Now You Know; QuickBooks December 2025 Updates

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Alicia Katz Pollock: In this week's edition of the unofficial QuickBooks Accountants podcast, it's now You Know day, which is our recap of In the Know, which was on Thursday, December 18th. This is Alicia Pollock of Royal Comm, and I am pleased to help spread the word about Intuit's announcements. If you aren't a regular in the Know Goa, it is [00:00:30] the third Thursday of every single month, and it's when the ProAdvisor program, uh, talks about everything that is being released in the software so that you're not taken by surprise by things. This month, it was hosted by Aarti Patel Martinez, who's the principal program manager manager of ProAdvisor training. And on the agenda, the learning objectives were to one. Identify account based dynamic allocations across entities in Intuit Enterprise Suite. The second is to recognize [00:01:00] how to use the book's closed beta feature in Intuit accounting suite, and to understand best practices for the prep for realm consolidation Intuit Accounting suite. So if you're a regular listener, we have been talking about Intuit Enterprise Suite with the closed allocations and talking a lot about Intuit Accountant Suite and all the new features there. But we haven't talked about the realm consolidation, so that part is going to be completely new. She started by [00:01:30] talking about some upcoming events and things to know about. And so for ProAdvisor that offer tax prep, there's a webinar on January 27th that's an introduction to Intuit Pro Connect tax for ProAdvisor.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So if you are interested in knowing about the connection between your QuickBooks and Prep for taxes and Intuit Tax Advisor and the Pro Connect software, this is for you. So again, it's on January 27th, and [00:02:00] you can find out more about it at firm of the future. Com On January 15th, there's an event called empower 2025 Tax Season Readiness Virtual Conference. And it doesn't say who's going to be speaking, but I do see Randy Crabtree in the promo picture for it. So I know that he is part of it. So this one is breaking down the latest tax law changes and walking you through the newest Intuit tax product updates. So if you're in taxes and using QuickBooks products, you definitely want to attend to that one. On January [00:02:30] 15th, there's a reminder that Insightful Accountant is now accepting nominations and applications for the 2026 ProAdvisor Awards. There's several of them this year. There's a top 100 US Pro Advisors top 25 up and coming Pro Advisors, the top 50 International Pro Advisors, and the top 25 tax advisors. So please do nominate your friends and you are also welcome to self nominate as well. I've been a top 200 top 100, and in 2021 [00:03:00] I hit the top ten for apologist and on my personal bucket list is the top educator. So hopefully all the work that I'm doing helping you guys smooth the road with your QuickBooks earns me a earns me a nod for that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay, now here's a really interesting one. On February 3rd and February 4th, they're doing a Career lab, which is a virtual event for accounting students. So Intuit is now reaching out to accounting students to talk about modern accounting [00:03:30] careers. And so they're talking about, um, different careers in accounting and letting people know that the field is growing. It pays well, and it gives you the freedom to shape the life that you want. They're going to be talking about Client Advisory service or CAS and how AI is transforming the industry. And so it's really interesting the way that they wrote this, because they're really trying to emphasize that Accounting. Bookkeeping is a flexible career where [00:04:00] you get to support industries that you feel passionate about, and so they've definitely got the right tone with this. So if you know any accounting students, definitely point them to the Career Lab on February 3rd and fourth. And again, check it out at firm of the future. Com there are last announcement was about W-9 bulk upload and automated 1099 that you can now bulk upload W-9 into QuickBooks 1099 [00:04:30] tool. And I'm going to be giving a webinar about it on January 6th. Now, I'm not sure exactly when this episode is going to air. So if you are hearing this before January 6th, come check out my 1099 class at Royal Comm. And if you are listening to this afterwards, there is it has been recorded and so you can definitely check it out.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I do an actual deep dive into all the features in the The 1099 software. How to use it and all of the best practices. [00:05:00] So definitely come check that out. All right now product innovations. So the first host that they had, the first guest was talking about Intuit Enterprise Suite and multi entity updates and Lakeith Lanka the senior project manager or I'm sorry senior staff product manager was the one who um who told us all about it. So the first thing that he talked about was a consolidated view. And what they had heard is that [00:05:30] many of the features in Intuit Enterprise Suite were restricted to parent administrators, which was preventing people from actually getting any work done. So what they did is they launched a consolidated view that's customized to each users access and including more granular permissions. So it is available in the US. It has been released now. Um, and what the consolidated view does is it gives you a dashboard across each of the companies so that you can look at [00:06:00] consolidation. Um, when you when let's put it this way, when you have multiple companies that you are managing, you can now keep a consolidated view. So to get there you switch to one of the companies and then you go to manage users. And the option to turn on manage consolidated view permissions has to be approved by the primary admin.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And then you'll have the ability to assign the different subcompanies to each of your [00:06:30] team. Now, right now, they acknowledge that it's a little bit manual, that you still have to select a bunch of checkboxes, but in the future, if you have any access to the company, you'll get the permissions to automatically get set up. And then you can make it granular if you want to. Another feature that he demonstrated was dynamic allocations, that when you have a transaction that you want to allocate across multiple entities, you can now set a default percentage and then you can run these allocations automatically. So [00:07:00] that is going to be a big, big help for multi-company transactions. The next presenter was Anusha Natarajan who I've had the pleasure of working with several times. She's the principal product manager on the accountant team, and she came on to talk about books close in Intuit Accountant Suite. So this is the beta test on the new feature to give you a high level dashboard across all of your clients so that you can work in your client's books without going into your [00:07:30] client's books. So she started with a poll, and it turns out that 35% of the people in attendance hadn't heard of it yet. 55 of it had heard of it, but hadn't tried it. And about 10% are currently testing it out.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Now, to be clear, this is different than Books Review. The books review tools in QuickBooks online are when you go into the client file, and then you have your books review tools in order to do your reviews. The difference with Books close is that it's high end. It happens in your Intuit Accountant [00:08:00] Suite software, where you have a dashboard, and then you can do an overview of the companies, but without leaving your dashboard. And then if when you need to go into your client, you still can. Now just making sure everybody's on the same page. Anytime you hear me say Intuit Accountant Suite or IAS, that is the new rollout of the software that is replacing Qbo, the Qbo for accountants suite. So we're kind of trying to normalize the new platform. [00:08:30] And so whenever you hear me talk about IAS, that is what I'm talking about. All right. So the books review tool in IAS Intuit Accountant suite there's two tiers. There's core which is free. And that's the equivalent of the qbo that we all know and love and use every day. And then there's also a new accelerate tier that's going to be a paid version of QBO or IAS that has additional features for [00:09:00] firm management level tools. So if you don't need it, you don't need it. Books close. It lays on top of either of those. It's separate. It's actually a service that you pay for client by client by client.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So you can use it just on the clients that you want to use it for. So what it does is it gives you a dashboard that has the closed status of all of your clients that you have assigned to books close, and it also gives you the ability to delegate the tasks to your team. So it gives you this one big dashboard where you can see everybody's [00:09:30] status and what who has been assigned to what. You can do the work in your dashboard without switching into your clients files. It is available internationally. You do have to be the primary admin to add it for your firm, and for it's free for 2026. But then at the end of 2026, once you have gotten used to it, have decided if you like it and they've worked out all the kinks, then there will be a per client fee. They are eventually going to add preparer, reviewer [00:10:00] and approval rolls in the future, which is totally nice. So you'll be able to actually take the the roll in the in the organization. So basically what it does is it gives you a list of review tasks. You can create templates that have the tasks the way that you like to see them. And then you can assign them to the different clients. And what's nice is as you start using it for each client, every time you add additional tasks.

Alicia Katz Pollock: At this review level, they'll be remembered [00:10:30] just for this one client. So it becomes a customized, repeatable dashboard. Client by client by client. You can even include external links to it for, you know, their bank accounts or for their Google Drive, or for however you are managing your practice. It allows you to see your account reconciliation status and do your reconciliations right from here without going into QBO. The bank account and credit cards are added by default, but you can manually add others like loans and [00:11:00] then the dashboard shows progress completion. One of the features that it has is a transaction review, where you can update all of your uncategorized transactions and get this. You can even assign Payees in bulk. So if they're missing, you can fix that. The transaction review even allows you to filter and only see certain types of transactions. For example, if you want to exclude journal entries, you can do that. And as an example of the things that you can customize, [00:11:30] for example, your fixed asset filter, it defaults to $2,500, but you can adjust it up or down per client. You can even add your own post review tasks like closing the books, or any administrative work you need to do around that client. Some of the things that they said are coming soon, within the next six months are going to be enhanced. 1099 management, including the ability to request W-9 throughout the year and expense inconsistency, check client collaborations, team [00:12:00] collaborations, and multi-tab access so that you can have your books close, open and your client file open side by side with the current templates for year end review.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right now it's month by month and you can pick a month, but you can't change the date range, but they'll be able to do that soon. Personally, I'm looking forward to that because I would like to use the tools to do my year end reviews as well and see a whole year at one time. So that's something that I'm personally looking forward to. And then last but [00:12:30] not least, it does include an enhanced management report section for sending your financials with all new customizable management reports. Now, I know I'm being kind of brief on this, but we have been talking about these tools in other episodes. And so I do encourage you to go check out our episode on how sweet it is. Intuit accountant. Sweet. All right. And then the last section of In the Know was about REM consolidation. [00:13:00] And it was led by Aaron Hutton, who's the principal post-sales engineer. And the. So what realm consolidation basically means is your realm is your Intuit Accountant suite account with all of your clients inside it, and sometimes you might have more than one realm. Up until now, if you wanted to move a client from one account to another Qbo account, it involved sending new invitations and then deleting your old file. [00:13:30]

Alicia Katz Pollock: And it was sometimes really awkward, especially if you didn't have any extra seats. You needed to delete your own QBO A and then have the client invite you. And it was really awkward. And when you have a lot of clients that you need to consolidate, it's virtually impossible and incredibly time consuming. So they have been working on new tools that allow you to actually pick up your clients and move them from realm to realm, which is really nice and really welcome. Now, the ability is only available to primary [00:14:00] admins, but that kind of makes sense because you don't want just anybody moving your clients from file to file to file. Okay. What's also nice is you can do up to 75 at a time, so you don't have to do them one by one by one. One of the realms does need to be in Intuit Accountant Suite, so it doesn't matter if all of them are. You can have some in Qbo, but the one realm needs to be in IAS. Now this is only us right now. Even [00:14:30] though Intuit Accountant Suite is international, the realm consolidation tool right now is just us only. Now in this session, really what they emphasized was the planning and the move. So they really want to make sure that you do it right. And because, you know this is kind of important.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So they emphasized preplanning that you have to pick which one is going to be your main realm, and then move that one to Intuit Accountant Suite. And [00:15:00] then make sure you're trained on Intuit Accountant Suite if needed. Now, some of the caveats and constraints that they mentioned is that there's a limit to the number of attached clients. Right now it's 2000. If you are using Pro Connect tax, you need to make sure that you're using the realm that is connected to your Pro Connect tax. They provided a link that has a really detailed document about just about everything that you need to [00:15:30] know. So I'm going to finish going over the IAS stuff, and then we can go take a look at that document as well. And the links to everything that I'm talking about are all in our show notes, so that you can download the slides and get the documents as well. All right. So we got as far as picking your realm and knowing the limitations. So then you also need to make sure that you plan your timing well. The way that you do it when you're doing the move is to log on to the target realm with the primary [00:16:00] admin user of the source realm, and then confirm that the billing is set up in the target realm, and then create a custom role for the source realm if needed.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And then, um, you'll follow their client transfer flow. Then afterwards there may be some cleanup. You have to add any administrative users that didn't transfer. I don't know why some users wouldn't transfer, but apparently that's something to look out for. You need to inactivate and delete the users on the [00:16:30] source realm so that they now only have the one active client. And then if some of the client's files weren't eligible for transfer, you know, follow up with that. Now, they didn't give me any guidance for why somebody wouldn't be eligible for a transfer. Now, one of the really important things is that if you have team members working on these files, you have to make sure that you're communicating with them to let them know that the login is going to be different. The place where they're going to go to that client file is different, and you definitely [00:17:00] want to make sure that they don't keep working in the old file and not know where the new file is. The way that you do this is the rum. Consolidation will be right up in the settings gear. There'll be an option in there for transferring clients. So it's just right there inside the gear transfer clients now in their guidance document about it. Some of the things that they have mentioned is that your firm books and your rev rev share cannot be transferred to a different realm.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So if [00:17:30] your books are in the old realm, your books have to stay in that in that realm. But any client connected apps transfer absolutely seamlessly. But if there's apps that the firm has connected, you're going to need to reconnect those manually at this time. They don't recommend that any clients with Prokinetics get moved because their tax documents in history cannot be moved. You also need to think about where the client has their wholesale billing. If their wholesale [00:18:00] billing is on the original realm, then you're not going to be able to move that to the target realm and keep the billing relationship. Now, I would like to hope that you can make a call and get that reestablished. Now, they do say that the firm builds subscriptions can be transferred. It takes up to two billing cycles to reflect in the system, and you might see pro rates and credits appearing in both the source and the target billings after the transfer. So it'll take a little bit of time. Now, if you do have your [00:18:30] books and your rev share and your pro connect and they're all in different realms, you can talk to support and they can help consolidate them into one. But their best recommendation is to pick which of the realms is the most complicated and use that as your primary realm. And that's the one that you should turn into Intuit Accountant Suite and then consolidate the other realms into that one.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Now, if you don't have your books or revenue share or Pro [00:19:00] Connect connected, then probably the best practice is to pick the QBO that has the most clients and use that one as your main. Now, I personally am really happy about this new realm consolidation because, you know, I have probably 60 people on my wholesale billing and I'm attached to literally hundreds of of companies, and I have had times when I did want to move them from one to another, because I actually do have a couple different qbo accounts. Um, [00:19:30] but it was so daunting that I there was no way that I was going to even contemplate it. So now I get an opportunity to take a look and see if I can streamline my operations. So thank you for this new realm consolidation tool into it. This is awesome. Okay, now in the know ended with, as they do, talking about some more upcoming what's around the corners. And we did it and make some announcements about some events coming up in the very beginning of this episode. [00:20:00] They did want to remind you about On the Books, which is their podcast with Ted Callahan and Jessica McCracken, where you get to meet different people who work at Intuit and talk about things happening in the industry. Some of the recent episodes were about consolidation and change, with Becky Munson and Michael Hitchcock talking about the 2025 in accounting.

Alicia Katz Pollock: The Year in Accounting. Upcoming episodes involve the Working Families Tax Cut and what we need to know. And another episode [00:20:30] that I definitely am looking forward to checking out is navigating the working families tax cut and everything that we need to know about that now. They're next in the Know webinar will be in February. On February 19th. There is not one in January there skipping January. So February 19th, 2026. And you can register at firm of. Com. And in the show notes I'm going to have links to today's slide deck, the information about Intuit Accountant Suite and [00:21:00] some learn more links to Rome consolidations transferring clients and also ebooks closed playbook that they're publishing to teach you how to use the books. Close. It's pretty cool. Okay, now let's close it out with what's going on in my world. I actually just spent my entire Christmas break working on my updates to my consultants textbook and, um, the the good news with that, it's been actually kind of interesting is [00:21:30] that as I'm doing the editing, most of its terminology, but I'm finding myself taking out more information than I am putting in new information. Now, that being said, I'm not spending a lot of time adding the the AI agents yet until they've been a little bit more developed and I can work them into the curriculum. But as far as just the changes in the product as we know it, it's actually been an interesting, unexpected litmus test that I expected to be adding a lot more stuff. [00:22:00]

Alicia Katz Pollock: And instead what I'm finding is that they have really streamlined a lot of the workflows. And so I'm taking out entire sections of the book that are not necessary anymore because of the improvements that they have made to the software. So it's been interesting and subtle that I didn't realize that the little changes that they're making have really streamlined everything. And so it's been awesome taking out steps and not having to rewrite and add a lot of new stuff. So it was an interesting perspective that only I [00:22:30] would get after rewriting the same book year after year after year. Now for Royal Eyes on January 13th is my year end cleanup for taxes class. And that's a class where I show you how I actually analyze my clients files at year end. Now, you know, I've been doing their books all year long, but doing a due diligence double check. Or if you haven't been doing their books all year long and they're showing up and saying, hey, can you get me ready for taxes? This is [00:23:00] kind of my 12 step process for everything that I look through, so that I can identify where transactions are at in the wrong place or done incorrectly, and the steps on how to fix them. So it's a 2 to 3 hour class happening on the 13th, and if you can't make it on the 13th, it will be recorded.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So the links will be in the show notes so that you can sign up. Then on January 20th I'm doing my class on projects, project invoicing and job costing, which is basically my deep dive into [00:23:30] the project center. So I'm looking forward to that. And then on the 17th is my sales tax class. And this, I think, is one of the most important classes you can take If you are a bookkeeper for a company who is working in in a state that does collect sales tax, because QBO sales tax works really well if it's set up perfectly, and if you don't set it up perfectly, it doesn't do a good job. And setting it up perfectly is actually three different [00:24:00] places or four different places where you have to align all of everything, all in just the right way, and then it works perfectly. But if you don't know what to look for, you will have problems. So I highly, highly recommend my sales tax class. And so the link to that will be in the show notes. Or you can go to Royal Comm and check out the calendar. So thank you everybody for joining me. For now you know our The Unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast take on in-the-know. [00:24:30] And we will see you in the next one.