We’re STILL at Intuit Connect!

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'm with Dan DeLong and we are going to continue my journey through Intuit Connect. How are you doing, Dan?

Dan DeLong: Very good. I am representing the owls, um, royal wise on my t shirt. After I've, uh, spent a little time with you, you gave me one of your shirts and I figured, hey, let's wear [00:00:30] that today.

Alicia Katz Pollock: We're actually twinsies. I've got mine on also. Yeah. Thank you for representing. Um, so I'm Alicia Pollock of Royal Wise Comm, and Dan DeLong is from School of Bookkeeping and thecube power hour. Now, starting back in October, I went to Intuit Connect and instead of going to workshops, I spend most of my time talking to the developers in the Intuit Innovation Circle in the exhibit hall. And we have been. This is the [00:01:00] third episode when we have been going through all the notes that I took and talking to the developers. Now it's kind of funny because now it's been three months since I took these notes, which means two things. One, I don't remember what they told me, and I'm reading off of my notes. And the second is that a lot of the things that they said are coming soon might have already been released. And so the timelines right now are kind of vague on a lot of these. So Dan and I plan to kind of giggle our way through this [00:01:30] through this episode.

Dan DeLong: Coming soon.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Coming soon. All right. You ready to go?

Dan DeLong: Yeah. Let's dive in.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. So we're going to start with the hard stuff first. And we're going to talk about I Intuit Enterprise Suite and I talked to Uttam Ramamurthy. And we've really focused on the industry solutions around construction. And as they're developing Intuit Enterprise Suite. They're trying to really make it [00:02:00] useful to mid-market companies and one of the major industries, and kind of the low hanging fruit for Intuit is construction, because QBO already has a fairly robust project management center that I love using, I really do, um, in fact, I just taught my projects class last week, and so it turned into what used to be a two hour class actually was 3.5 hours of literally everything that I could find in the project suite. So if you are doing projects in [00:02:30] job costing and progress invoicing, my link to that class is in the show notes.

Dan DeLong: Yeah. And not only, um, not only that. Um, I mean, this this kind of mirrors how how QuickBooks desktop went into industry specific versions as well. Um, but in addition to the projects and the job costing and those types of things that, that they're working on people in the in the construction home builder, [00:03:00] you know, space special trades. They tend to have multiple entities. So those two things kind of go in coincide with what is the most ideal fit for someone moving into into an enterprise suite?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, it definitely fills a need for sure. Okay. So let's take a look at what they what they have said. So the what they were really trying to do is really simplify and connect [00:03:30] and power up your construction workflows, because there's a lot of things that you still needed to turn to spreadsheets for or third party software. And they're trying to make it a one stop shop. One of the things that's going to be different is that there's going to be a dashboard of all of your projects, so instead of just seeing a list with the stripes with the the profitability, there's going to be a whole entire dashboard just for projects. You can set default margin [00:04:00] goals like you can say, I want a 25% profit margin on my projects, and it will work that into the reporting. One of the things that they're making more robust is the project notes that you can upload project notes, and it will auto populate all of the project details. It will pull the phases out of your documentation and also use its own AI product knowledge from similar projects to figure out what your phases are.

Dan DeLong: Yeah, I like that with the with the profit [00:04:30] margin goal. Like being able to to do those things and then that's going to be a trigger that, you know, you'll be able to get notifications on or, or things like that where those defaults are going to either be something in, in, in red or, you know, some something on those dashboards. So I can see how all of this kind of feeds together to, you know, get more out of QuickBooks quickly or Intuit Enterprise Suite, I should say.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I [00:05:00] think I remember hearing them say that if you fall below your profit margin settings, it will alert you and start giving you a heads up when your profitability is is too low. Or maybe you're going too high, as you know. I don't know if that's a thing or not. I don't know if you can have too much profit.

Dan DeLong: Right.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. Um, the fact that you they are working on being able to upload a spreadsheet into the project budgets, which is going to [00:05:30] help you with the level of detail that you know, right now. You still have to do a lot of your budgeting in a spreadsheet, and then just put your grand totals into your QuickBooks budget. One of the things that they're testing is the ability to create a list of products and services with quantities and unit costs, and then group those both by phases and by cost groups. And one of the abilities is that it's going to have is to be able to look at the project estimate with collapsible groups so that you can [00:06:00] see the line items, but your customer just sees the phases or those cost groups. Now that's super cool. One of the tricks that I teach in my projects class is actually creating a bundle, and then dragging all your line items into the bundle so that you, your client, just sees the one grand total, but you can see all of the details. So that's kind of what we call a tip here at Royal Wise. Another thing that they are doing is a proposal builder, and it's graphically oriented with building [00:06:30] blocks for text and photos. And that will allow you to include like befores and afters or testimonials and create a really pretty proposal, not just send them an estimate. You'll be able to send that proposal to the customer and get a signature. And one thing that they have implemented is taking a deposit from the estimate. Now, I've tried taking a deposit from an estimate a couple times, and one time it worked and twice it hasn't worked. So like [00:07:00] even when I was teaching my projects class last week, I actually took a deposit on the estimate. But then when we turned it into an invoice, it didn't actually subtract the deposit like it was supposed to, so I'm not sure if it's still in development or not working, or if it's just my cookies on my computer preventing it from working, but hypothetically, it works like a charm.

Dan DeLong: Imagine, if you will, this estimate, this deposit.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah.

Dan DeLong: Applied to the invoice [00:07:30] and the accounting is done for you.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. The way that it's supposed to work is that when you send an estimate, it has a deposit field that actually properly allocates the deposit to a liability. And then when you turn the estimate into an invoice, It's supposed to subtract the initial payment and then just invoice for the remainder, and then at the same time move the money out of the liability, which is something that we've always had to do manually. And if all of this is Greek to you, [00:08:00] hey, that's what my projects class is all about. There's also the ability that when you mark a phase as complete, which apparently you can even do through a text message, you can generate an invoice. So it will do some of that automatically for you.

Dan DeLong: That's nifty. Do you want to do this in action? Yeah. So yeah, for sure. One of the big, uh, gripes I guess, of, of QuickBooks is the inability to [00:08:30] support some of the more specific ways of billing, uh, like, you know, uh, clients you have, like, government contracts and, um, you know, with in, in construction, the AIA progress invoicing. I don't really quite understand all of the nuances of why that is, but the EAA, I. Oh my goodness. Ai AI progress billing uh, is [00:09:00] is something dealing with uh, architects and um, and they have some specific things about how those things show up and, um, you know, other apps like, uh, notify or Job Trend or, you know, some of those other apps that feed into QuickBooks are necessary if they need those types of, you know, specific workflows. Uh, now in Intuit Enterprise Suite, they are going to support that. Uh, [00:09:30] the question is what it actually, you know, devil is always in the details as far as how it actually looks. And if it's, uh, if it's a provable, uh, by that. But they understand what those workflows are, and it's nice to actually have now a solution that would actually support that. Because what's the point if if you have to go into an into an enterprise suite for all these other things, but you can't bill your customers properly?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Sure. Okay, good. So I'm [00:10:00] glad that they're paying attention to the industry standards for sure. And then the next thing that I is also has is a new project dashboard with a balanced summary. And it will have cost breakdown graphs and a whole new layout and a whole new way of looking at your projects from the from the high level. And when you're done with the project, it will even generate a closing summary with lessons learned, profitability reports, and a list of any outstanding transactions. [00:10:30] So if any of these things sound good to you for your construction clients, definitely take a look at Intuit Enterprise Suite.

Dan DeLong: You know, the one thing that I've seen since, you know, Intuit connect and and to to today because I, I do work with, um, you know, some telesales agents from that pass things over to, to us when, when the customer needs a little bit more demos or, you know, visual representation as to what what [00:11:00] this is. And Intuit Enterprise Suite is still a sales process that Intuit themselves are still trying to figure out. Right? And it's kind of maddening. I don't know what the what other word is, but, uh, some of the telesales agents don't even realize that Intuit Enterprise, you know, the things that are that are in Intuit Enterprise Suite and then they'll send them over to us and we'll be like, uh, did you did you even go down this road of, you [00:11:30] know, if you're already in QuickBooks online and you need more of this sort of things, why not look at the Intuit Enterprise suite And then we end up having to send them back to Intuit so that they can go through the whole sales process that they are trying to figure out these things. Um, so that's one of the things about, you know, being in a silo, uh, which I am intimately familiar with by working at Intuit, where some departments don't really understand what the other departments are doing.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. [00:12:00] I mean, when I was getting ready for my projects class, I have a list of reports and features that are just in Intuit Enterprise Suite for the project center. But my list was 2024, and I wanted to get an update from them, and I sent it to a couple of my contacts and nobody really had a consolidated list answer where they can say, oh, here's five more reports and three more abilities that it didn't have back then.

Dan DeLong: Yeah, you'd really kind of have to go to the, you know, the In the Know webinars [00:12:30] where they're I think that's where they're probably giving the most um, external use of of that it would, it would be great if there was some kind of, you know, side by side comparison. And then as these features are implemented, they're no longer coming soon. Uh, they're just available. And then you can see, you know, something maybe that's dynamic. That would be that would be wonderful from, from the outside looking in.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. It would definitely be very helpful for us. I mean, that's a good idea for me [00:13:00] to go back over all of the recordings and go amend my notes. But that's a lot of work.

Dan DeLong: It's a time.

Alicia Katz Pollock: To just have one. Yeah. Really time consuming. Okay, let's keep going on the the next part that distinguishes Enterprise Suite is the Multi-company features. And one of the things that they're working on is a consolidated view on as an overlay for all of your multi-company entities with that includes not just a shared chart of accounts, which we've talked about, but also shared [00:13:30] vendors, shared dimensions, shared customers, and you can look at everything in one big dashboard and then filter it and group it in different ways. So if you, you know, you if you have a lot of entities, you can make groups of your entities and then just pull that group off of a toggle and just look at that one subgroup at a time. After my tour of Intuit Enterprise Suite, I went for lunch, and [00:14:00] then when I came back, I headed over to the Mailchimp's center and I talked to Steven Yu. And for those of you who aren't already using it, MailChimp is one of the most robust communication tools out there for generating emails and staying in communication with your customers. Because, as you know, you have to nurture a customer in order to onboard them. And then once you've got that customer, it's infinitely cheaper and easier to upsell them than it is to hire to acquire [00:14:30] new clients.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So I really love the fact that MailChimp is getting integrated into QBO. I've been using it for years, and I have been playing with the tools that allow me to. For example, when I when Intuit has a price increase, I have a lot of clients still on wholesale from back in the day, meaning that I'm paying for their subscriptions, but I'm passing that cost on to them. So when I need to send them an email saying, hey, in two months your prices [00:15:00] are going to go up. What I actually do is I go into MailChimp and I run a segment. I create a segment where the product or service equals wholesale QuickBooks, and then it finds everybody on my wholesale QuickBooks plan, and then I can make the email in MailChimp and send it out to everybody. And so that has actually already been in in place. And I really like it. What they are working on and what they are imagining is now [00:15:30] also being able to integrate with your Shopify, with stripe, PayPal, square, Wix, and your different e-commerce platforms so that you can actually see the success of your email campaigns all on one dashboard.

Dan DeLong: That's pretty cool.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, they are integrating it with Zapier. They are also adding the ability to monitor your marketing engagement through not just email, but also through SMS text messaging. And they kind of envision [00:16:00] being able to do that through WhatsApp as well.

Dan DeLong: Yeah. This was um, like one of the, one of the things like Intuit's um, habit or into its, uh, pattern, I guess I should say, of when they acquire something and then want to to, to put it in is typically take, you know, little features that the, the other application did well and put them inside of inside of QuickBooks. What I'm seeing here is and this was kind of like [00:16:30] resonant of, you know, their big slogan that they had when you walked into the exit, exit, exit exhibit hall. I can say it, the exhibit hall had this big thing about, you know, what you can't imagine is coming is becoming a reality. And a lot of times we look at these things like, okay, what is what are they going to take out of MailChimp and put inside of inside of QuickBooks? But this is this, and it's been a long time coming because they've, you know, they [00:17:00] purchased or acquired MailChimp years ago. So, you know, people that have been waiting for, you know, this this type of integration is, uh, you know, it it doesn't follow that normal pattern of, we're going to take this piece, you know, and turn it in, you know, add it to to QuickBooks, where you can see that with the AI, you know, some of the AI agents where you can, you know, change the tone of of some of the emails that are going out and those types of things. [00:17:30]

Dan DeLong: But in this case, uh, they're on the same level is what I'm is what I'm seeing with with regards to the integration. And they're not, you know, take taking MailChimp things and putting them in QuickBooks or taking QuickBooks things and putting them in MailChimp. They are truly, you know, putting them on the same level. And those those things are now just I hate to use the word seamless, but, uh, because that's a trigger word, because there is no such [00:18:00] thing to me. But these, these types of the way that they're going about it, it it's it's a lot more polished than what, what we've seen in the past where they have taken an acquisition and tried to shove it into QuickBooks. Uh, so I'm really excited to see how this this kind of plays out, um, as they continue to, you know, enhance that because this just makes total sense for how MailChimp and QuickBooks can can really work together. Because if [00:18:30] you're going to be doing your sales in inside QuickBooks, you need to have those insights. And, and externally, uh, that you, that you typically didn't have before with QuickBooks.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I'm glad that they've been taking this integration slowly and not doing the MVP style, because MailChimp was was already robust and working for millions of people. And I'm glad that they didn't break it along the way. I'm glad that this has been really responsible integration. All right. [00:19:00] So let's talk about some more things that MailChimp does. Because also, you know, if you're not already using MailChimp as a ProAdvisor, you get discounts depending on your ProAdvisor tier. The higher your tier, the bigger the discounts you actually get on it. So let's keep telling telling the audience some of the things that MailChimp can do for you, and maybe we'll get some new MailChimp users out of this. One of the things that they're working on is click maps, where you can open up your email campaign and see where people are clicking [00:19:30] and which call to actions have been most effective. There's an audience dashboard which will show your list growth over time, broken down by acquisition channel. And so you'll be able to see how many subscribers you got from Meta or Facebook, and how many came from Google, and how many you imported manually, and how many came in from your pop up forms on your website. And if you're doing e-commerce and you've got Shopify, it'll show those as well. Then it'll be able to [00:20:00] attribute your revenue back to those email campaigns, including your email journey from which, from the pages viewed on your website to searches that they did, to collections that they viewed to the products themselves, to seeing the product added to your cart, to completing the checkout.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So being able to actually watch your customers behavior path will help you design your website. It'll indicate holiday breakdowns and take a look at Thanksgiving and Black [00:20:30] Friday and Christmas and Mother's Day. Or even seasonally, like tax season versus summer. It'll help you with send time optimization. What days are best for you? What time zones are best for you? It'll help you analyze your subject line performance as well. And that's something that we do at Royal, as we send to half our list with an A, B test and then send to the rest of the list with whichever email performed better. And you know, of course, I asked, well, how are you going to leverage AI? And [00:21:00] they said that it will include a digest of weekly performance, recommended message actions, and kind of doing a marketing analysis and a marketing analysis, or doing an analytics report based on your campaigns to help you understand all these statistics that you have at your disposal. They are also making new email templates with drag and drop, where you can actually specify a website and it will generate a newsletter for you. For example, [00:21:30] you can point it at a blog page and it will create an email for you that's coming, quote unquote, sometime in 2026.

Dan DeLong: Nice.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So definitely check out MailChimp for yourself if you're not already using it. And this could also be a really big value add for your clients as well.

Dan DeLong: Yeah, I just don't know. Like one thing is the discounts are are they expire. So I would love for them to have, you know, an ongoing discount for uh, for, for ProAdvisor [00:22:00] to use them. The other things that we don't know is what version. Right. Like if you have a free version of MailChimp, are you going to have all these features? What version of, you know, what flavor of MailChimp you need to have in order for all this to to work, right. Um, accountants, of course, will have the advanced in their in their books. But what, uh, for their clients, you know, if they have a simple start client with a high level MailChimp. Uh, will they have all these [00:22:30] features and functions as well? Probably not quite.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I'm sure it's going to be it's going to be tiered. But you know, I if you're looking for growth, doing it through your marketing is one of the best things that you can do, and especially if it's built right into your analytics where you can see which clients bought which products and services from you and then retarget them through your email campaigns. To me, that's magic.

Dan DeLong: Yeah. Like if you're going to find some trends [00:23:00] out of your repeat business or your repeat customers, and then and then you can start to integrate these, uh, these practices so that, okay, typically, you know, we have a 50% of our clients come back in 30, you know, in three months. Right. So then you can set up that journey or that, that thing ahead of time so that that repeat business is more automated for you. And then you can get some analytics from that. It was like, well, what what performs well when [00:23:30] that actually happens so that you're actually putting your best foot forward to get those repeat customers.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right.

Alicia Katz Pollock: As I continued my tour of the Innovation Circle, I then went to the folks talking about the customer hub, and I talked to Christina Stansbury. Now, I already did a whole episode on specifically the customer hub. And you can look back. It's called customer hubba hubba, and a link to it in the show notes [00:24:00] so you can get back to it easily. And one of the things that they are working on releasing in the next few months is having contact forms embedded on your website. And that way you can you can train the customer agent, the customer agents, the AI tool inside QBO that there's already a lead section where you can connect it to your Gmail, and it will look at your emails and surface people who are asking for your services [00:24:30] so that you can manage them as a customer, relationship manager or CRM inside your QBO all that is one of the reasons why they moved customers out of sales and down to its own customer hub, so that you can actually start treating your QuickBooks as a customer Manager. In the Customer hub, you can see your opportunities in both list view and in Kanban view, so that you can see who's in inquiry, who's in discovery, who's in [00:25:00] negotiation, and which ones are closed.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And it will even offer suggestions for how to proceed to how to land that client. Do you want to draft an email? Do you want to create an estimate? Do you want to book a visit? And when you do communicate with your customers, the emails will be sent through your Gmail so it looks completely natural. They can't tell that it's being sent from inside QuickBooks. If you want, you can also book site visits. You can use your Gmail calendar or your outlook calendar. You can book the appointment. You can [00:25:30] you can pick the time, or you can send them a link to schedule themselves. And there is the ability to do video calls right inside QBO. You can't record them, but it does provide a transcript. If you're doing a site visit, you can open up the mobile app, your QuickBooks mobile, and then open up the leads profile and take notes right in there. You can add voice recordings, you can add images, and then they'll sync back to your QuickBooks.

Dan DeLong: Yeah. That was one of the things that I've been noticing lately is [00:26:00] that the mobile app, uh, has been has gotten some over, uh, overhauling of the user interface. So that mirrors what you can see and do inside of inside of QuickBooks. Uh, and I appreciated that because now the terminology that they've changed between the mobile app and um, and, well, the terminology changes that have with the new user interface, uh, have have found their way pretty quickly to, to the mobile app, [00:26:30] which I appreciate, you know, because I like where is the QuickBooks checking. Uh oh. It's under lending where it is on the, on the website. So, um, being able to do the things that you need to do, you don't have to relearn or like, oh, why is this different? Uh, so I do, you know, kudos to Intuit for, for making that pretty quickly, that consistency.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Although that did completely throw me for a loop because I deposit my checks into QuickBooks, checking [00:27:00] through my phone. And I used to just be right on the surface and I could not find it. I swore they took it out and I had to get. I got on a help call to help me find it down, buried underneath the menus where it now was. So on the one hand, making that consistent is really nice. On the other hand, I hope they keep the shortcuts to my my most frequent features right up front.

Dan DeLong: Exactly.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. All right. Um, and one of the other features that they're working on into the future, not ready yet is [00:27:30] proposals where you can pull in your information about your client coming from your email or from all of this note taking that you've been doing, and create a graphically designed, polished document that's connected directly to your lead info, kind of like we just talked about with enterprise suites projects where you can create a proposal and put in notes and images and anything that you want inside the proposal, and then send it for a signature and a deposit. [00:28:00] As I wandered over to the next section, I wanted to see what was new in online bill pay. And you know, online bill pay is not quite new anymore. It's over a year old, but they are always improving it, and we now have the ability to email in your bills. That's not necessarily new. They did change the URL, so it's now your company name plus expenses at assist Intuit. Com and if you go to the business [00:28:30] feed itself, that's kind of the little sparkle in your left rail that you probably don't click on very often. But you do have the ability to drag and drop multiple documents into there. So if you have PDFs or JPEGs, you can drop them all in and it will build a bill for you. One of the reasons, one of the barriers to using it has been that it's getting the vendor name and it's getting the date right, but it hasn't been good at line items yet. It's just been either making things up or consolidating the whole [00:29:00] total into one line, but they are working on line item details and there will be some AI or machine learning behind it. It will start asking if you want to make a rule so they you will be able to say, you know, if the invoice, if the bill says this, then use this product.

Dan DeLong: Yeah, that's that's always been kind of one of the thorn in the side for, you know, the all this OCR optical character recognition, you know, sending [00:29:30] something and then turning, you know, extracting the data from it with within QuickBooks where things have been just been kind of the shallow end of the pool. And, uh, that's been the barrier for people to use some of these tools, is that if I'm just going to get a summary and it's going to take, you know, it's only going to take six pieces of data and I'm going to have to, you know, do things anyway. What am I, you know, what am I saving other than it's now an attachment, uh, to the to the transaction. [00:30:00] Uh, so I'm pretty excited that, um, and we've seen this with, like, the, uh, the bank statement reconciliation process where it's, it's actually been learning and been putting, you know, doing things, um, giving us good, pretty good results as, as a part of that. So, uh, somewhat confident that that this will actually, um, you know, mirror that because they as bills, especially if they're coming from QuickBooks, [00:30:30] they're going to be a lot of invoices coming in as bills will have that, you know, to and from where they can see the, the actual line items, uh, that, that are, that are necessary. So it's uh, I'm interested to see definitely interested to see how this plays out with the line item detail because that's that's a lot of. Well, yeah. But uh, when people start to. Yeah. Start to talk about it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, this particular topic [00:31:00] is going to be a little bit of a struggle because if it doesn't work, people can't use it. But if we don't use it, then they can't build the AI generator to make it work. So this one is this one's kind of going to be challenging for them. They are starting the development kind of vendor by vendor that you that mapping that I was just talking about is going to be just for that one vendor. Because maybe the the line item is different from one vendor to another vendor. So my suggestion was that either you can have a toggle [00:31:30] to is it for all vendors or just this one vendor, and give us a choice. So we'll we'll see. This is all again imagination at this point. And you know, props to Makers Hub because they've already got this dialed in. So way to go. All right. Um, so let's see if you email in a bill that has a new vendor in it. It will ask to add the vendor. And you can also ask for payment information and send them an invitation to the business network. [00:32:00] And if you do that, then you get the payment information but you don't see it. You don't have to process it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: The only thing that you can actually see is the last four digits, just to confirm that you've got the right payment on file for them. And in the future, if the vendor changes their payment information in the business network, it will ask you also as a security measure. So that's really nice that they're paying attention to that kind of security detail. As a reminder, [00:32:30] Bill pay has three different payment speeds. The standard is now three days to send a payment. You do have the option of sending it in one day. And that one's called faster and that costs $10. And then there is also instant. And then they get the payment within minutes. There is a 1% fee, but it does have a $100 max on it. So if you have a big bill that you need to pay right now for 100 bucks, you can get it paid within minutes. They are also working on an automatic [00:33:00] bill payments. Kind of the way that we have automatic invoices, invoice payments right now. You will have the ability to make scheduled bill payments. So you can just set it and forget it. And of course that will automatically reconcile. So that's a cool coming soon that I am looking forward to for that.

Dan DeLong: When you saw that, did it, uh, was it based off of the terms or was it based off of like the recurring amount? Like if they send you a bill and there's and it varies. Right. [00:33:30] Um, will it automatically pay it based off of the terms as far as that is concerned? Or will it just kind of set up a frequent bill payment like a schedule? I'm curious.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I imagine it's going to have the same type of mechanism that the invoices have, where you are creating one invoice and telling what that schedule is, and then the customers approving the payment. I would assume that the same thing is happening. You're setting up a recurring bill and [00:34:00] saying, yes, I want to just automatically pay this without having to do anything. So it's probably one amount on a set schedule.

Dan DeLong: Got it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. At the next station, I talked to Abby Chu about the bills funnel, and one of the other things they're adding into the bill pay is approval workflows so that you can do segregation of duties and bill pay. Elite is already fully customizable, where you can have a bill clerk and you can have a bill approver [00:34:30] and you can have a bill payer. What's actually been fascinating to me is that you can you they have to be all different people. So what happens if you don't have three people that somebody who is the bill approver can't actually make a bill and somebody who is paying the bill can't make the bill. So I was kind of wondering how this actually plays out in real life. When you are setting up bill approvals, your conditions can actually go seven deep, which gives you a really good if then and or where you can say [00:35:00] if the bill is to this vendor, then send it to this person for approval. And if it's to this vendor but it's under $1,000, send it to this approver. And if it's more than $1,000, send it to this approver. But if it has this product on it then it needs to go to this other person over here. So you can make really complicated bill approval workflows. You also have the ability to do sequential approvals. If you need it approved by more than one person, you can send it along the chain. And they are working on the [00:35:30] ability to do group approvals, where you can have a group of people who can approve, and any one person from that group can do the approval.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Or if somebody is out of office, it can get delegated to somebody else. So they are working on that bottleneck that if somebody is out sick, you can still get your bills approved. They're also introducing an audit history to the workflow itself. So if somebody goes in and changes the approval workflows, you can see who changed it and what they changed. That's [00:36:00] pretty cool. There's also new abilities for bill pay service delivery inside Intuit Accountant Suite. So now what we're talking about is if you are an accountant user, a bookkeeper, and you are responsible for the AP for the company, you have your own new set of tools as well. And so it could be your book. You as a bookkeeper, it could be at the firm level, but you now have more of an eagle eye of what's happening across [00:36:30] your clients. You can see upcoming bills due by period. You can customize the view by user. You can see how many bills for your clients are coming up and what the dollar amounts are. And they're working on an available cash balance so that you can make sure the bills don't go out unless there's money in the bank. After all, the other liabilities are accounted for because the last thing you want to do as the bookkeeper is bounce the company's check checking account.

Dan DeLong: Yeah. And one of these, um, [00:37:00] and like the, I think the driving force behind, you know, all of these changes that they're making to Intuit accounting suite, uh, is not having to go into each particular client to get the information that you're looking for to have a one, not a one stop shop, but at least, uh, a tip of the iceberg before you need to evaluate going into your clients, you know, saving you that [00:37:30] time of switching into your from from your firm or from your practice into your clients. And as and that's what's really driving all of these all of these changes is that how much of this stuff can I do Inside of Intuit accountant suite. And how much do I have to actually need to go to run a report or, you know, get get the more detail into my client because that's now potentially you're going down this rabbit hole and if you can, you know, cover [00:38:00] the the core processes that you do for your clients or at least get some of those insights before making, you know, knowing what you're doing or knowing what you're in for by going into your client rather than needing to find that information, um, manually each time. And it should be a time savings for, for accountants that are using it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I mean, the fact that Intuit even wants you to be able to pay the bills directly from [00:38:30] Intuit Accountant Suite instead of going into each client's file is really, really novel. Yeah. You know, on the on the flip side, though, just to be a devil's advocate for a minute that I've been using double for my this past year, and I'm coming down to the end of my year end cycle, and I did take some time to go into my clients file after. I've been doing most things at the high level in double and then going through the reclassify, and I still found a lot of value [00:39:00] for going in and looking at it from inside the client view that the with reclassify, for example, I discovered that one of my clients was paying his personal PGE electricity bill and his company, both on the same credit card, and all we saw were PGE payments, so we didn't think twice about it. But when I went in to reclassify and was scanning and doing my scan, I realized that there were two payments every single month, a big one and a little one. And I had to call out my client to say, hey, by [00:39:30] the way, these are owner draws.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You need to change your billing or please go change your billing on your personal card. So I think there are some times when the eagle eyes still doesn't give us the details on the ground view. Now, while we've been talking about Bill pay, let's flip the script and talk about recurring invoices. One of the things that they are going to introduce is the option to require auto pay, that you can tell your client, no, I'm not [00:40:00] going to take your payments manually anymore. You have to sign up for this as an option, not a requirement, but an option. And they are working on. Check this out. I think this is really cool where the customer can have their own dashboard, where they can go in and control their own payments and see their payment schedules, not just for one customer, but across maybe all of the vendors that they do business with. They were all using QuickBooks, and so they will have an account where they can go into their own payments dashboard and [00:40:30] manage their own auto pay payments. Maybe they have to change their payment method, for example, and then they'll be able to do that across all of their vendors, all at one time.

Dan DeLong: Yeah. And I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunities to buy something Intuit related in this dashboard. Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I'm sure you are right. Okay, if you're not already subscribed to QuickBooks, you will be by the end of this. Great. Okay. And last but [00:41:00] not least. Hey, Dan, we've made it through 27 pages of field notes. Are you ready for the last page? Here we go. So the last one is about the lending. And I talked to Richard, married, um, about their get paid section. And you've probably noticed by now that there is a lending center inside there, because Intuit bought Credit Karma several years ago. And Credit Karma is a website where you can either boost your [00:41:30] credit score or find best fit financial products. So a credit card that has an interest rate that you can afford, for example, kind of like a they've been really. Exactly, exactly. And so think of it. That's perfect. It's like Lending Tree. So now you have Lending Tree buy into it by which is actually Credit Karma inside your QuickBooks. And what this is actually doing is financial underwriting. Underwriting based on your file [00:42:00] history and whether this is for you or for your clients. Uh, if you haven't already looked inside your settings, do look that there is a lending option that you can toggle on and off, that if you send an estimate that to a client that's of a certain size, if you have it turned on, it will actually ask the client if they want to take out a loan through Intuit to pay for your job. And so you can turn that right now it's on.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You can turn it off if you want [00:42:30] to, but their whole idea is that if a if one of your potential customers is turning down your bid because they have cash flow issues. Then you are more likely to win the engagement because you're also offering them financing. So that's part of the customer experience. What we're talking about now is you taken out a loan. Okay. So because QBO can obviously see your financial situation, they will offer [00:43:00] you loans if needed. And so if you go to the lending center, you can put in the amount of the loan that you want to take out. And it will take a look at your credit score and the length of time that you've been in business. If it's under $250,000, they'll offer you an Intuit loan, and if it's more than $250,000, they'll point you to third party lenders instead. But it will give you a list of a bunch of different lenders [00:43:30] and all of their different terms. There will be an option for actual term loans or lines of credit, and then they'll even give you a choice of different repayment plans. Intuit's loans will have no origination fees and have no other fees. The interest rate, however, will vary according to your credit score and your eligibility. So if you have an excellent credit score, your interest rate is going to be low. And if you don't have [00:44:00] a strong credit score, then your interest rate is probably going to be pretty darn high.

Alicia Katz Pollock: At least there's no penalties if you for prepayments. So if you want to pay it off early, you can. Once you have applied for the loan, you have 14 days to accept your accept your terms, and then it'll take 1 to 2 business days to get the funding. And then the page itself will turn into a servicing dashboard right inside your QuickBooks. So you apply there and then you manage the [00:44:30] loan there as well. So that wraps up my tour of the Innovation Circle. As you can see, it took us three episodes to get through my list, and it took me three days to get through the exhibit hall. And it really is one of my favorite things to do at the at Intuit Connect is see all the things that are coming. Of course, at this point, the timelines in this episode are completely nebulous. We're probably introducing things that are [00:45:00] and told you they're coming in the future, but they've already been released. It's also possible that we listed some features which they have decided not to develop. So either way, this is really useful because we can really see that Intuit is really true to their mantra of powering prosperity around the world. They're really trying to help us make more money and have better cash flow, and having the data and the insights to see what's [00:45:30] happening beyond just running a PNL and balance sheet are really, really super helpful. So thank you into it for continuing to envision new possibilities.

Dan DeLong: Yeah, we're almost ready for the next Intuit connect uh, to to to do this all again.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, it's almost time already, isn't it? Okay, I got six months. All right. Uh, so, Dan, what is happening in your world?

Dan DeLong: Well, um, coming up on the end of the year, I did a series on [00:46:00] job costing, uh, with, uh, with a fellow accounting professional, uh, on our workshops, uh, at School of Bookkeeping. And I'm going to be turning that into a course on, uh, School of Bookkeeping, where it's the job costing fundamentals, which will pair nicely with your projects course. So, um, so I'm looking forward to, uh, turning that into a reality in the, in the coming months and, um. Yeah, always. Uh, well, now, um, [00:46:30] Chairman Fuller has, uh, accepted the permanent co-hosting of the QB Power hour, so, uh, we'll be, um, working together a little bit more, uh, closely on the on the power hour. Looking forward to seeing how that plays out this year. How about you? Oh, excellent. What's going on in your world?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, I've kind of made it to the intermediate level of all of my courses as I'm re reworking all of my content for what I'm calling the the great QBO [00:47:00] refresh when I'm in a good mood, or W-2 QBO when I'm not in a good mood. And, uh, so we just did our 1099 course, I did my year end cleanup for tax time, where I teach you how to go through your QuickBooks and find all the mistakes and bad data so that you can clean it up for your clients when you're getting ready for taxes, even if you're an excellent bookkeeper, that extra review goes a long way, and I just recorded my sales tax [00:47:30] class and I'm moving into payroll. So there's a class on Qbo payroll. I have a guest class with Shannon Bauman about payroll compliance. So all of the things that you need to know as somebody who runs payroll about payroll in general and Qbi time as well. And of course, that projects and job costing class. So, Dan, I definitely want to compare notes with you to see where we align and where we enhance each other.

Dan DeLong: Yeah, absolutely.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All [00:48:00] right.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So we'll have links to all of those resources for you in the show notes. And this is Alicia Katz Pollak and along. And we will see.

Dan DeLong: You on.

Alicia Katz Pollock: The next one.