Now You Know: March 2026 Recap of In the Know

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Alicia Katz Pollock: In this episode of the unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, Dan DeLong and I are going to do a recap of Intuit's In the Know webinar, their monthly webinar where they talk about all the new releases and all the new features that we can expect to see in QuickBooks. I'm Alicia Pollock from Royal Wise, and I've got with me.

Dan DeLong: Dan DeLong from [00:00:30] School of Bookkeeping.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And thank you for being here, Dan, to keep me company as we go down this long list of innovations.

Dan DeLong: Glad to be here.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And always glad to have you. All right. Well, let's go ahead and dive in. So we are recapping the March 19th episode of In the Know. It's worth noting they are not going to have one in April because it's still high tax season. So they're going to be skipping to May. But it's always the third Thursday of the month at 11 [00:01:00] a.m. and, you know, I think there were something like 1500 people in there. This is one of my go to, don't miss events that I do every single month. And you can find out about in the note from our show notes. You can also go to the firm of the future.com and look at the articles there so that you can sign up for it too. The link to the slide deck is in our show notes, so you can open up the slide deck as well. This month's episode was hosted by Aarti Patel Martinez, who's the principal program manager in charge [00:01:30] of ProAdvisor training, and the sections of the event were first, some ProAdvisor community news, then that went into product innovations. And just the too long don't read is that there's a new buy now pay later feature. Another some more information about books, clothes, some new payroll modernizations, and some updates to QuickBooks bill pay now because when they present it live, it is CPE. I actually [00:02:00] decided to start recording the poll questions so that I could tell you kind of like take the temperature in the room and tell you how people actually feel about these things. So I even have the poll results in our, in our session.

Dan DeLong: That's really going above and beyond, uh, for your, for your listeners. Alicia. Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. A little bit of value added there. All right. Uh, so the first announcement was that insightful accountants, uh, top ProAdvisor [00:02:30] awards. Uh, the deadline just passed a couple days ago to apply for it from March 20th 4th to April 26th. You can go in and cast your vote for your favorite ProAdvisor of your choice.

Dan DeLong: Hopefully make sure you do. Make sure you do, Alicia.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Make sure you do. Dan. I'll vote for Dan. Dan will vote for me. Our votes will cancel each other out. And so we need you. Um, but but Murph reassures me that it's not a popularity contest. That's [00:03:00] just one element of of what they look at. It's what's in your application that matters. So if you're like, oh, I'm never going to become a top ProAdvisor because nobody would ever vote for me. It's absolutely 100% not a popularity contest because otherwise, well, Hector would win every year. If Hector was actually in it. But Hector doesn't actually apply for this anyway. But, you know, if it's a popularity contest, the same people would win year over year over year. And I was a top ten back in 2021 as an [00:03:30] apologist. And Dan, you've won a top.

Dan DeLong: Ten in the same year with social media. Um.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. Well, on my bucket list is trainer. You know, that's, that is my, my category.

Dan DeLong: As it should be.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. You'd think. Right. Um, and so please do vote for me. Um, one of the things that Intuit is doing in this slide deck, which is super cool, is they're putting in QR code links to like the place to go vote, for example. And so all [00:04:00] of the things that we're actually going to mention throughout the whole episode today all have their own QR codes. So definitely, definitely head over to the show notes. Open up the PDF because then you can just QR code straight to all of these links. So yeah, please do vote for me, Dan and your third ProAdvisor of choice. Okay. You want to do this next one? Dan.

Dan DeLong: Yeah. So it looks like, um, there is a, a suggestion with a promotion, [00:04:30] uh, to update your clients to QuickBooks advanced. So they're doing, uh, promotion, uh, which looks like, uh, 50% for the first three months. Uh, so this is dealing specifically when it's firm build. So when you in your Intuit accountant suite, uh, because it's no longer QBO A Intuitive accounting suite, core or accelerate, whichever you know. Platform you're on. If you have firm build clients where you're managing the subscription, [00:05:00] you can upgrade your client to from, you know, simple start or essentials or plus to advanced. And they're offering an additional 50% off for the first three months. So it's a good way for, um, for your clients to try it out, depending on your arrangement with your firm billing with your clients, or it's an extra markup for you, uh, to, to bring them up to up to advance. [00:05:30] So you get the 50% for the first three months. Uh, you can do that right? From the subscription and billing page. Uh, it looks like they're also offering a 75% off for one year. So if you add two more, two or more firm billed clients to QuickBooks online Advanced, you will get The subscription cost will be 75% off for that first year.

Dan DeLong: After that, it will typically, the way they do this in in the past is it'll revert back [00:06:00] to whatever the normal firm billed discount is after that. So it's not like it goes to regular price, but, um, but the, the caveat here is you have to call for that one. Uh, so if anyone has done the five for 25 or the, you know, multi company promotions that they had for firm build subscriptions, you have to call and the sales team will will enable that for you after [00:06:30] you've, you know, created those companies, they can fix it on the, uh, fix the, the pricing on the, on the back end. So there's a phone number in the slides to, to call and get those, uh, get that, that's for the 75% off the one year. The 50% Promotion is right away, so you shouldn't have to call for that one. It's the extra 75% off for that one one year. If you do multiple ones at the same at the same time.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And if the 75% [00:07:00] off deal is like the, the old five for five was basically what you are doing is you're creating two shells to get them ready for adding a customer into them and getting started with the customer. So you don't even have to have a customer in mind. You can go ahead and create them. Now you're going to pay that, that 25% start. Yeah. Um, but 75% off since right now it's what, 225 a month? 275 it's 275 a month.

Dan DeLong: So with [00:07:30] your discount, it's 192 or something like that, uh, with 30% discount.

Alicia Katz Pollock: But then if it's 225 for point 75 off, you're paying. Oops, let's times.

Dan DeLong: Do the math right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. 5625. So you can you can get two advanced companies ready to go for 56, 25 a month for the first year.

Dan DeLong: So the, the thing that I ran into when, when they had those [00:08:00] kinds of promotions is that people would create these shells. And then maybe months later, they had a, they had a company that they wanted to bring in from desktop or migrate. And there's typically a 60 day import window. And so just if you are wanting to use these for a client that might be on desktop, just keep in mind that you don't want to cause another call to intuit if though, if that's what's going to happen, if it's going to bring, if you're going to bring it in from desktop [00:08:30] and it's past 60 days, you are going to run into a, an obstacle doing that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay, that makes perfect sense now. Interestingly, I have noticed that they are doing a really, really heavy push on QBO advanced. I have been seeing ads popping up in QuickBooks. I was working on a client yesterday and there were four different places. There was a green banner across the top, and there was an interstitial in the middle, and there was a pop up down at the bottom all saying, hey, you should upgrade to advanced, you should upgrade to advanced. [00:09:00] And, you know, we just did the episode about the earnings call last week. And advanced was one of the big drivers of Intuit's increased revenue over the last three months. So, you know, I can I can see that they're really pushing it. Now I've got two things to say about that. We're not even into the in the know yet. And we're just commenting like crazy. Um, but the, the two things about that is first of all, I really like QBO advanced. There's a lot of value in there for accrual [00:09:30] based clients with revenue share and the enhanced reporting. And so I'm, and the, I love the, the ability to create custom reports. Pulling data from lots of tables and make pivot tables. So there's a lot of value. The other thing is a comment about all of the pop ups for all of these ads that we're now seeing. Intuit is taking a page from Credit Karma, which they bought a couple years ago. In Credit karma is doing really, really well, but Credit Karma is a free site to [00:10:00] the client, but they get it funded by popping up like, hey, you can qualify for this credit card and this loan and all of this financing, but the pop ups work for them. The whole Credit karma experience is all pop up ads everywhere that make it look like a natural part of the software. And I can see that they are adopting that model inside QBO.

Dan DeLong: Yeah, it just would be nice to be able to dismiss them [00:10:30] forever. Yeah. You know, once, once you, once you once you've acknowledged them or, you know, if there is a setting or something like that or a preference. That would be good. Good feedback.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Like, like once you've closed the box three times, you shouldn't see it again. Or maybe accountant users can turn it off. Yeah. And the client still see it. I don't know something, but I spend a lot of time.

Dan DeLong: There's a solution in there somewhere, and.

Alicia Katz Pollock: There's got to be a happy medium. There's got to be a happy medium. Okay. [00:11:00] Um, on slide three. Okay. Um, is, um, there's an on demand webinar about Intuit enterprise suite with all of its capabilities. So in the slide deck, there's a link. So you can just go straight to the, the watch now on that webinar. And it's got a lot of information because it's again, is, is where they're doing all of their big development.

Dan DeLong: Mhm.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. Uh, then they have a slide highlighting the accounting, AI and accounting [00:11:30] AI is basically code name for bank feed AI. And so there is also a demo link in the slide deck so that you can see all the things that are new. I talked about them in one of the previous episodes. I'm going to talk about some more of them in this episode, and I kind of want to talk about them again in just a whole bank feeds episode because I really, really like the things that I'm seeing. For the people complaining that the AI is not accurate, well, when was the suggestions ever [00:12:00] accurate.

Dan DeLong: Right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Your standard for what AI should know how to do. But the truth is, is that you just have to train it for each client that as you use it for each client, it's client specific and it will get better and better and better. So just be a little patient with the technology. It's not Intuit's problem, it's AI's problem. So it'll get better.

Dan DeLong: Yep.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yep. Okay. You want to do the next one?

Dan DeLong: That was my color commentary on that. Yep.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yep.

Dan DeLong: If [00:12:30] you don't like it, you're not using it enough as typically that's the MM. That's the, that's the, that's the takeaway there.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. That's a that's it.

Dan DeLong: Uh, so not only do they have the on demand webinar, but they have two upcoming webinars to schedule for the Intuit Enterprise suite, uh, on March 24th. Uh, they're going to be talking about strategy with three migration stories from, uh, four lane who is, um, a company [00:13:00] that is working pretty heavily with Intuit. Uh, they are an outside company that does a lot of data migrations. Uh, so they are going to be talking about that kind of strategy, moving to Intuit enterprise suite. Uh, and then on the 26th will be built for what's next. Uh, so out of the box, we'll be joining them, uh, to talk about the future roadmap of, uh, what's, what's going to be on the, on the future future roadmap for, [00:13:30] um, Intuit enterprise suite.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. And I want to just throw in here. I'm happy to see that four Lane is doing this with Intuit. Royal wise is having its Intuit Enterprise Suite webinar on June 2nd, and it's probably too early to say this out loud, but I'm going to tell you anyway that I think it's going to be falling. Who's going to be helping me do the session since I can talk about Enterprise Suite, but I don't have any clients on Enterprise Suite. I wanted [00:14:00] to have the class be, you know, somebody with experience. So on June 2nd, Royal Y's is going to have its eyes training, most likely with falling.

Dan DeLong: Yeah, that's a that's a big challenge. I think for Intuit Enterprise Suite for accountants is just what you had just said, is that you don't have a sandbox to play in unless you have a client. And how are you going to get a client unless you have a sandbox to play in to tell your client to do this. So right [00:14:30] now, Intuit is owning the whole sales process of everything from, uh, you know, introduction, demo, negotiation, contract, all those things with Intuit Enterprise suite, I imagine. And I'm just speculating that eventually it'll get to that. And I think Marjorie and four Lane is the tip of the spear of allowing that to, to come externally to, to accountants and ProAdvisor. All [00:15:00] right. So what we have coming up here, um, is upgrading QuickBooks reporting with the AI powered intelligence webinar. Uh, so they're going to be talking about client ready report packs and AI powered financial intelligence with the single entities. That's going to be on Thursday, May 14th at 11 a.m. Pacific time.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And I haven't heard of join. So I'm going to definitely check that one out. Next [00:15:30] up, they talked about some new enhancements to QuickBooks payments with some new features that are coming in May of this year. There's going to be a new payments AI agent that is going to predict late payments for you based on your customer behavior, and give you the opportunity to send some personalized, quote unquote, non-intrusive nudges. And so it's now going to start looking at how fast your clients are paying you and tell you ahead of time, hey, expect this person [00:16:00] to be late and do what it can to get the, um, you know, to, to get them to, to pay more, pay more quickly. Okay. Um, then there's a new card on file opportunity coming up. One of my big feedback that I've had for them as they moved to recurring payments on invoices where the clients are putting in their payment information, was that I could not then use that payment information. If I was running the charge, I [00:16:30] had to continually run all payments, all invoices to the client. So they are working on releasing in May the ability that the client can put in their payment method, and then you are able to run their card on file. So I'm very, very stoked for that one.

Dan DeLong: That's nice.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. All right. You want to do this one.

Dan DeLong: Yeah. So, um, iPhone users knew this or at least they should have known this that you can enable the tap to pay on your [00:17:00] iPhone. But the Android users were sitting out in their green bubble of, hey, why can't we have an option as well? And uh, so now, uh, when is this coming? Uh, by the end of April, uh, you will be able to enable the tap to pay within QuickBooks payments on your Android devices. Uh, this is, um, I mean, if you've used, if you've seen people with square or, you know, other app applications that for payment processing [00:17:30] on a mobile device, they've enabled this as a, as a feature. So you don't have to carry around a bulky, you know, card reader, right? In order to get the card swiped rates, you have to have a card present. So the tap to pay enables that, uh, so that you don't and the convenience is you just use the mobile device. You don't use the, you don't need a card reader that has to connect through Bluetooth. And that then drops [00:18:00] the, the Bluetooth. It's already there, right? You just have to find that sweet spot on your phone to, to tap.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And the other benefit is that those card readers were 50 bucks a pop, and you had to figure out where to go to order them. So people did not even know they existed because they were kind of buried in the settings to go get your own reader. So the tap to pay was a great invention. You can tap the card to your phone. You can tap their phone to your phone as well. I actually [00:18:30] do demos of this in my QuickBooks payments class@royal.com. I actually run a payment right in the in the course in the video. So I show you how it works. And what's also nice is that the the merchant service fees are less when you do tap to pay. It's only 2.5% instead of 2.99% when you send an invoice. And that's actually cheaper than square and stripe. So if you are using square with a swiper out in the field, you do not need to do [00:19:00] it anymore.

Dan DeLong: Yeah. So perfect for, you know, those field service types of businesses where you're in front of your customer at the time that you need to collect a payment.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. And then the last of the preannouncements and this is still just the preannouncements is that they are enhancing payroll and HR for premium and elite, and all I can do is just read off the slides for this one is that new tools in Premium and Elite will be available [00:19:30] to manage the entire employee lifecycle, covering talent pipelines, onboarding, time off, performance documents and benefits. Now half that's already in there. So I think it's still more marketing speak, but they really are, um, adding in a bunch of new features. Like for example, I just this, I'm hiring five new bookkeeping interns for a new internship that I've started at Royal Wives this month, last month. And the, I put up the employee [00:20:00] handbook in their payroll section, in their employee under documents, and then I was able to turn it into a signed document. I could add fields for their their text name, their signature and the date and then send it out to them. And then they would read, they read the handbook, and then they actually signed it right inside QuickBooks, which was honestly spectacular. And then also the i9 tools they. They filled in the beginning of it through workforce. And then they uploaded their. Their [00:20:30] driver's licenses and birth certificates and it was all right in QBO. So. I really like what they're doing with the new AR, with the new HR and payroll ads. Um, there is a webinar about it on March 26th at 10 a.m. Pacific time so that you can see what's new in QBO payroll. And there is a QR code in the slide deck to register for it. All right, Dan, you ready? Are we going to just announce.

Dan DeLong: That [00:21:00] was the pre-show?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right now we're getting into the actual presentations with the product innovations. So the first one is buy now, pay later. And the presenter was Kristin Griffith, who's the in product marketing at QuickBooks payments and the first poll that they ran, um, to take the temperature in the room was two. Any of your clients offer payment plans for their customers? Basically pay over time options. Choice one was yes. By breaking [00:21:30] down invoices into multiple smaller payments, two was yes through outside pay over time platforms e.g. Klarna, Afterpay, PayPal and I personally have been using Anker Choice three. No. Their invoices are small and they don't see a need or four no, but they would like to offer pay over time options. The most important, the most popular one was actually know their invoices are small and they don't see a need was 62%. So 62% of the people are like, [00:22:00] yeah, we don't need this, but the percent, right? Um, the, the remaining definitely would, um, were in either the camp of breaking down an invoice into smaller payments or using using another service.

Dan DeLong: And I think that's probably, you know, the I think that would be standard. I would have expected it to be much smaller. Right. Like this. This particular thing is [00:22:30] it's a, it's a it's a small need, right? It's, it's not like global, like everyone. Oh, I want to be able to offer this for, for all of my clients. Uh, but you see it as an option, you know, now almost everywhere that you pay for something online.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And that's actually the really key is that buy now, pay later or Bnpl as they're, as they're abbreviating, it has actually become a new trend in e-commerce that, you know, most of the people listening [00:23:00] to this are like, yeah, why would I ever need that? But young consumers now are actually using buy now, pay later almost as frequently as credit cards. So it has become an established expected payment method. Acid and we old school dinosaurs are not offering it. And so if you are skewing younger, either with your services or your clientele or keeping your firm modern into the future, buy now, pay later is actually something that you really should be implementing. [00:23:30]

Dan DeLong: Yeah, because I mean, especially if you're, if you charge annually, right? And maybe that's your, your only option is, is charging something for an annual subscription or a large thing. Offering this as a, as an option is a way to do monthly payments over time for them. And it's just offering them the convenience factor of being able to do that. And typically it came with a convenience price tag. Um, when you do, when you offer this outside [00:24:00] of, uh, outside of, outside of what, what was already available.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Now. Yeah. My own personal example with this is every July, from July to October, I offer a 12 week hands on QuickBooks training using my textbook where we actually build company files from scratch. And that course is because it's three hours, twice a week over 12 weeks. It's a $2,500 course, but I get a lot of people who are like, well, I can't just give [00:24:30] you $2,500. Can you break it up? And so we have had to manually go into anchor and create a payment schedule and go ahead and set it up and run it. This is going to absolutely allow me just to go ahead and charge them. And it's pretty exciting. So I haven't even said how it works yet. So, uh, so this is going to be pretty cool. So everybody sit down and put on your seatbelt because it's actually pretty awesome. So what they did is they partnered with a payment rail company called affirm. And affirm [00:25:00] basically is the buy now, pay later of this. This is already rolling out. I have seen it in some files already, but it will. The rollout has started and it'll be 100% out by May. And it's available right inside your QBO invoices. And there's a setting in the settings to turn it on or off, but it is on by default. And I know a lot of people don't like settings being turned on by default, but if they don't turn them on by default, you will literally never [00:25:30] know that it's there, which is why that they do it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Um, and then once it's on inside your settings, what you'll see is when you are in an invoice over in the manage pain over on the right hand side, where all the sliders are for the different payment options, there's a new one that says buy now, pay later. And when you send your invoice to the client, it will change just a little bit where it's your standard invoice, like normal, [00:26:00] but there's an offer in there that like the example that's on our screen right now is, you know, here's your $483 invoice and you can pay it with a $0 0% Apr as low as $44 a month with a firm. So the option is there, but they just click view and pay just like normal. And if they want to pay by credit card or ACH or debit card or PayPal or Apple Pay like normal, they absolutely can. There's no change in the workflow except there's a [00:26:30] new button for a firm. And then once they start with a firm as the payment method, what it does is it actually, I don't know if it instantly looks at their credit score. I don't know exactly how that happens, but in the demo it offers three different payment options. So again, we're looking at a $483 invoice. And the first option is $0 interest and 129. For every two weeks for [00:27:00] six weeks. So you're basically breaking it up into three payments. And they only have to pay a third of it today or they can pay for six months, 8419 and then it does charge them interest and it doesn't give a percentage of interest.

Alicia Katz Pollock: It says you're going to pay $21.38 interest. So they know, oh, this is just going to cost me an extra 2138. Sure. No problem. Or there's one that says lowest monthly payment. And it says $43.66 every month for 12 months with a $40.20 [00:27:30] interest. So they're completely upfront how much extra it's going to cost. And they're not putting it in terms of percentages. There's like it's just going to cost you 20 bucks more or 40 bucks more. And people are like, yeah, sure, for 12 months I'll pay an extra 40 bucks. And so they'll choose it. They'll choose the plan. And then your client pays through into its payment rails. And it's from there on, it's exactly like you got paid in full from any other method. You [00:28:00] are paid in full. Your payment arrives in the same amount of time as it does for if they paid by credit card or ACH. So, you know, depending if you're doing instant deposits into QuickBooks checking, it could be immediate. If you're doing ACH, then it could be five days, whatever your whatever your rates are. But what's cool, what's super cool is that you're getting paid in full and there's no risk to you. A firm is taking [00:28:30] on the entire risk. So if they default, you already got your money. They're not taking the money from you. You are paid immediately, just like normal. And then a firm is taking on all of the client payments.

Dan DeLong: And, um, and usually, um, like when you investigate these buy now, pay later options in other things, uh, that could, could be used with collecting payments. The, because there is a higher risk of default [00:29:00] because now, you know, uh, affirm in this case is, is on the hook for collecting the remaining, the remaining payments. Normally they would recoup that by charging you larger fees, you know, like anywhere from up to 6%. I've heard with, you know, these other, these other companies that, that are out there. So they take the, you know, they take their, their, their fees by charging you the, the business owner more. [00:29:30] But what I really like about this is it's homogenizing it all under QuickBooks payments, right? So the fee to you is the fee to as if they used a credit card, right? Or any other payment option, you know, so very similar to like the Venmo and PayPal options in your invoicing, where you just turn them on, regardless of what that fee might be. In reality, it's going to be the same to you. So it helps [00:30:00] with the, you know, figuring out how much this is, you know. This transaction is going to cost me, uh, in all of that because you don't have to. Well, uh, well, if they're going to use American Express, I'm going to pay these fees. Or if. If they use, uh, you know, Venmo, it's going to be those fees or now a firm is going to be these fees. It's all the same. So it makes it a lot easier to predict, uh, what's, what, what could happen or what would happen. Regardless of [00:30:30] however, these, these transactions are going to be paid.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And that fee is just 2.99%, exactly the same as if they had paid your invoice through credit card. So there's no extra fee to you at all. So this is a great way of streamlining your third party access for multiple payments. It's a great way of offering clients a new way of, of paying. And it's going to show up for transactions that are over $50, up to $20,000. [00:31:00] And so I don't see any reason not to put it on. Not to turn it on.

Dan DeLong: I guess we'll find out later.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. Yeah. So so thank you for that. And do it. I'm very, very happy that when I run this new run, this course, it's going to be much easier that I can just invoice them for the $2,500. I'm paid in full and I don't have to wait over time, but they get the benefit, so I'm stoked. Thank you.

Dan DeLong: Yeah. Actually, um, I think there's [00:31:30] it's like, no, there's no downside to this, right? Like, I don't know what those, what that downside is. I'm sure we'll probably find out, uh, afterward, you know, after it's been turned on for a little bit. Um, and people are using it. Um, but I, I can't see, I can't.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I can't find a downside either. Oh, I'm happy about it. Okay. Ready to switch topics? Yep. All right. Next up is Books Clothes with Hayley Garcia, [00:32:00] who's the project manager on Intuit Accountant Suite. And they started again with a poll. And the poll was, have you tried books, clothes in Intuit, accountant, Suite and Choice? One was haven't heard of it, which was 31%. Haven't tried it yet, was 60% and trying it currently was 9%.

Dan DeLong: Hmm.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And Dan, I know that you've been doing a lot of work with books clothes, so I'm going to let you take the lead on this section.

Dan DeLong: Yeah, we actually just did a, um, [00:32:30] a side by side comparison on the QB power hour, uh, this, this past week on books, clothes versus books review because that's the way that they're advertising this books. Clothes is an advanced books review. So if you've ever used books, review the, the question that comes to mind is like, well, why would I use books, clothes if it's available in Books Review, so we. And why would I pay to use something that is free, [00:33:00] right? So that's typically the, the, the answer. So what we did is we went through every single feature that's in both books, review and books close. And we compared those, those two things. Now, one thing to just kind of start off is this is not close the books as in put a closing date in because now we've got books closed and closed books, same words, just in reverse order. They mean completely different things. So books close [00:33:30] in and of itself is a feature inside of Intuit accounting suite that you can add on and onboard clients to. There comes a fee with that, which is $8 per client or six if you've got more than 51 on boarded clients into, into books, clothes, you were saying?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh yeah. And and and you can pick and choose your clients. You don't have to turn on books closed for all of your clients. So you can try it on just one. You [00:34:00] can use it on five.

Dan DeLong: Exactly.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You want to.

Dan DeLong: Do it now? A big side note is that currently there isn't a way to offboard a client from books clothes, but I have been promised that it will be available by May 1st, which is the day that they'll start charging for the for these companies.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Uh, actually, there was a change in that. They had said that the charging was going to start on May 1st, but they're changing that. They're not going to start charging now until July 1st. The delay is still going to be free for several [00:34:30] more months.

Dan DeLong: So my so my webinar is already outdated from.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Already.

Dan DeLong: From Tuesday.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Great. Okay.

Dan DeLong: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right.

Dan DeLong: But I wouldn't even found that out until two days after I did the webinar.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So there you go. Okay. So, so basically what the premise of books clothes is that you as an accountant can don't have to go into all of your client's books and then have this separate checklist that you can go down, the checklist of all the things that you have [00:35:00] to monitor about your clients from one dashboard, and then work with the data at that top level. And so it is, um, it's, it's a good way of keeping track of all the different tasks that you have to do and keep an eye on. Like, are there new vendors added? Are there new expenses? Over $2,500 are there?

Dan DeLong: Those things are customizable too, so you can change your inclusions or exclusions and the thresholds [00:35:30] so that you can, uh, get the, the right, um, what's right for that particular client? Right? So if it's not always, you know, whatever is significant for them, that's what you can do. And you can create, uh, templates so that you can associate those, those template of tasks to to the client and you can create your own so that those are applied to future. Um, future books closed clients.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Uh, [00:36:00] so one of the things that they demonstrated was creating your own template specifically for retail clients. And so you can customize a template for just the things that you do. If they have point of sale and walk up customers and have that be one template, and then you can make another template for your construction clients, for example. Um, another feature that they demonstrated was that they now have, you can assign three different people to the clothes, a preparer, a reviewer, and an approver, and [00:36:30] you can have them be the same person or different people, and that you can customize those roles on a client by client basis. And so you just tell it, I want the this test to be done by this person, and then it will assign all of the people. And I thought that was pretty slick.

Dan DeLong: Yeah. And I think the the ultimate goal of books, clothes is being able to do it all within the firm level, right? Uh, being able to reconcile accounts without going into [00:37:00] the, the specific client, uh, to, to do that. So there's a lot of time wasted by switching clients back and forth and so on and so forth. So that's going to be a time saver. And also for larger firms that have, you know, those different types of people, the roles that they might have within the firm so that they can, uh, assign it. And then one person can kind of oversee and see at any given point where, [00:37:30] where, where are we in our deliverables for, for our clients? So, you know, the solopreneur, uh, ProAdvisor who's, who's the only 1st May not see the value of all of this, uh, until they get to a point where they need to scale their firm and add on more team members to be able to do that. So that's what was ultimately was the, was the takeaway of our, of our webinar is that it really just depends on the firm's situation, as far as whether or not this is, [00:38:00] is actually worthwhile or not, but it does have some nice features to it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And that's why it's an add on. You can be in IaaS core, which is free or accelerate, which is paid, and then books close is on top of that on a per client cost. So there's, you know, you can definitely check it out. Now a couple of things that I wanted to address also about it. One of the questions that somebody asked in the chat during the in the webinar was that they noticed that [00:38:30] when you're looking in into an accounting suite at your client list, there used to be a books review column that gave you that overall eagle eye of like all the different status clocks for books review, and they took that away. It's not gone. You can still go into the client and go into the books, review tools and all of the clocks and all of the statuses are still there, but they did take it out of the regular free dashboard. Of [00:39:00] course, because they want you to use books, clothes. And so it was not an oversight. It was intentional.

Dan DeLong: Yeah. I think that's ultimately potentially going to be the, um, the concern of this is like, oh, what am I going to lose when, um, you know, when now there's a paid thing that does more, um, you know, are they going to take things away? And that, that is a, that's a legitimate concern. Um, but on the flip side of that, I had onboarded a client for [00:39:30] testing purposes into the books clothes. I went into their books review to do this, you know, side by side comparison. And I got a prompt to update the books review to and to the new experience, which I'd never seen that before. I grabbed a screenshot of it, but I cannot get it to happen again. So it was. I'm not sure what triggered it, like if I had to onboard them first as a book's closed client and then go into books review or because I was just, oh, I'll [00:40:00] go into my other clients that aren't on books, clothes and just add this new experience. But I thought it was. And basically what it does is it copies all of the book's closed features into books review. So you have the you have the same experience either way.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I'm going to bet dollars to donuts that that was an accident that you just caught that they they triggered something and pulled it right back out again because I don't.

Dan DeLong: Think like, what are you doing?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Books review. I have been promised that books review is not going anywhere. [00:40:30] So if that is part of your normal work stream, it's not them. I don't I'm I mean, don't hold me. Don't shoot the messenger if I'm wrong, but I have been told that books review is still alive, well, and staying in place. So you're not going to lose books review because of books close. It's just books. Close is going to have more features and allow you to do it from the eagle eye and not in the trenches.

Dan DeLong: Yeah. And ultimately, I think I think like people like you and I, um, Alicia, are not [00:41:00] the target for books, clothes. It's the people who don't use something or haven't done this before at all. That's, that's that those are the, the target client, I guess for, for Intuit to experience the, the, the option of books, clothes because they want to keep it all in one place. And that makes that makes total sense. But, you know, firms that have already found other solutions that do the things that [00:41:30] books clothes does are not really going to find the, the value built into that, but somebody who doesn't do any of these things already will potentially see it first inside of the program that they're already using.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And you know, I, I really like keeping everything inside my QuickBooks ecosystem. And that's kind of like what my career is about is doing it to try it so that I can be an authority about it. But, you know, they're a little late to the game. I'm [00:42:00] already entrenched with with double for a couple years now, but if so, I'll at this point either try it with a couple clients here and there that I don't want to put into double or I'll wait until you all debug it for me and get it up to speed, and then maybe I'll move back again, you know, so I'm, I'm game. I do want to point out that they do have two different courses about IAS, Intuit Accounting Suite in ProAdvisor Academy. So do go into your ProAdvisor training section [00:42:30] in your IAS and go take those courses so that you can get familiar with all of the different features that are there. All right. Next one is payroll modernization. And that was presented by Venky Muralidharan, who is a senior staff product manager in the payroll Services group. And what he showed us was that they have modernized and updated the run payroll table so that it's got easier data [00:43:00] entry and review. And I do use Qbo payroll myself. And you know, right now I well, I just went from five employees to ten employees because of my new incubator.

Alicia Katz Pollock: But when you are running payroll up until now, well, first of all, if you have tons of employees, if you have dozens of employees, it wasn't easy to find them on the list. So now the payroll run itself has filters and searches and sorts so that you can find employees and [00:43:30] then you can assign bulk actions to them all in one shot. Instead of having to do everything employee by employee by employee. And so some of it has started to roll out. But the real rollout is starting in May and it's out to, you know, under a thousand people right now. They're kind of troubleshooting it. I think I have it on mine and it is not just the US, but it is in Canada as well. So where you find it is when you [00:44:00] are in the middle of running your payroll and you click run payroll and you have selected which group of employees you're paying. So like, maybe it's your every other Friday payroll, you can now check off the employees and you can skip them from the payroll run. You can change their payment method, maybe from direct deposit to paper check, you can add bulk memos.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Um, and I've also noticed that you can adjust your PTO right in line now, now, I don't know if it's just because I never clicked [00:44:30] the box and tried. But when my. I have a couple employees who. Well, at Royal Wise we have very, very flexible, um, flexible timing. And so people can push their hours around. So some of our employees will work like 60 hours in one week and 20 hours and the next week. And some of our employees will just work, you know, 38 hours in pad with two of their sick leave. And I'm cool with that. I want them to have good lives and arrange their time as they want to, but [00:45:00] that meant that I had to keep a close eye on the PTO approvals and always go in and manage their approvals all the time and change it from one bucket to another. And I generally spent 5 or 10 minutes of every payroll run, just on two employees for making sure their hours were all lined up. And now you can do that right inside the box. I can go in, and if they're short by 0.7 hours, I can go ahead and just give them 0.7 hours off of their sick time, and I have [00:45:30] been very, very happy with that new ability.

Dan DeLong: Yeah, I'm seeing one of the options there on the on the screen there. That's a big win, right? Because, um, the change payment method, um, oftentimes, or, you know, sometimes things happen with, you know, direct deposit and they, they don't, uh, occur and in their haste and the, you know, business owners haste to get them their money, they'll just give it to them, Venmo them or do something, you know, outside [00:46:00] of payroll. And then, you know, the answer is, well, you got to go back in or, you know, if you had to re maybe you entered payroll somewhere else and you need to duplicate that, but you don't want to send it to direct deposit and you have to change your payment method for your a whole bunch of employees before you process it. And that's a pain if you have a large, uh, employee run to do and go in [00:46:30] each one, change it from direct deposit to payroll check, paycheck or paper check and so on and so forth. This allows you to batch action that and just select them, change it to paper check. And then when you're done with that, you can change it back to, you know, direct deposit.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, yeah. So that's a, that's a huge benefit. Um, something else that you can do is customize what columns show. And the big one, you can reorder the columns. So now you can have [00:47:00] your columns in any order that you want and show and hide the columns that you, um, that you, that you need. Um, the poll that he, that he gave was, well, what steps do you repetitively take across multiple employees that could be a good bulk action in the run payroll screen? Um, 11% said change that payment method like we were just talking about from direct deposit to paper check, 12% wanted to skip deductions in bulk, 46% wanted to assign [00:47:30] classes and projects. 18% wanted to assign fixed values to a pay type like PTO or a bonus, where you could just assign a bonus to everybody all at once, and then 14% said other and then did some write ins. So that's, I think that's a great enhancement. As you heard, it already made my life easier. All right. And then our next one is bill pay. There is a some [00:48:00] new features in online bill pay. It looks like they're dropping the word online bill pay and just calling it bill pay. Jorge Cardenas Guillén was the product the product marketing manager for Bill pay who spoke to us and his his pole for everybody is well, how do you typically sign up your clients for additional services such as QBO bill pay. So 12% sign their clients up for bill pay.

Alicia Katz Pollock: When they're setting up their new client, um, [00:48:30] for the first time through their QBO A or sorry, their I s um, 32% only adds services to their clients as needed. So they're already up and running and they do it themselves through, through IAS 34% does it either when they're setting up a new client or for existing clients, but they do it themselves. And 21% either goes into their qbo account to sign them up, or just sends them the recommendation [00:49:00] that they that they sign up. So there's a lot of different roads to getting there. The issue that they were having is that they wanted more control and to be able to do some more bulk processing. So they added in some parallel approvals, the ability to bulk pay up to 50 people all at once. And the ability to create recurring bill payments. So all of these very, very good things. So these [00:49:30] are already live as long as you have a Qbo subscription, you can now add on bill pay and it doesn't matter what level you have. And interestingly, because Bill pay has a free core version, a mid-level premium version, and the elite version, if you are wanting to do approvals for your bill pay, you don't have to have QBO advanced anymore. You can have even simple start or essentials, [00:50:00] but pay for bill pay elite and that gives you the new approvals. Dan, do you want to go in and tell us about how the new approvals work?

Dan DeLong: Yeah. So um so parallel um parallel and group approvals. So if you need two people to be or more more than one person to be. To to approve this, then you. Now you can, uh. Let's see, what is it? You don't have to have two approval workflows. That [00:50:30] was the that was the workaround is to be able to have. In order to have parallel approvals, you would have to have two, two workflow automations set up in order to. In order to do that, now you can do that within one one workflow, right. Um, and then, uh, this is also for group, you know, if more than one. So what's the difference, I guess between group and parallel to, to you or how they, how they described [00:51:00] it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So, and actually I want to put in a correction on that, um, that before you couldn't even have two different conditions, you could only have one. So it didn't fit your, your company's workflow. You were out of luck. And so now this is adding that ability. You couldn't make two two different separate approvals before. You could just make two different branches on your, your one tree and make this really super complicated thing, right? So there's, there's two [00:51:30] workflows that work in tandem. One is for bill approvals and one is for the bill approval releases. So one group of people can approve them, and one group of people can push the button to actually run the payments. And so what they've what basically you can now make up to five levels of approval. So five stages of approval and up to seven people in any one of the groups. And [00:52:00] what's cool about it is as you build it, when you create any one of those levels, you can name the people that are the approvers, approvers, and you can have either anyone could approve it. The first person to get there done. Or you need two people to approve it, or everybody has to approve it. And so you have that complete flexibility at five different stages of, I just need this one guy or I need two of these people, or [00:52:30] I need all of these people to sign off before we move forward.

Dan DeLong: So it can be it can be any one of them. It could be any number of them, or it could, or it could be all of them.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And they will. You can turn on whether they get notified through the tasks inside QBO, which is a seriously underrated feature. Um, and, or they get emails as well. And so you can just build out your tree with this incredibly complicated [00:53:00] set of approvals and the approval status will show up when you look at the bill. There's a pending approval with a little info and you can see what stage everything is at. So it is, um, pretty darn cool. And then when you go to the bill payments window, you can also see all of the current bill payments that are pending and which stage and which status. And you can, you know, push reminders or whatever [00:53:30] you need to do there.

Dan DeLong: It's pretty robust.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So it's definitely, definitely getting robust. Um, the, the next thing that it can now do is you can do bulk payments for up to 50 bills all at one time. You go into the bills, you go to the unpaid tab, you check them all off. Um, and so you can kind of set the parameters all at once, but after you've said, okay, I want to pay all 50 of these, you can still go in on a bill by bill basis and update the bill, the [00:54:00] date that you want, the payment, how you want it paid, the delivery date, the speed of payment. So you get the best of both worlds. You can set the basics to get the process started and then just tweak individual bills for their own individual needs.

Dan DeLong: Was that a was that was that a was that an option before and just they increase the limit or was it. They weren't able you weren't able to do bulk payments at all?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I think it was a limit of I'm not sure what the limit was. I think I [00:54:30] remember only seeing like maybe 20 on the screen. So I can't remember exactly what it was, but, um, or, or you had to do the same kind of payment all at the same time and you couldn't make the individual customizations.

Dan DeLong: Oh, gotcha.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. Now the part that I'm also really excited about and this I think is as cool as the bill now pay later that we talked that we started the episode with is that bills can now have recurring payments. And [00:55:00] so you can now set a recurring bill with autopay. So if you have a bill that you routinely pay every single month for the same dollar amount or week or year or whatever. You can make a bill recurring. Fill in all the payment details and then it will just auto run. And then you still get that benefit of the bill and the payment. And not just an expense.

Dan DeLong: That's nice. Yeah. Yeah. Can you schedule? I mean, as far as the auto payment, [00:55:30] maybe you're going to get to that. Uh, but when it when does it actually pay? It does it automatically pay it based off of the terms that are in there. Or is it you schedule that as a, as a recurring bill and bill payment?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I think it is. So you get that recurring screen, you know, kind of like we're used to with everything where you say what the interval is and you say what bank you're paying from or what payment method. So [00:56:00] it's going to be at the same cadence of your regular bill pay. So it's not going to be like immediate, but it will initiate the payment on the the date that you say like the first of the month, for example, or if you or you can create it in advance. So it's just, it's really just the same recurring window. But now you can make recurring bills and you can pay those recurring.

Dan DeLong: Them to pay.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yes, yes. That's [00:56:30] the, that's the magic here. Now, to celebrate this, they have a limited time offer where you can get 90% off your premium and elite plans. So again, there is a free version that's five ACH payments a month or as many regular credit card payments as you want to. But now the premium level and the elite level, you can get that 90% off. That makes elite $10 a month [00:57:00] for unlimited bill pay.

Dan DeLong: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Which is a great bargain. You also get a two day ACH speed, so you get faster payments as well. All right. So that was the in the know. It was definitely a long one. Um, this this month because Dan and I have so many things to say about it. Um, and finishing off their, with their announcements, um, they, I want to highlight the on the books podcast with Ted Callahan [00:57:30] and Jessica McCracken. Uh, there's a recent episode with Randi Crabtree about mental health in accounting. I was actually just listening to it on my dog walk this morning. Uh, they are in on a mission to upskill 1 million accountants in five years. And there's an episode with Dave Olson about building trust and scaling with intention in an AI world. Uh, so definitely check those out.

Dan DeLong: And there's also an upcoming webinar to optimize your [00:58:00] high volume practice with Proconnect tax that is coming up on April 1st. No fooling at 10 a.m. Pacific time.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, well, I'm completely surprised that they didn't do this one in May, because people are not about to switch to proconnect tax in the middle of tax season. Right? Um, but they are now, you know, making sure that new tax preparers know about proconnect tax and how it integrates with QBO. And last but not [00:58:30] least, as I mentioned in the beginning, they are skipping the April in the know. The next one is on May 21st and there's a link in the in the deck in the show notes to register. Or you can go to firm of the future.com. All right. Excellent. So Dan, what's going on in your world?

Dan DeLong: Well, this year in in 2026 we have um, at the QB power hour. Uh, typically it was a register once for the series. [00:59:00] Um, and then, you know, you would come as time and topic made sense to you. Uh, we are actually, uh, changing that to individual registrations this year in 2026. So, um, that is the new learning for me is trying to figure out how to, how to transition that. Um, I think we have a pretty good cadence here. Um, but we are, what this allows us to do is schedule out further in advance and allow you to [00:59:30] register for the, the upcoming topic that you, that makes sense to you and have a calendar event that actually tells you what, what that is. Because the problem is you register for the series today. Uh, and then, you know, two months from now, you have no idea what the topic is because your calendar event says something from today. So, um, upcoming, uh, we were actually able to schedule now more than two weeks in advance. Uh, we have a Shopify showdown where we're going [01:00:00] to be talking about the different Shopify app connectors inside of QuickBooks and kind of pitting them against each other, which is a new series that we're doing called an App Showdown. And then after that, we're talking with relay on passing the baton of ways to, you know, add relay to your tech stack, uh, as an, as an accounting professional. Those are coming up in, uh, at the end of March and, uh, middle of April.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay, cool. And you'll have links to register for [01:00:30] those in the show notes.

Dan DeLong: Yep.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right.

Dan DeLong: And how about you? What's going on with you?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, I am coming down like the. I have the light at the end of the tunnel at my great QBO refresh, where I have been teaching a new QBO class every single week from August all the way to um, to now. Um, and June is the, is the end of the series. And so we went through all the beginning basics. We went through all of the advanced bookkeeping and now we're in special [01:01:00] topics. So this past week I did a class on how to back up your QBO. Next week, I'm doing a class on third party integrations and best practices for implementing third party apps. And what's actually cool about the third party apps class is, first of all, it's free. You don't have to pay anything to attend it, and then you get an hour of suggestions for how to vet apps and implement apps. But what's cool about the class is it also has a whole set of demos of my favorite apps, all [01:01:30] collected in one place. A lot of them are me sitting down with the different app developers and getting my own private demo and then, you know, holding their feet to the coals about them. So they're, you know, more than, but other ones are just like, you know, their standard demo. So there's a mix of them, but it's a really good way of finding like Alicia's favorite apps and some vetted, really high quality apps. And so anybody can take that class. In fact, all of my classes are always available. So if I ever talk about a class and you're listening [01:02:00] to an old episode, you can you don't have to attend the webinars. Everything is available on demand, including CPE. So you can use realize as your own CPE portal.

Dan DeLong: That sounds like a good class to attend if you're planning to expand on your QuickBooks, uh, ecosystem.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, so I'll have links to those two classes in the show notes. So thank you all for coming today. I hope you got some extra blocks in on your dog walk since [01:02:30] we ran long today.

Dan DeLong: Um, rambled on.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Uh, it was a lot of fun commentary. All right. So, uh, thank you everybody. This is Alicia Pollock from Royal Wise.

Dan DeLong: And along from School of Bookkeeping.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And we will see you in the next.

Dan DeLong: On the next one.