I can tell, I think it's marketing speak where they're focusing on the, the Agentic AI agents that we've been talking about, and they're calling it a suite of agents. [00:18:30] But really, I don't think it's much different than what we're used to now. Simple start has been renamed to the Light Suite. Essentials is the essentials, suite plus is the plus suite and advanced is the advanced suite. So the only real name change came to Simple Start, which is now going to be called QuickBooks Lite, also in the October 25th. What's New article? They talked about a new sale feature in QuickBooks mobile app, where you can tap new [00:19:00] sale and just take credit card payments just by typing in the dollar amount. Although, honestly, I'm a little puzzled by this because I've been teaching a class on Gopayment and QuickBooks payments for many years, and I've always been able to do this, so I don't think it's a new feature.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I think it's a feature that nobody's using, and that they're calling it forth to let you know that this is here. So if you take mobile payments out in the field, you know, whether it's doing field services at a client's location [00:19:30] or you're at a trade show or a farmer's market, you can actually use the mobile app on your phone and just tap in the amount of the sale, and your clients can do a tap to pay and just tap their phone to your phone, or tap their card to your phone, and you can take the payment really super easy. So I think really this is a reminder that it's possible. And while I'm talking about QuickBooks payments and whether this feature is in there or not, I should probably let you know that I'm actually teaching my QuickBooks payments class and refreshing it on November 25th. [00:20:00] So at 9:00, it's going to be a two hour class where I'm going to go into Qbi payments and all of the different ways that you can use merchant services, as well as how to keep it secure. So head over to learn.com and sign up for my QuickBooks Payments Merchant Services class. It's on November 25th, two hours two CPE. The next announcement is about client invitations that when your client goes to invite you to QBO. [00:20:30] They have always put in your name and your email address and sent you an email, but now instead you can just give them your firm ID and just give them your ID number.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And don't give them your your email address. And the the invitation will go straight to your QBO you'll still get an email invitation about it, but you'll be able to just accept the invitation right inside your interface. I've used it a couple times. It's really slick and I'm really, really happy for it. Last [00:21:00] but not least, this one's actually kind of exciting. When we want to recommend Intuit Enterprise Suite to our clients, we always have to do an introductory sales call about it. You can't just sign people up for it. So in order to encourage us to explore it a little bit more, they are upping the bounty. In the past, if you had recommended Intuit Enterprise Suite and your client signed on, you would get a bounty of $1,500, [00:21:30] $1,500. They are upping it to $3,500. So for recommending Intuit Enterprise Suite, you can get $3,500. This offer is good from now until January 31st, 2026. And so if you have any clients that have been considering Intuit Enterprise Suite or you've been thinking about recommending this, absolutely is the time to do it. Hey, I'll take an extra [00:22:00] $3,500 in my pocket for Christmas money myself. So thank you for tuning in to the recap of the October in the know and the firm of the future announcements. This is Alicia Pollock of Wise Comm, and I will see you in the next one.