Christmas Gifts from Intuit!(Look What I Found Dec 2025)

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

Alicia Katz Pollock: Ho ho ho! Welcome to the Christmas edition of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast. I'm your host, Alicia Katz Pollock of.com. It's Christmas. And what better time to do an episode of Look What I found, which is when I list out all the little details and all the little improvements inside QuickBooks online. [00:00:30] And so these are the presents that Intuit is giving us today. Now, considering it's Christmas, I actually hope nobody's listening today. I hope you are all with your families and out celebrating, but I know that a lot of you are just like me, and you're taking this little downtime to actually get her done. So here we are together, and I hope that I can entertain you a little bit and show you all the good things that are to come in your accounting software. So [00:01:00] let's go ahead and get started. Now this is a hard time for me to do a look what I found, because they're doing so many rollouts and improvements to the system that it keeps changing right out from under us. So the things that I'm going to highlight today are things that are notable, that are different, that are small tweaks and things that help out a lot. Now it's definitely a random order, and I'm just going to kind of go through and talk to you [00:01:30] about what I'm seeing in the software. So hopefully you can use your imagination and mind's eye, and I will direct you to where to go in the software so that you can see it for yourself.

Alicia Katz Pollock: The first thing that I noticed is that in account and settings, there are some new settings there. The first one is there's one called accounting. And when you go into accounting you're going to see a couple of different things. If you're using Qbo advanced and you [00:02:00] have fixed assets. Then there's now a fixed asset policy where you set a capitalization threshold and so you can say, okay, expenditures that are $2,500 or greater or provide, I'm actually reading it now that provide economic benefit beyond one year will be capitalized as fixed costs. Now, I don't know if that is here because I turned on the books review in the new in the new Intuit Accountant suite, and [00:02:30] if it's tied to that, or if this is a QuickBooks advanced thing, I'm just letting you know that I saw it in here. And so this is where you can set your capitalization threshold for whether QuickBooks suggests it as a fixed asset, or whether it suggests it as an expense. In that same window, there are settings for the new banking feed. So you know how we've mentioned that the banking feed now has client requests. So when you're looking at the new banking feed, you see these little speech bubbles with little plus [00:03:00] signs on them And what that allows you to do is ask your clients what expenses are for or to send a receipt.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And what's cool about it is you can just leave them in the banking feed as waiting requests. Or you can you can go ahead and categorize them. You can put them in a suspense account like ask my accountant. You can even you can put them in uncategorized expenses. You could even put them where you think that they belong. And then you use the new banking centers client requests [00:03:30] to ask for confirmation, and then you can see what's been followed up and completed and what is still outstanding. What's new about that is that you can now begin to point out who you want the question to go to. So instead of being a blanket request that just goes out to the primary administrator, when you go into accountant settings and then into the accounting settings, there's a section called requests for more information. And you do need to require [00:04:00] a sign in to answer requests. So the regular requests, you can send it to anybody. And they don't have to have a qbo account. They don't have to log in. If you're going to specify I want this request to go to this particular person. It does have to be a registered user. But once you turn that setting on, then when you make the request, there's a little people, little person in the right hand corner and you can pick who you want the request to go to.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And then it shows up in the whole tasks section that [00:04:30] is also being built out. So I thought that was a I had been immediately asking for it as soon as I saw the client request when they first introduced it, my first thought was, yeah, but who is supposed to answer? And if we have if it's an expense specific to an employee on that employee's credit card, sending it to the owner isn't going to help. It needs to go to that particular user. So it's nice seeing that this is being developed and built out. While I'm talking about account and settings, something else has popped [00:05:00] up and that is when you are using QuickBooks time. They have now taken the next step of integrating QuickBooks time into the Qbo interface natively. And naturally, QuickBooks time was a purchase of Tsheets many years ago, and up until now you had to still go to Tsheets to manage the time, but it integrated completely with Qbo payroll and you could use it with other payroll programs as well. But you had to go to this [00:05:30] other website that still said Tsheets. For the longest time, about a year ago, they brought in the parts of QuickBooks time that allowed you to manage payroll so you could approve timesheets right inside Qbo instead of externally, for example. Now, as of about the last month or so, there is now when you go to time when they rolled out the new interface, time now has its own app and its own section with its own list of [00:06:00] features.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And so when you go into time, you can do your time off and your approvals and assign your clients to different team members and do a lot of management. So they've taken yet another really huge step to bringing it all into the same interface. I don't know if it's all there yet. I don't think so because QuickBooks time is so vastly robust, but there is a lot of it now that's in there. And so you'll see [00:06:30] enhanced time settings inside your Qbo portal when you are running Qbo time. So some of it happens under time in the My apps in the All Apps section. And some of it happens in the settings where you are in account and settings. But that's where you can set things like break defaults and management and your work week, and the parameters for who can do what. So if you're a QuickBooks time user, keep an eye [00:07:00] out for these inside your QBO interface. The next big change that I saw is the Sales Tax center. It no longer has boxes by state where you have to go from state to state and then drop down from year to year. Now it's just one long list, and if you want to see it state by state, there's an agency filter and you can filter for which state you want to see.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And if there's a specific tax period you want to see, you can filter for that particular [00:07:30] tax period. And I think that is way more functional, because you can just tell it what you want to see and hone in straight onto those. Each tax month or each tax entry has its own line and it has starts with a status. So if it's open and accumulating there's a blue open tag. And if when it becomes due it turns yellow and says that it's due. If you're late, it turns red and it gives you a little warning symbol and it tells you that your tax is overdue. And [00:08:00] once you have paid it, then it turns green. And I want a gentle reminder to everybody that when you are paying your sales taxes, you don't do it by categorizing the tax payment when it comes in from the banking feed. You have to go into your sales tax returns. View the summary, make the adjustments so that it matches the state and then matched the actual payment that you're making. Otherwise, your liabilities never get paid down properly. I always make it a point to reconcile all my payroll liabilities, [00:08:30] to make sure everything is, uh, is happening properly, and something else that's new, that is being rolled out is that several states are now automatically being paid through the system.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Now, I in a future episode, I'm going to do a deep dive on sales tax. So right now there's about 10 or 12 states that it will auto file. And the biggest question I always get is, well, what if there's a discrepancy between [00:09:00] what it says when I put it in the States website versus what it says inside my QuickBooks. The Intuit has agreements with all of the states that if this is what the calculation is, that we're going to roll with it. That being said, there are so many ways of mucking up your sales tax, and I hear complaints that people are like, oh, the sales tax center doesn't work. Actually, the sales tax center works brilliantly, except that there's so many different ways of user error that [00:09:30] it becomes kind of kind of an issue that you have to set up your your state agency properly. You have to make sure that your, your customers are exempt if they're not supposed to pay taxes. You need to set the correct tax ability on a product by product basis, because different products are taxable at different rates in different times. And then even whether you have the ship to address open or closed on the invoice can change the tax rate that's being collected. Then there's the fact [00:10:00] that hitting the check mark to toggle on and off your sales tax does not change your sales tax ability.

Alicia Katz Pollock: It's only telling whether you collected sales tax on that particular transaction. So if sometimes a service or product is taxable and sometimes it's not taxable and it's not dependent on the location of the customer, you actually need to make two different products and put the taxable one on the invoice or the nontaxable one on the invoice, and choose the same one if you just [00:10:30] toggle the check mark. Some of your reports are going to show that you have taxable revenue, even if you didn't collect tax on that, on that form. And that's the distinction that people lose. And I'm going to say it again, just to be super clear. Toggling the check mark on an invoice for the sales tax for a product or service does not change the taxability of the on the reports. It only changes whether you collected tax on it in this transaction. So that if [00:11:00] you are finding a lot of discrepancies between what it says your taxable revenue is and the sales tax you collected, that's your problem. So be aware of that. Okay. Going back to the look what I found. Part of it digressing from my lesson on sales tax is that when you start the sales tax payment in a state where it does actually remit the sales tax for you, it does have a let's check and some new reports and some explanations in the AI agent [00:11:30] definitely helps make it more clear.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So they're working hard on this, and I'm glad to see that there's some improvements there. At some point I'm going to do a sales tax class for you while I actually teach a whole sales tax class that is very, very well worth taking because I go into demo on all of these things that I'm trying to explain to you over a podcast. Okay, let's head back into the look what I found. The next one is the a [00:12:00] little enhancement in the business feed. The business feed is that little spark in the left hand rail where you go in, and that's where all the agents come to play. So it's a collection of alerts from the payments agent and the accounting agent and the sales tax agent and all of your different agents. What is neat about it is that, well, you know, I don't know if you've taken the time to go in and look, but it's a really good place to go in and surface insights about your data. So it's telling you, you know, the [00:12:30] payments agent will tell you if your invoices are paid on time or late, and how many overdue payments you have. But as you go through the whole list of all of the agents, if there are agents there that are not helpful to you, you can go up to the upper right hand corner and there's three dots.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And under those three dots is give feedback where you can say this was helpful or this was unhelpful. You can click give detailed feedback and actually help and [00:13:00] help into it out and let them know what you specifically like about it or don't like about it. And there's an option for snooze, so you can say snooze for two weeks and then it will disappear and not show up. And then two weeks from now it will come back again. So we have a little bit of increased control into how the business feed is operating and developing. Now you know, everybody when I, when I talk to the ProAdvisor is people's [00:13:30] opinion on AI sits on both sides. Some people love the development and the addition of AI in the software, and other people don't want to have any AI in the software. But the whole world is moving towards the AI and it where Intuit is using the AI to do some analysis for you and look for especially anomaly detection. I find it really, really helpful, so I'm happy that it's there. Now I want to back up one second. I mentioned [00:14:00] giving detailed feedback. I actually think it's hysterical that the link says give detailed feedback, not just feedback. I was talking to one of the developers last week, and she was telling me that she reads literally every single piece of feedback that comes in through any of the gears, any of the modules, any of the apps.

Alicia Katz Pollock: She reads all of it, and she says that for every 20 she gets 15. Are people just saying, I don't like this? Take it away. And five [00:14:30] of them are actually helpful and actionable and insightful, and she would love it. For all of you who you know are passionate enough about QuickBooks to, uh, to do more than just complain about it and actually help it improve so that you don't have to complain about it. Be specific. What is it that is irking you? Is it the fact? Is something literally not working, or is it cluttered? Or is it some [00:15:00] phrasing that doesn't make sense. Or do you wish it did something different than it does? But if you can be specific and actually quote what's on the page, tell them which dialog box or which graph or which alert or what it is that is not working for you, so that they can specifically address the details. That's great feedback. Feedback is a gift. Just a bitch session is unhelpful to anybody and it's demoralizing for all of us. So be [00:15:30] constructive with your feedback. All right I'm going to go get off that that soapbox. Let's go talk about something else. Let's go talk about reports. So a couple improvements on the reports. We've been letting you know for a couple months now that they are in doing the next wave of improvements on the modern reports, that I love the modern reports because they have so much more ability than the classic reports did, but they've been [00:16:00] kind of ugly.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And I'm actually right now working on my on my textbook for consultants, and I'm having to replace all the reports images for the second year in a row. Last year it went from classic to modern, and then this year they're going from ugly to functional. Um, and so I have a lot of work to do. But the thing about the reports is that they did realize that they leaned in on all of the new multi-layered, [00:16:30] uh, filters and grouping and, and columns and all the customization that you can do. But the appearance wasn't attractive. And for a lot of people, that's the beginning and end of it. Is are the reports legible and usable, and are the numbers cut off and how are the sizes? And are there weird lines and weird places? So they are improving the interface. They're moving a lot of the tools back to where they were with classic. [00:17:00] So they're going to be right up above the report instead of up in the upper right hand corner, for example. The reports refresh has been there, but it's a tiny little circle up in the upper right hand corner. And people literally were just not seeing it and complaining that the reports don't have a refresh.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, of course they do. So, um, they are moving the controls back down. And then the big buttons that were all of these super power features for customizations and filtering and grouping and columns and display and all of that, they're no longer [00:17:30] going to be across the top. They're going to be under a little button called customize. So now I don't want all of you to go complaining in the other direction about how they took away all these amazing new fields there under the customize button. So go find them and use them and play with them. I'm actually teaching two reports classes. Well, it's next week from the day I'm recording this, but I just taught them as far as all you all are concerned, and I'll make sure that I have the links to both [00:18:00] my basic reports, running reports for, um, analyzing for growth. Let me say that in one sentence. Running reports to analyze for growth, followed up by a second class in advanced reporting, where we go into all the detailed customizations available in QBO, advanced and above. All right. So some other things that I've seen with the modern reports is there is up in the settings, there's a new option for default report settings. And there [00:18:30] you can specify your preferences for the visuals, like how do you want the columns to be highlighted.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Do you want banded rows? Do you want grid lines? How do you want the headers and footers to be formatted? How do you want the numbers? How do you want the view to look? Do you want it to be compact, or do you want it to be cozy? Or do you want it to be comfortable? So some of that formatting used to be under the customization button. So they've moved that part out into this new setting up under the settings gear. But the new visuals are all [00:19:00] brand new column highlights. Banded rows, grid lines. You have some more control, so definitely go take a look at that. I have also noticed in some reports that there's a tiny little zoom button on them, where there's a little drop down that says 100%, where you can magnify it and you can shrink it. So if you have a report that is a lot of truncated information because you've got really big numbers or you have really long memos, you can use this to [00:19:30] zoom in and zoom out. So that will be really helpful as well. Something else that has popped up if you're using QuickBooks Online Advanced, it does have a utility called Backup and Restore that allows you to turn on backups. And those backups are really handy. By the way, if you're using QBO advanced, make sure first of all that you go turn them on.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And second of all, for some people, having a backup is actually a really good reason to go up to advanced [00:20:00] because while QuickBooks is stored on a server and they have it redundantly backed up so that God, can you imagine if we lost our data? So they have it backed up. So we're not going to lose data, but that's not a backup that you can access. It's not a backup that you have any control over. So having your own backup that you can roll back to yesterday or last month if you need to is a really, really good idea. And so I like a lot of my clients [00:20:30] on advanced so that they have these backups. Now, if my clients really don't need advanced, I do still like to have a backup for them. And I use rewind and I'll put a link to rewind in the show notes. Um, so I do believe in backups. All right. But I'm digressing. Uh, the innovation that is happening is that your Backup and restore app for QuickBooks Online Advanced used to be available in the integration Transactions store. What we used to know [00:21:00] is the App Store, and you could turn it on from there. They've taken that away. It's not in the App Store anymore. Now, it's not considered a separate app at all. It is all internal to QBO. And so the place where you can find it is going up to the settings gear icon and then choosing back up company.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So now it's not confusing because there's not two places to look for it. So again all of you on advanced go turn it on. I [00:21:30] mentioned a little earlier that QuickBooks time was now much more integrated into QBO. I noticed something adjacent to that though. It's not part of the same thing, but um, and I think this kind of came along when they deprecated tags and they added new custom fields. There is now a custom field specific for timesheets. So when you go in to add a custom field, and I haven't really put it through its paces yet to find out, do you have to have time turned on? [00:22:00] Is it part of the time sheets? But there's a new custom field specifically for time sheets. So if you have to track something about time and timekeeping and time tracking and time sheets specifically, you now have a dedicated custom field where you can add that level of detail. And while we're speaking about payroll, I ran payroll last night, and instead of finished payroll being my ending button, there was a new button that said set up [00:22:30] payroll agent. I'm like, okay, I'll bite. What is it? And this is the big release of their new payroll agent, which is a text message based payroll, where instead of having to log into the computer, you're you can manage some of your payroll through text messages by just sending up the orders to to run it or to approve.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And your employees can text in their timesheets as well. Now, personally, I use workforce. I love my I [00:23:00] love workforce. My employees like using workforce because it allows them to clock in and out of the jobs that they're doing and specify what class the work is for and even what customer the work is for, so that I can really see the job costing on it. And it's really easy to just switch from customer to customer to customer and job to job. So I really like QuickBooks time for looking at my capacity planning and my job costing. So now that this is now saying, hey, you can put your hours [00:23:30] up through text, I'm not so sure if I want to do that, but if you're not doing the level of timekeeping that I'm doing with that kind of detail, and you just need your employees to to tell you how many hours they worked, they can now text it. So you'll turn on the agent, and the first thing it will do is ask your employees if it has their permission to text them, and if they say yes, and if they opt in, it will now start having conversations with them where they can say, all right, put [00:24:00] in for four hours of sick leave, or they can put in their whole weekly schedule.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Monday this number of hours. Tuesday this number of hours. Wednesday this number of hours. And then it's going to populate their timesheets for them. Now this is so brand new that I literally just saw it last night. So I don't have any information for you about how it works. And because we do our timesheets through workforce, I don't even know if it's right for me to use. But you know, you know, you can imagine how my employees feel. Oh, Alicia found a new [00:24:30] feature. She's going to make us go use it. So I sent all my employees a message saying, please do opt in. Please send me screenshots of what it pops up on your phone. And if you aren't doing any work that's specific to a client or a particular class, if you're just doing generic work, do me a favor. Go ahead and put it in through the app. So stay tuned. I'm probably going to let this run for a couple months, and I'll get back to you sometime next year with a full report about how this actually plays out. All [00:25:00] right. So that is our look what I found for November and December. And as far as what's going on in my world, by the time you hear this, it's going to be close to Christmas. And I have instead of getting to take a Christmas vacation, I have had to dedicate the time to upgrading my textbook for consultants.

Alicia Katz Pollock: With all of the new features and all of the new screenshots. And, you know, so it my Christmas is writing. [00:25:30] Um, but I have promised my family that I'm going to come downstairs sometimes for upcoming classes. Of course, it's January and being January, everybody's mind is on 1099 and tax prep, so on six is my how to run 1099 in QBO class, and on January 13th is my year end cleanup for tax time class, where I show you how I analyze a company file for accuracy, missing information, [00:26:00] incorrect information and some of the solutions for what's wrong. So it's one of my favorite, favorite classes to teach. It is expanding from 2 hours to 3 hours this year, and I consider it a must for anybody who is responsible for making sure that the. When you turn your clients over to their CPAs for taxes, that the books are actually accurate. So thank you all for being amazing listeners for tuning in week after week. We're coming [00:26:30] down to the end of the year, and all I can do is express my gratitude that our podcast is now over two years old. We're going strong. We're growing, we're getting a thousand listeners per episode, and I really love doing this. So I'm glad that you are getting some value out of it as well. So this is Alicia Pollock from Royal Comm, and I will see you next year.