It’s Recertification Season!

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

Alicia Katz Pollock: Hey there. This is Alicia Pollock of royalties.com. And in this episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, I am honored and delighted to have with me Matthew Scott Fulton from Parkway Business Solutions. And he also moderates the QB Community Live Facebook group where I am very active. How are you doing, Matthew?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Doing wonderful. [00:00:30] Alicia. You know, it's been a bit of a time since we've done one of these together, and I'm excited to be back on again with you. Thank you for the visit.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, this episode actually got inspired by your humble brag on Facebook that you and Lynda took the level two certification certification test the moment that it came out, and were two of the first people to pass it. And so I'm like, hmm, I should probably do a recertification episode. Hey, Matthew, do you want to come on with me?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah, a little background to it, Linda [00:01:00] and I. For years she would always go on and without me knowing. Go and be sure to be the very, very first person to do the test and then would send over to me like, have you done it yet? And it's only been like two hours. And I'm always like, come on, give me a chance here. So now we always schedule it and do it together. And we, we booked it out so we could get it done fast.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You were actually my alert that recertification season opened. I somehow missed all of the notifications. So for those of you who might have missed might [00:01:30] have missed the notifications. It is recertification season for the ProAdvisor. Recertification is season is April 28th all the way up through June 30th. And the recertification test is how we keep up our ProAdvisor certifications that the the way the program works. And let's actually give a little bit of background because not everybody here is even certified. Yeah. Is that QuickBooks Live in your ProAdvisor portal, [00:02:00] in your Intuit Accountant suite, or in your QBO A. If you're still using it, um, has a has a ProAdvisor training area where they have courses about the, about using QuickBooks online and not just about QuickBooks online. There's also now courses about bookkeeping and advisory and payroll compliance. And so it really has become a full fledged center. So basically what certification is, is a test, a multiple choice test from Intuit [00:02:30] where there's a level one certification. And that basically shows that you know, where the features are and you know what buttons to push in order to do your daily bookkeeping. And then once you pass that, you're eligible for a level two certification, which is where you do a deep dive into the features. And that's the one that really shows that you know your stuff, you know, some of the more obscure tools and, you know, some of the more unusual use cases.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I truly believe everybody should take the time to do the level [00:03:00] two certification. Like you, you just said the level one. It is much easier to pass because it's kind of more of an overview. As you stated, the level two, not only does it teach you more about it, make sure you know things, but it also shows a little bit more of a commitment to your trade. And I'm a firm believer any kind of certifications and educational stuff you can do, you should definitely be taking that stuff.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I agree completely. When I hire, I look for people who have the level two certification because like you said, like anybody [00:03:30] can pass the level one. It's the tests are open book. And so you can literally just sit there and click on things. And, you know, I've seen people who don't even know the software pass the level one test. So it really is the level two where you do know your stuff.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Talk about some of the evolution real quickly made me think of the evolution of these tests. And I think there's always been a long running joke with those of us who have been doing this for a bit of time now. There was once a time where the QuickBooks online certification test was [00:04:00] an A, B, C, D type test, and you had four chances to go through and it would always remove all of the answers you got right. So you could literally go a, a, a, a, a on everything around two, go b, b b b, round three, go C, C, C, c, and then round four go d, d d d and always pass it. It was, it was. Don't ask me how I figured that out. Okay. But I'm proud to say I'm now certified level two so that doesn't matter.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So yeah, I mean I do kind of miss the days [00:04:30] when it would eliminate the questions that you did get right and just resurface the ones that you didn't get right. But now it doesn't do that and it actually works out of a test bank. And so you do have three tries to take to pass the test, and it will give you what areas you need to study on, but it won't tell you which questions you get wrong. And because it's a question, you might not even get the same questions the next time you take the test.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, this is kind of a good segue to talk a little [00:05:00] bit about tips and tricks of maybe how to prepare for taking the test and what to do while you're going through it. Before we discuss a little bit more about it, what do you think?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Sure. Go for it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Uh, so one of the things that I've always done right off the bat, you do want to go through the resources, the information. They've actually changed the tests again over the years to where now the core stuff, as you go through, it's going to teach you [00:05:30] exactly basically what's going to be on the test. And if you're really paying attention, and if you're if you're doing the initial test more so than the resort, you're, you'll have like sample questions inside of it. So it makes sense to go through. And I personally have always gone and done like screenshots of the important information I feel I'm going to need to remember. And I, I like to put it into a PowerPoint because it's easy to, you know, snap it, drop it into something on the slide and save it to help for reference wise, because it is an open book test that you're allowed to go [00:06:00] back into the program itself. You can use your other resources, downloadable resources and such. So that always really helps give yourself a space of time to do all of it. You know, plan a nice little quiet area where you're not going to get interrupted just to be on the safe side gets you through faster. Um, what else, what, what other tips do you usually do to prep?

Alicia Katz Pollock: And so what they do is there's a training that has CPE with it as well. So they actually tell you [00:06:30] all the answers to the test. They tell you what they are testing you on. And so it generally has several different modules. And the thing that I want to warn you about, though, when you're walking through it is it's really fancy technology. It's not just a document that you read, like they'll put up an image and it will have hot spots and you have to click the hot spots on the image, or it will have a ten step walkthrough where it will point to different features and talk about each of the features, but you have [00:07:00] to click through all of them to see it. So if you are not paying attention and you're just trying to read the document, you're literally going to miss all of the prep content. So it's you have to kind of play with the interface. Now, personally, that feels like gamification to me. It makes it fun. It's like a little treasure hunt to find all the little nuggets of information. Um, sometimes I do actually keep a side document and I'll copy and paste all of that information into a side document so I can reference it easily. [00:07:30] But I'll talk about that my test taking strategy in a minute. Let me finish this piece of it. Um, and so after you like spot said you have um, after each section, it gives you a couple little practice questions. They're pretty easy. They're kind of gimme questions, but at least it shows that you're paying attention. And then after you finish that training, you get CPE credit for doing it. Now, if you're a pro and you know your shit, you don't have to go sit through the several [00:08:00] hours of prep training. You can just sit down and take the test and you do get three tries. So I personally like to take it cold, see how I do, and then figure out what I still need to study. Um.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah, I'm kind of in your camp as well. I will say that I did recently take their, uh, the advisory course where it's got the full bookkeeping once they're big bad boy one that's an example where I actually had to go through and take the time to, to review [00:08:30] everything, take my notes. And as I like to joke, I realized I've probably forgotten more about accounting than some people will ever learn because of all the stuff I forgot. However, for these, like the resorts I jumped in, I just tested it out real fast. Um, so if you feel comfortable with it. I agree it's it's nice to be able to test out. You don't have to spend the time you lose the CPE credits, no CPE credits if you do it that way. Right. So but the question is if you need that specific part or not.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, [00:09:00] exactly. Now, as far as taking the test, I definitely have some strategies to recommend to be successful in it. The fact that it's open book is amazing because not all of their tests are open book. The bookkeeping certification test is not open book. You have to know know it. But with the QuickBooks online certs, you can look it up. So generally what I recommend is I have the test open in an incognito window, and I keep the training materials open in a regular window so that [00:09:30] I can go back and forth through the training materials and actually go root out. What answer are they actually looking for? In this case, I will also in a different browser window, like maybe I'm doing the test. The test is in my chrome incognito window, no. The training materials are open in a regular chrome window. And then in Safari I have opened my QuickBooks and sometimes I'll even have the sample company open in yet a different browser, because there's some [00:10:00] questions that are about just QuickBooks itself. And there are some questions that are about the ProAdvisor portal QBO, in this case, Intuit Accountant Suite, and being able to just move back and forth between the four potential environments means that I can just go read the question, go turn to the thing that that has the answer where I can go look it up. And I mentioned this on Reddit and somebody came back and was like, you don't do not need to work that hard and you can do it in just one window. And [00:10:30] I'm sitting here going, well, like, I don't want to have to go in and out and in and out and surf around. I just want to be able to turn to the window that has where the research that I need to do.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: There's also a key part of it that because at least in the past, there was always a situation that if you were in the test and if you even just in a different tab, try to go to open up QuickBooks online to review certain things, it would actually kick you out of the test because it was in the same environment. So the real reason of doing the different [00:11:00] browsers or the incognito and so forth is so they're disconnected to be able to look and do what you need. Because when we say it's an open book, we mean it's open internet in a sense. Right? So, um, the one thing you're not allowed to do is you're not allowed to have somebody else, of course, take the test for you. Um, take the test with you, get answers from somebody else. Um, but you are allowed to open up the, the, the software. Look, if you need to do so. So take advantage of that. [00:11:30] It is helpful when there's questions that are specific to how do you get to this thing? And you have to remember like muscle muscle memory, right? We know how to do things. But then I'm like, wait a second. Is it this, this, and this. Or is it this, that and this or like to get to it?

Alicia Katz Pollock: So and what's the button called this month?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: A don't get me started there. Yes.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right. And, and that's actually kind of funny because when I was taking the test, there was a feature in that they described on the test that I [00:12:00] don't have. And I was like, ooh, that's really cool. But that that particular dashboard is not in my I was. Yeah. So yeah, it was a little jealous. Hopefully that's a thing to come because.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You probably upgrade to the accelerate and be able to find no.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I'm opted in to accelerate. And it was still not there. It was actually specifically the question about the dashboards, the AI dashboards, because there's dashboards all over the place, but there's this one specific dashboard with advanced [00:12:30] KPIs. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself because we're going to talk about this. Okay. Um, so what we want to do is talk about, okay, so now that we've talked about how to take the test and the when to take the test. One more thing I wanted to say about it, because you do get three tries on the test. If you don't pass in those three tries, you actually have a 60 day lockout window. And I think we just passed the deadline for being able to [00:13:00] fail and still take the test. Because now that today today we're recording this on May 1st. Yeah. People are listening to this a couple weeks from now. So there is not 60 days. Um, I'd have to look, maybe it's it's 30 days for the restart. I would hope that they wouldn't lock everybody out. So I'm giving you potentially misinformation right now. Uh, but I do recommend taking all your steps to get the recertification test done now, because in a regular certification test, if [00:13:30] you get locked out, you have to wait 60 days and then retake it. And I don't want anybody to get locked out.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So two things I'd like to add to that. One of the things you were mentioning is, okay, there's three chances to get it, you know, to complete it and get it right. Now a days, the test, if you don't pass it the first time. Again, just a reminder, it means you're taking the whole test again. One of the things that I like to do while taking the test is I will take screenshots of my question with the answer selected already. [00:14:00] And again, I saved it in that PowerPoint. So I don't have a whole bunch of random pictures on my hard drive. I save them in a PowerPoint. So if I get if I don't pass, I'll kind of know what areas to reference and look back into to research it. And then it also helps me the second time around a little bit faster that if I know certain ones I got right, I can see it and possibly go faster if I get the same questions. Yeah. Um.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I do the same thing. I just keep mine in my snagit. Uh, however, when I, when [00:14:30] I finished my test, I got a 94 on it and I still don't actually know which one I got wrong.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. They used to tell you that, like, that's the other part. It doesn't tell you what items you got wrong necessarily anymore, especially in the desert. So you can't just go and focus on one specific area.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I would like to know what I got wrong. So I agree completely in my knowledge. But we don't we don't get that. And from a test taking perspective, as a as a, I have a master's in teaching. It is [00:15:00] not good pedagogy to give people the answers because then you're just helping them pass the test. You're not helping them actually learn the material. So that's, that's one of the reasons, reasons why. And it's also why Nasba has incredibly strict CPE requirements for the quizzes that you take to get CPE that they have to have. They have to directly address the learning objectives. They also [00:15:30] have to have feedback. So if you get the answer wrong, it has to explain to you why it's wrong. And, um, but it can't tell you what the right answer is. And so at Royal Eyes, it literally took me four years to write eight quiz questions per hour of content with explanations of all the wrong answers in order to get CPE authorized. It was, you know, and that was before the days of AI. Now, I [00:16:00] just built a quiz yesterday and it took me 1015 minutes instead of 15 hours for the one for the one course. So thank God for, for AI for that. Um, but there's also actually, let me clarify that, that when I'm talking about the feedback questions, those are the ones that are during the content, like you get to the end of the section and it gives you the, the easy quiz. That's the one where it will tell you, well, that answer is right or that answers.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You're right. And then you have to have the final answers, [00:16:30] the final quiz where you don't get any supporting information about it. So from a from a trainer's perspective, as a teacher's perspective, as a Nasba certified CPE provider, I can see the structure in how Intuit has put these together and why.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So I just have to say, I think I'm probably more team bad pedagogy, um, than good pedagogy because anyways, I don't know. I, I'd like to know quickly or and see this stuff. Uh, the [00:17:00] other part I wanted to bring up, which is the important part about the certification as a person who has not gone or basically went through one time and did not recertify and had to take all the original tests all over again, get recertified. You just it's worth spending the time. It's again, showing that you're committed to your trade, but you don't want to have to go through all the tests because they are actually harder now than when I first took them.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I was actually thinking that they were easier now than, than [00:17:30] when we first took them. But I guess that's And.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: The advanced one at least, I guess is the advanced one. Took some time and some major research onto it, so it's worth spending a fraction of the time each year to keep up to date on it all.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, and I actually really like the recertification test because they focus on what came out in the last year. So it's one of the ways that you can stay on top of the new releases, but they also surface tech techniques or features that are underutilized, [00:18:00] that sometimes we'll see features that have actually been there for years. They're not new, but people are not using them. So they want to raise awareness about them. So those are the two pieces of content that are in the recertification. So I appreciate it because I get to really make sure that I have all the all the new features under my belt. And actually sometimes it'll point out some of the nuances about them that I overlooked.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Every year after I do recertification, there is at least one thing in there that I end up walking [00:18:30] away from and going to talk to a minimum one of my clients to improve something for them every single year. There always is something that and I always thought I was on top of all, there's always some nugget that helps me better.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I always look for those nuggets too. And that's actually a perfect segue into let's actually talk about this year's test. This year was a little different from other years because usually, like I said, it's just it's new releases and hidden features. This year, [00:19:00] they released a whole new platform that QuickBooks is technically called QuickBooks on the Intuit platform is the actual name of QuickBooks now. So we all still call it QuickBooks online, but that's the actual name of the software's QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. And it's still QBO to me, and it's always going to be QBO to me.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Intuit, your naming conventions have always been very awkward. It's just all I'm going to say.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. [00:19:30] I mean, considering right now we have IES and I s and my Philadelphia accent, sometimes you can't tell what I'm talking about.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Hey.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. All right. Um, and so those of you who have been listening to me since last fall at Royal Wise, we have like over 50 different QuickBooks Live deep dive classes, everything from beginning level, all the way through advanced technical detail. And because the interface completely [00:20:00] changed last July, in July 2025, I had to rerecord all of my content every single class. And because of Nasba, I couldn't do my normal every other week cadence. I had to teach a class every single week. And, um, when I first started, if you, if you look at my great QBO refresh video on YouTube, you'll hear me say, oh, it's the same software, it's just a different interface. And you just have to adjust your eyes and your muscle memory [00:20:30] and you'll learn it. And it does all the same things. It's just, you know, things have moved. My conclusion after teaching 30 classes is it is not the same software. It is not the same platform. Everything that I, I had to expand all my classes. Teaching the same topic took an extra hour because everything. It does so much more than it did before.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now for clarification. [00:21:00] Are you talking about the IAS Intuit Accountant suite or are you talking about just the the good old QuickBooks online? Because I'm not going to remember the other name of it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, no, we're still going to call it QuickBooks online. Yeah. So I it's the answer is both, but I'm just talking about QBO itself between all the, the drag and drop of receipts and new abilities to copy one transaction, you can take an expense and turn it into a bill [00:21:30] or all the the the fancy tricks inside the banking feed. There is. It really is different software than it was a year ago.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I can tell you after, you know, taking about nine months off, jumping back into the software again and trying to make sure I knew how to do everything quickly was was interesting. It might be fun in the future to kind of do another episode where we talk about some of the new stuff and things that worked great for me and things that didn't, but okay.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. All right. [00:22:00] We'll do, we'll, we'll, we can do another episode for that. All right. So what I want to do now is I do want to talk about what's on the exam so that people know what to expect. Now before I do that, I want to be crystal clear. We are not giving you the answers to the questions we don't have in front of me. And I also want to shake my finger at people a little bit, because I do see answer sharing online and it goes against your ProAdvisor agreement to.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You [00:22:30] have to sign off saying you won't do it multiple times at the beginning of the test. Yeah, no if ands or buts about it. You know it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So I've seen it in the past. I've seen people make YouTube videos about it. I've seen people create trainings about it. Now I realize we have a course, a free course about how to take the tests. So you can totally check out how to take the tests. And we are about to tell you the topics on the test, but we're going to pull that from the training [00:23:00] materials. We are not pulling this from the questions. So what we want to do is highlight some of the things that you need to study up on and get familiar with before you take the test.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Agreed.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. So the first thing that I want to do is talk about the learning objectives. And one of the things that is actually really interesting this year is because it is a whole new platform. Usually, the level one test and the level two test are completely different from each other and have very little [00:23:30] to do with each other, except for a couple commonalities in some of the topics. But this year, all of the level one certification learning objectives are all in the level two, and the level two just has a couple extra deep dive features.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Real quick, add in just to be on the safe side, because we were so used to when we were taking the the test before, it was like the QuickBooks online standard test. And then it was the advanced test, not talking about QuickBooks online advanced, but just the advanced test. The [00:24:00] basic one is what we're calling level one. The level two is that higher level advanced just to refresh and connect it for people in case they didn't know.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, exactly. They used to call it core and advanced. And but we've got so many different things call it called advanced that they changed the, um, the changed it to just be.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: One and two.

Alicia Katz Pollock: One and two. Yeah. Which also gives them the future ability to be three and three and four. [00:24:30]

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. Makes good sense. Good naming convention on that one, guys.

Alicia Katz Pollock: A little boring, but you know.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: He could have been one plus.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So so um, I've I've pulled it up on screen. Um, for those of you who are on YouTube, you can actually see my, the learning objectives. And so this is literally copypasta out of the, out of the screen. So I am going to read these to you so that everybody knows what to expect. So on both the level one and [00:25:00] the level two certifications, you will be able to describe the updated interface and structure of QuickBooks. Explain how AI has been incorporated into QuickBooks. Explain the updated structure within the sales area, demonstrate updates to the sales and get paid app, including AI integration for payments. Identify the features of the customer hub and how to keep accurate customer records. Describe the latest updates to expense workflows. Use the [00:25:30] AI features introduced to the bank transaction screen. Describe the process of AI powered reconciliation. Describe the AI powered insights in the balance sheet and profit and loss reports. Identify the key features and benefits of Intuit Accountant Suite. Explain the different Intuit Accountant Suite plans available and how to switch over from QuickBooks Online Accountant. Then, level two has three more learning objectives. Matt, you want to do those?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. [00:26:00] They include use the Project Management AI in QuickBooks advanced customize standard reports in the modern view and use the new report Sharing options. And then describe the updates to reporting in QuickBooks advanced and into an enterprise suite, including the new finance AI, which is actually really cool. Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So it makes sense that these three are just in the advanced certification because they're focusing on QuickBooks online Advanced and Intuit Enterprise Suite specifically, [00:26:30] which are more advanced features.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Higher level, more it's higher level, more functionality. You can do a lot more with it for sure.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So they're not things that beginners or basic companies need or beginning bookkeepers need. So it makes sense that this is where they divided the two exams.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And I will say that again, we can't give away and we're not going to give away any kind of the questions. They do a phenomenal job of directing you to areas to focus [00:27:00] within their outline of stuff. It really does. They've been right on the nose with it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm. Okay. Um, so what I did when I was taking the test is I literally copied and pasted everything out of the training and pasted it into a document here, so I have a 35 page ugly. I did not take the time to make proper headers and sizes and all of that. So for those of you who are watching this on YouTube, forgive the fact that this is not [00:27:30] a pretty document. It's literally a screen dump.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And we're going to read every bit of it to everybody right now. Right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: No.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Don't worry folks.

Alicia Katz Pollock: We are going.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: To do a quick recap.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Really high level. One more thing that I want to say before we get into the topics is that for those of you who have been regular listeners of this podcast, there is almost nothing in this test that we have not talked about in the last year. I mean, there's a couple nuances and a couple more obscure features, but I was actually really [00:28:00] happy to see when I was going, when I was taking the test, I was like, oh, we've talked about that. We've talked about that. Oh, we've talked about this too. Hey, I must be doing a really good job on new features because none of this is new, new, new.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You find everything new very quickly.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So those of you who are listeners, we're actually helping you with your certification preparation. All right. So the first section of the test is literally about the interface and pointing out that the new button is now called the create [00:28:30] button and the bookmarks and the favorites. And also people tend to gloss over them, but the ovals across the top are customizable, and you can actually create hot buttons right on the dashboard for the places you go most.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I did not know that. That's actually I need to adjust my list, I like that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Excellent. Yeah, I do too. I mean, personally, I don't spend any time on the dashboard and I probably should [00:29:00] spend more time there. I just tend to like go straight to the banking feed. But the fact that you can make buttons to take you your own navigation right across the top of the, of the home screen, as well as create bookmarks as well as the My Menu, accountant navigation, all that customizable, all that customization is really super important to, to stay to be aware of.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I would agree that, you know, so the key function of all of that [00:29:30] is the old software. You had just one single like sidebar. The new one is now a multi bar where you're looking at things and then the subs pop out a little bit differently than previous. You actually can access more functions of the program because the multi bar, you just have to get comfortable with it. This is kind of like you were saying before of, you know, let your brain forget what it once was and just start to learn the new one because it's here to stay. Once you do that, you'll be very quick and efficient with it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, [00:30:00] and I really can't emphasize enough how much customizability there is. And so if you're feeling like you have to do a whole lot of clicks to get places, you can create your own shortcuts in several different places so that you can make your own navigation. So when you take the test or take the training, it'll show you all the different places. Okay. They even point out the fact that you can right click on things to open it in a new window, and you can do control period to [00:30:30] go full screen, and that they've made a keyboard shortcuts for just about everything. So if you do control alt question mark or control option, question mark on a, on a Mac, there's keyboard shortcuts for just about everything. So if you find yourself hamstrung by having to go pull up different menus, just learn, you know, control eye opens up an invoice. And I don't know what the other ones are offhand because I don't use keyboard commands much, but you can just get it into your muscle memory so that no [00:31:00] matter what happens to the interface, you can get where you need to go.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Then I think the second area really that there's a lot of focus on is what we're seeing on the screen here has to do with the different AI capabilities that have really been built into the software of the program. You know, they started introducing some of this stuff a while back, and it's really evolved, um, to become a helpful and useful tool within it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So they talk about the accounting AI payments, AI and customer [00:31:30] AI, which are all in QuickBooks plus. Um, and then QuickBooks advanced and enterprise suite include finance, AI and project management AI. So they're basically giving you different levels of automation depending on the level that you're in. And so if you're a simple start user, you're not going to get as many AI features as you are if you're using the higher levels. Even even payroll has AI now.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. [00:32:00] So real quick touch base on it, the areas as a reminder, AI, the accounting AI is going to specifically be focused on automating like the categorization and the expense tracking, right. Um, your payments AI is, as they say, it suggests faster ways to get paid by optimizing your invoicing. So it's going to help remind you if there's overdue items, if you need to send a reminder and it's going to help you kind of create the language in there, if you'd like, uh, adjusting even the tone in messaging that can go out.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, let [00:32:30] me, I'm going to hop in for one second on that. One of the ways that you can leverage that, which you're not used to, is when you create an invoice for a customer, it will surface, oh, this customer usually paisley. And then you can go change their terms immediately or be proactive and let them know in your messaging, hey, if you're not on, if you don't pay this one on time, we're going to add a late fee so that you can kind of nudge problematic clients.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I love that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's for sure. Yeah, it is useful.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So, [00:33:00] um, and that kind of leads also, I guess into like the customer AI aspect of it, where their goal is to identify different opportunities in your inbox. You know, draft follow ups and track status. And that's because if I remember correctly, you can connect your Google email to it and have it, you know, if it's specific for sales, everything else, right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Now we're going to kind of we're on page two of 34. So let, let, let's, um, we're going to go into each one of these in a little bit more detail as we go. The [00:33:30] next section of the test is about the business feed. And the business feed is that little sparkle in the left navigation rail that says feed. And this is a place where it's using AI to surface insights about what's happening in your business. And it has different tiles. And I'm going to go ahead and actually show us the banking feed. So here it is in, um, there's the little sparkle. And so it will pull [00:34:00] up insights from your profit and loss report and your balance sheet. It will tell you what's happening with your AR and overdue payments. And when you're looking at it, some of you might be like, yeah, that's not real helpful. Well, we can make it helpful. Every single tile has three dots in the upper right hand corner. And when you click on the three dots, if you could use it like a notifications, and every time you read it, you [00:34:30] could dismiss it, right? And then it'll refresh itself. If there's a tile you don't want to see for a while, you can snooze it for two weeks. There's also a preference to don't show it again. And if you say, oh, this is not helpful. Me, I don't want to see it. They're actually tracking that. If a lot of people dismiss a tile as not useful, they're going to pull it and replace it with something else. And then there's also a give detailed feedback, not just give feedback, but give detailed feedback where you can tell them [00:35:00] what you like about a particular tile or how they can change it. That would make it more useful for you because they do want this business feed to be useful.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So that means if there are tiles you really like, give feedback on that as well. That's important.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm. Now they did actually take the time to talk about the AI, which I really appreciated that it, you know, was like, well, which AI is behind the scenes? And we know that Intuit has deals [00:35:30] with open AI, meaning ChatGPT and anthropic as well. And so what they have to say about it is that Intuit AI performs a wide range of functions, and this can't be achieved through a single model. Instead, we built Gen OS, an AI operating system that enables Intuit developers to build and deploy different AI capabilities. So they basically trained their own financial like large language model. And so that different [00:36:00] parts of QBO are using different AI behind the scenes, which is pretty cool.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yep. Um, we trained it or they trained it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Um, yes, a little bit. Um, and actually the, the next section of it is about the security and privacy. And so they have links to their data stewardship principles and their operating values, which is integrity without compromise with, with capital letters. And [00:36:30] they train their AI capabilities on their knowledge base articles and the help content. And then it says customer data as described in our global privacy statement. And it has a link to it. Uh, basically what that means is they are using your data, but it's an anonymized, it's not specific to a client file. And the, the names of the guilty parties have all been changed. They're basically just doing the analysis on [00:37:00] the numbers without any personally identifiable information and without the information from one account transferring to another account. So all of the data is safeguarded inside each file.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: For those who may be concerned about that. Realistically, nowadays most software is going to have some form of understanding and of how people are using it to improve upon processes, everything else. So this [00:37:30] is a pretty common practice nowadays with a lot of software development software companies. And it's kept private.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Um, and then it also specifies that they have access to internet searches, for example, to research unknown vendors. It actually is doing some internet searches behind the back behind the scenes. And that's how it's suggesting who those vendors are. And that's probably also why a lot of the time we laugh at what vendors it actually maps to. Okay. And [00:38:00] then there's a permission in the customer AI that we'll talk about where if you are having it, access your email, then to manage the leads, then that is because you have given it permission. And then it also reminds us that Intuit's a member of the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute consortium and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. So it really is upholding the highest level of standard for where we are at right now with AI. [00:38:30]

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, the part you're showing here, I think is extremely important, and it is something that Intuit has been very focused on from the beginning is the concept that automation can only do so much, and it really human humans matter in the process. You know, they, they handle certain routines, but it's required. It still requires us humans to handle the ambiguous and interpersonal things. We're still responsible for doing the review, checking it, making sure everything is fully correct And for complex things, [00:39:00] we need to step in and help it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm. Yeah. So they're they're human intelligence. They're h I human where it matters. Their, their, their byline is automation where it counts human where it matters. And basically, they're pointing out that their goal with the AI is to monitor the systems, flag anomalies and execute clearly defined tasks without needing constant instruction, while humans handle the ambiguous and interpersonal, we're the ones who interpret the context, navigate [00:39:30] the trade offs, build client trust, and and take charge of high stakes and emotionally charged scenarios. They mention the sales and get paid overview and the fact that the menu has changed that. For example, that's now where you can find sales, recurring payments, sales orders, sales channels, QuickBooks payouts, as well as products and services and standard transactions. This is one of those screens [00:40:00] and windows where I finally woke up and went, oh wait, the software really has changed that. Recurring payments, sales orders, and sales channels are all new things.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: A key part of that, because it's so easy to overlook when Alicia was just talking about those different options there, the little bubble icons that are across the screen, those are where you can see and you can click quickly to get to stuff, you know, instead of having to go again over to a side menu.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, exactly. It's got some of the business feed tiles [00:40:30] right there that might be helpful. And the Create Actions menu where you can customize which sales and get paid actions you want right on the overview screen. Now one of the huge, huge changes is the customer hub. We have an episode, the customer hubba hubba, um, that you can go back and, and listen to where we pore through the customer hub in in detail. So we're just going to surface it right now to let you know that, yes, they focus heavily [00:41:00] on the customer hub in the certification test, that they have moved customers out of sales and get sales where it used to be and into its own hub with the specific goal that you now have a CRM or a customer customer resource management area. And what's, um, part of it's the AI, like we talked about managing the customer history. Um, there are some big changes to inventory. Did [00:41:30] you catch that? Matthew.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: No, um, I did not. So. Oh yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: When you, when you said, hey, there's always one little nugget that you didn't catch before. Um, this was my nugget right here that there now is an ability to, if you have an inventory count worksheet, you can now upload it and it will do an inventory quantity adjustment automatically for you, instead of you having to [00:42:00] go into that form and build it by hand.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now, if we can only get it to count the inventory for us as well.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh, wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that be nice? I actually want to give a little shout out here to write tool. This is one of the areas where write tool really shines in the inventory quantity adjustment screen. It has the ability to add all of your products all at once or to zero out all a bunch of products all at once, which are really, really handy features for inventory quantity adjustments. So thank you, [00:42:30] Hector and Mark for that. Okay. One of the other big changes this year is that inventory in QuickBooks online used to be always Fifo, first in, first out. And now because so many people are coming over from desktop, you now can specify moving average cost as an inventory valuation method.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's huge. Yeah, that's it's very big.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And then they just recently, in the last couple of months introduced item receipts. We talked about this. We just did an episode about this [00:43:00] where now there's a new item receipts stage that you can opt into. Where it used to be, you went from a purchase order straight to a bill and now you had financial impact. But now you can receive items from a purchase order before the bill is created. The bad news is that it's one or the other. You if you turn it on, you have to go. Purchase order item. Receipt. Bill. You. You can never again go. Purchase order bill. So it creates an extra step. But if you are [00:43:30] warehousing and doing receiving, it's very necessary. They also put in a whole bunch of quote unquote new capabilities in sales orders. Basically what that means to me is they made them functional. Now sales orders, sales orders can have custom fields. You can search on it, you can add attachments to it. You can use bundles in it, and you can convert sales orders to purchase orders, all things that were necessary to make them useful.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So yeah, you know, sales order was something that we've needed for some [00:44:00] time. And this now is a nugget. I need to go back to a prior client and talk to him about is having that ability to, to add those in. That's huge.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Now, another huge one is that inventory can now be added as a module to simple start and essentials. Up until now, if you wanted inventory, you just went to plus, but now it's an add on subscription. And so if you're using Simple start, you don't need anything else from plus except inventory. You can just subscribe to the inventory [00:44:30] module for simple start.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Beautiful.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Okay. The next thing that it did is go into huge detail about the customer hub and all the things that the customer hub did, does. And just, you know, for the, the sake of detail. The things that the customer hub now does is basically you can. With your permission, connect it to a gmail account or an outlook account, and it will look in your email [00:45:00] and surface leads for you and add them straight to QBO so that you can then turn them into customers and send them, send them estimates. And then it also has work requests, referrals and reviews and testimonials that you can turn on in the settings. And I actually, I turned them on and I just had two different customers give me ratings. They sent me testimonials that I can now use in my social media. [00:45:30] And they also gives them a thing about when would you like to work with us next? And so one of my clients basically said, hey, call me in May. And another one said, I'd like to talk to you again in October. And so now I actually know when they want to hear from us and honestly, I really like that. I think that feature is fabulous. Now, some of the other features that are now being rolled out into the customer hub is the ability [00:46:00] to get contracts signed. So if you have always had to go out to DocuSign or Pandadoc, you can actually now send a contract right through QuickBooks and you can specify where they need to initial and where they need to sign and where they need to date it. And you can also scrape those contracts and import them to create estimates right out of them, right in the system. So that definitely streamlines your app stack.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And that's, is that now available on all [00:46:30] levels as well?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yes. All the levels that have the customer hub. I can't remember which level starts the customer hub. I know it's not in simple start. I can't remember if it's essentials or plus.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Okay.

Alicia Katz Pollock: There's also features for appointment setting and features also for video calls that you can launch right inside QBO. Now it doesn't have any memory. You can't record the calls, but you can have it be a customer communication tool.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You [00:47:00] know, I got to say, this is a great example as we're kind of we're going through this stuff. Um, Alicia, you went through all of the information, obviously, as we're looking at here, where I jumped in straight to the test and there's quite a bit of stuff that I'm seeing here for the first time because I took the shortcut to get through it so quick. So, um, I feel like I'm gonna have to go back and do the test again to make sure I get everything or go listen to all your podcasts, of course.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Well, that's actually a huge insight because like I said, my inclination if [00:47:30] I didn't, if I wasn't training on all the content, would just be to go pass the test because I know that I could. But again, it's a question bank. You're only asked 15, 16 questions out of 50. And so some of you know you'll you'll be lucky if you hit a question that you didn't know the answer to, that you get to be inspired by. There's so much there's so much in the trainings. I really do think it's worth doing. You know, it took me maybe an hour to go through the the training, [00:48:00] so I recommend it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Since you mentioned the number of questions when we tested out, it's 25 questions.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh that's.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Interesting. More. Yeah, there's more questions. And it was I don't want to take us on too far, but when you first start up, it says that there's going to be X number and then it actually shows another screen. It says it's 31 and it's telling you you've got 3.5 hours to do this. So you're stressing out like, oh my gosh, what is this test going to be? Um, and then it was 25 questions. That was it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh, okay. But that is [00:48:30] really interesting that you have more questions if you jump straight to the test. If you test out and you have fewer questions, if you took the time to do the training. Yeah. Interesting.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Heard it here first, folks.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so some additions. So now the next section was about expenses. There's bulk uploading of bills and receipts. You can drag and drop one document that has a bunch in it. Or you can drag and drop [00:49:00] several it all at one time, and they'll all get extracted. When you create new vendors, it's got new vendor detection and it offers you to send the vendor a payment request to put in their bank information so that you can use the online bill pay and already have their payment information for direct deposit. So for small vendors, you know, you're not going to do that for like corporate ERP level stuff. But for small vendors, it's really nice to be able to, to pay your marketing. Uh. [00:49:30]

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Social media helps for 1099 season two, which is nice right up there. One other little nuance thing they've finally done with vendors, I don't know if you've noticed this. They finally have When you go in to create a new vendor, if you type a name into the company name, it's no longer trying to populate the first and the last name every single time. It actually will just try to only do the company name, and you don't have to go clean it up. Thank you. So it would always populate extra areas.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay, cool. Um, there's also something new [00:50:00] for purchase notifications if you are using a Mastercard credit card, every time there's a purchase on that card, you actually get a text message with a link reminding you to snap a photo of the receipt and upload it. So Mastercard only, but that's a, that's a neat feature. Yeah. Okay. And as I had mentioned, you can use the copy button in the upper right and change one expense form to another kind of expense form, which is really super handy [00:50:30] if you have an expense. And it really should have been a bill, you can just turn it into a bill, which is great. Um, also vendors can have multiple email addresses, you can just add them in and separate them with commas. Okay. The business network is now available to accountant users. It wasn't for a whole for a long time. With the online bill pay, they first spent some time talking about how to sign people up for it. So you do need [00:51:00] to know, like, do you do it when you create an account? Or what do you do if they already have a QuickBooks account? What are the different ways of getting people signed up for online bill pay?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Um, real quickly to clarify it. So the online bill pay, this is where your what is this talking about? We're paying other people or is this sending it out to other people and they're paying us like the instant payments is getting into below.

Alicia Katz Pollock: This is specifically expenses. So this is bill you are creating and paying a vendor or a contractor. Okay. Um, then [00:51:30] they go into detail about the different payment speeds and dollar amounts and all of that. I'm not going to go into that right now. We did talk about online bill pay in a previous episode, so I'll put the link to that in the show notes. You now also have the ability to request to increase your own processing limits. So if you are paying really high volume or high dollar amount bills, you can request a new limit and you [00:52:00] start with $200,000 of payments a day. But if you need more than that, you can put in a request and get that raised. They also removed the daily limits because people were trying to pay their bills, and they could only pay a few bills before it said, no, you've you've reached your limit. So now there is no limit anymore. You can pay as many people as you want as much as you want. And then I also just want to remind people that you can have payment release approvals [00:52:30] if you're using QuickBooks online, advanced bill payment approvals are already in it. But if you sign up for bill pay elite at any subscription level. So even if you're using QuickBooks, simple start with if you sign up for Bill Pay elite, you can still have the workflows for bill approval payments.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's a key thing for people to remember is even simple starting above all of them have. You have the ability. If you turn on the bill pay and you can update to the elite version like you're saying, which gets you additional features, um, [00:53:00] more payments that can go out and so forth.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Although I did just realize that simple start was probably a bad example. Essentials would be better because simple start is only one user, so there is nobody to approve your bills. So let's say let's say essentials in that example. Okay, shifting gears. Then they talk about the banking feed and the bank transactions. We've spent a lot of time talking about the bank feeds. In this [00:53:30] podcast.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You're going to want to know the basics again about the new stuff in there. So the match categorize what the sparkle is for client communication attachments. Basically all the columns, the different things. Be familiar with what's there because that is stuff that could be within the test.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, there's definitely emphasis on the client requests and asking for more information and asking for receipts. So that's something that they definitely emphasize. The [00:54:00] next area that they also emphasized was the statement extraction, that up until now, if the bank feed did not give you the transaction date range that you needed, you had to go to your bank and export either a QBO dot QBO file or a dot xls file or a CSV file and then import it. But there is now a new experience that when you go to upload, you can now upload a PDF or a Jpeg or a PNG [00:54:30] file or a h e. I see that's the Mac one, and it will now scrape the documents and go grab the bank transactions off of the document and then put them in the banking feed for you to do normally. So you no longer have to log in at the bank. If you have the statements, you can just drop the statements in and it will be able to do imports from paper.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: One of the other things that they've added into the whole process is [00:55:00] when you're going to start to reconcile your different accounts. They have a new AI powered. It's the same statement extraction, and it can actually grab and pull up the statement, right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm. Yeah. Um, I think they it's in, it's definitely in here somewhere, but it does. So you do need to have some familiarity with the new reconciliation option. Um, where it does pull out the, um, show you the differences between what's in QBO and what's in [00:55:30] the statement. Um, I find it cluttered but helpful, especially when figuring out what's on the statement that's not in QBO, which is the one thing that the old reconciliation did not have at all. Next, they talked about the AI report insights that when you're running specifically a PNL or a balance sheet, these are the only two reports where we see it, the accounting AI in plus and advanced and into an [00:56:00] enterprise suite. So this is not available in essentials and below. But when you pull up your balance sheet or or PNL, there's a new button that says ask a question in the upper right of the report. And so you can ask it things about the about the reports. There's also little sparkles next to some of the totals where it's finding anomalies and trends. And then when you either click on it or you click the insights button that's there, it will show you graphs and [00:56:30] charts of what it's seeing that where the normal pattern is breaking and it will even tell you which transactions are the anomalies and show you in a chart. And you can even download a PDF of the report. So it is something that I have been using.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: A key thing to remember with it is they've done a great job of tucking it away right towards the top area, where it's by the other controls. It will always sit there and it's something you cannot turn off. [00:57:00] It is always going to be there if you want to use it, but it's always there.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. However, they don't print, so they're just when they're there on screen, you don't have to worry about it when printing. Um, but I like it because it's that first stage of analysis that so many people, you know, they've been talking about going into client advisory and elevating our services and a lot of bookkeepers who are the kind of bookkeepers where they're like, oh, this expense goes in this bucket and this expense [00:57:30] goes in this bucket. Can't actually interpret what the business activity. And so I really do like the insights that are now popping up and telling you what's increasing, what's decreasing. Is that good or bad and why the next step will be, well, what do you do about it? But that's not on the recertification test.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So another area they focus on to, of course, is the brand new Intuit Account suite, as we keep calling it IaaS. Um, right [00:58:00] now is the opportunity, of course, that you, you can be choosing to switch over before it becomes kind of mandatory to start to check it out. And they're going to go through and kind of show you some of the different functionality where things are at. Um, a key thing to know is when you're making this switch, what happens to different people's settings? Like if you have a whole bunch of employees, everything that you had previously will actually come over to the new one with the same settings. So [00:58:30] you're not going to have to go in and start adding people to different clients again. All that, it's going to be a smooth transition on that side of it, right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And in addition, the things that you see when you're in accountant Suite are based on your permissions. And so you only see things related to the clients that you have access to. You also only see things about the firm books. You know, if you're a team member, you might not see everything because you have to be a firm admin to [00:59:00] see certain details. So there's a slightly different experience, whether you're a firm admin or a standard user. Still talking about accountants. Um, but they'll have different experiences. So if you're looking for a feature and you don't see it, it's because you don't have that permission.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: A big area that they, they focus on to inside of it. This is actually, there are a couple aspects of, of the is that I liked. One of them is when you go to your clients, the list is different. [00:59:30] Now you can see more information such as like if they have connected apps and there are syncing issues, you can see if there are issues with like disconnected bank accounts, uh, you know, multiple different things that are all spread very easily onto one, you know, visual spreadsheet to see everything. I found that to be very helpful.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Very much. And the IAS is split into two sections. [01:00:00] So there's a service delivery area up at the top and then firm operations down below. So the firm operations is where my books used to be is down under firm operations. And then up under service delivery. There's a work center, a client insights center, and the books close. And the work heading was the old work session section. And I teach this in my, um, in my old QBO a class [01:00:30] that a lot of people aren't using these at all that you can actually do task management on both for your firm and for your clients right inside QBO. And this is not new. It's just really underutilized. But you can do, um, you know, task reminders to do your reconciliations, for example, or maybe you need to assign somebody the task of breaking up a loan into principal and interest. You can now make a [01:01:00] task for that and even attach the transaction to it and tell somebody, hey, can you edit this and split it for us?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: This kind of came out of the like the old school trick we all used to do was to create a recurring transaction for $0 to remind you that you had to record a sum, a depreciation thing, or something of that nature. Now, instead of having to do that, I have this weird thing that's sitting in your books. You can create these tasks with specific reminders and so forth to, to zero in on it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. [01:01:30] So I would definitely check those out. Now, I know a lot of you have task management software already, but I have found it easy to, uh, take a transaction and communicate with a client about one transaction, um, or assign something to a team. The other two features that are in that top service delivery section are books close and Client Insights, which are both paid services, or at least they will be paid as of July. The client [01:02:00] in the client insights is part of the accelerate, which is, I think, going to be $150 a month. And then the books close is a per client cost of $8 per month, but both of those are up at the top. Now, they didn't go into detail at all about books close and how books close works, but they did talk about the the client insights interface a little bit.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And just real quickly, since we're not showing the screen with that stuff, everything you've been talking about on the, on the [01:02:30] inside of IaaS, you would go to your all apps and then under all apps, you have a top section now called Service delivery. That. And then the bottom piece is the firm operations. So that's where everything is now located and hidden.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Now this is something we can't show you. So you just have to trust trust us on that one. Okay. Then one of the other innovations is the training manager dashboard. And so this is where you can look [01:03:00] at your your whole team. If you are in a firm that has multiple cast members or bookkeepers in it, you can assign ProAdvisor Academy trainings to them and give them deadlines, even either suggested deadlines or hard deadlines for which courses or certifications you want them to do. Now, here's something that I was really excited to see. And that is that there is now a new global 1099 dashboard, where up until the Intuit [01:03:30] Accountant Suite came out, you had no eagle eye on 1099 for your clients, and you had to go into every client's file in order to see their status. Now you can see the 1099 status right up in one dashboard. You know who has forms that need to be filled out? Which ones have been submitted? You can now see it all.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And that's under that service delivery area under the all Apps as well. Everybody.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Exactly. Okay. They [01:04:00] then go into the differences between the core Intuit Accountants suite, basically the free functionality, and then compare it to Qbo versus Intuit Accountants suite. And so there is some there is some innovation to it. And it is still free, which is nice.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And so if you go into the accelerate program, there's going to be additional things like extended firm visibility with the advanced insights and anomaly [01:04:30] detection. So that's an important part. That's the client insights piece. You get anomaly detection and the advanced insights. You also get the instant answers about, you know, individual clients using their AI and integrated client insight and team groups to be able to bulk assign role role based access. So they're going to be, they're doing user groups in a sense. An example of that is like, if you service multiple industries and maybe you have certain clients that are only working in one industry, you [01:05:00] can kind of create teams with that as well to make things a little bit easier. Um, it's important to know that when we're talking about the accelerate versus core, another aspect of both of those is they both have AI capability where you can ask questions, but the number of tokens that are available per month changes. I believe it's 200. At the core version versus a thousand at the higher version, if I remember correctly, we could check that, but that's good to know.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All [01:05:30] right. And so then this is now where everything that we just talked about was on both Recertifications, both level one and level two. Now we're going to go into some of the the questions that are just on the level two exam. And the first one is project management, that there's specific project management AI in QBO advanced and into an enterprise suite, including that ability. [01:06:00] I had actually mentioned it earlier, but I wasn't specific that you can upload contracts and proposals into a project and it will pre-populate the whole project details for you so you can create a project from scratch from it, or update an existing project. Or you can just store them as an attachment. But it does have the ability to create a project based on a proposal or a contract.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah, it will actually go even deeper. You can use some of the project planning through [01:06:30] by creating project tasks, budget creation through using upload spreadsheets, of course, estimate creation, cost allocation. They're really diving deeper in to be able to do some of this job costing stuff, which is really neat on the project basis.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And if you are a company who is using the project center, I would seriously take a look at upgrading to advanced and even IES because, you know, whip reporting and a whole lot of [01:07:00] automations, you can do project stages. Anyway, I'm digressing, but just want to let you know that. Okay. Um, then they go into the modern reports, they point out that the reports center is now called Reports and Analytics. They talk a lot about the modern view and how to do customizations using the customize button, and all the different sections of the customize button with filters and columns and grouping and comparison reports [01:07:30] and all the different parts of the menu. So they go into excruciating detail to make sure that you know how to use the new reporting functions.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: This was an area that was also something to pay attention to, is there are now the scheduling option or the ability to like export and send reporting to people. Um, previously you could, you could schedule reports, but it would be an individual one and it could only be attached as like an Excel file. Now you can set up a schedule [01:08:00] for group reports as well if you wanted to. And you can choose between an Excel, a PDF or a CSV file. Um, that is an attachment to send out to them. So, uh, there's the two pieces. It's the formats that you can send it, and then it's scheduling either single ones or custom a group of reports if you want as well. Yep.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay, good. Um, something else that is new is the calculated fields where, um, in the customized menu of the reports, [01:08:30] there's a new section on a data tab called calculated fields. And uh, here you can specify the calculations that you want, whether it's a percentage or a number or currency format. And you can type in your own formulas and select the columns and the rows and the operators. Now this is a topic that I would like to do a whole episode about.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I would agree there's a lot of different industries that could use at different ways. Um, [01:09:00] and it'd be great to do something where we kind of show some of the examples. The nice part of this, if I remember correctly, is of course, when you're going and you're customizing and you're adding these formulas and such, you can save it that way, right to where it then automatically is pulling back up. So if you're always having to go in and make adjustments every time to figure it out, you could use something like this to save some time down the road by automating part of it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Especially if you're exporting reports to Excel so that you can do additional calculations. This is going to mean that you don't [01:09:30] have to leave QBO for it. There's also the KPI scorecard in advanced and higher, and KPIs are key performance indicators. And this is a great way of doing analysis on the health of a business beyond what's their net profit and how much money is in the bank and in their cash flow. So definitely play with the KPI scorecard for this.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: What's neat about it is they're going to have a whole library of different KPIs that you can just use, or you can [01:10:00] actually go and create your own custom one as well and save it to the dashboard for for future use. Of course.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's totally cool. Then they point out a feature that's in QBO advanced and higher inside the reports and analytics. There's another dashboard. Now, this is the one that I was talking about earlier that I don't have and I have not seen. But the when I was looking in the training, the different charts that they had blew my mind. And I really [01:10:30] want to get my hands on this one. So I will keep an eye out for the dashboards. And where are they?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: To give a little extra context, because I do happen to have it with one of my clients, but it's in a client file, so we can't exactly show it. Some of the dashboard they have. Again, they have default ones that you can pull up like profitability, cash flow balance sheet. Um, they have accounts receivable, accounts payable and revenue sales performance. And then you can customize and create other things as well. And it's what we're talking about is there'll be a visual [01:11:00] graph, and then there'll be your little bubbles of information across the top. So it's visual storytelling about the finances of the business or the health of the business.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And, you know, we know that there's different dashboards and overview screens all the way throughout the software. But when they demonstrated this, this one was different. This one had dashboards with like an AP that had a visual graph that I couldn't even interpret. I paused it to figure out what was going on there. So it's kind of, it's definitely a level up. So I look forward to seeing [01:11:30] it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I think part of what you were speaking about actually, is the next piece that that's offered at the higher level is this finance AI and I playing around trying to see what this is about in one of my clients, had it generate the full report. And I have to tell you, it was sexy. It looked really, really good. Um, you can have it set up, you can run certain ranges and you can have it kind of automatically refreshing. You can choose what you want to be on there or not. And then once you've got the [01:12:00] way you like, you can export basically, you can create a PDF. It's one of two ways you either export it as a PDF, or you can do a print, which then takes it to print as a PDF, but it looks a little different onto it. Um, it has interactive AI on the inside the software, but of course that does not translate over to a printed version, of course.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right. Um, yeah. And to find this report at the top of the report center, look for a blue bar at the very top. That's [01:12:30] an AI alert that says I generated a financial summary for April to give you key insights into your finances. And then you click the review summary button and it gives you this really beautiful report. I agree with Matthew. It's really spectacular. And being able to send that to your clients is going to make you look like a genius, even if you don't know what's on the page.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: This was my takeaway from the test that was finding this piece of it. And it's awesome. So yeah, play with it, folks.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Um, and as, [01:13:00] as spot said, it either refreshes every 24 hours or it has a refresh icon. So if you run it and then make changes, you might have to refresh it again. And then at the very end of the training component of it, they have a learn how to section that has giant lists of links to learn about all the specific features. So if anything that we said is something that you have not played with at all, it has additional materials and I will actually put the links to [01:13:30] the worksheets and the what's new and the FAQs in the show notes as well. So if you go into your podcasting app and then you can click on all of these links and get there, they even created a ProAdvisor glossary, which I thought was, was really cool. So I will have all of those available to you. All right, we did it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So that was a pretty long list of all the stuff that was covered. Basically [01:14:00] a quick summary of what you're going to be learning through those courses. Again, as a quick recap of the stuff that you're going to be learning throughout all of this whole training is you're going to be focusing on the new layout, the new, the new way everything looks within the Intuit Accounting Suite, just even as QuickBooks online with the new sidebars, everything else, they focus heavily on understanding how AI plays a part now in the process that it's part of the software and you can utilize it, [01:14:30] but they also remind you that it still requires human input and we're the final say over it. So it's the expansion. From there, they focus, they add to discuss. Of course, the bank feeds all the features, functions, everything else that's happened to that part, uh, what else am I forgetting? Just as a quick recap that they had Alicia.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Um, everything is on it. Yeah. As you look around, uh, just, you know, and, you know, do your own self study, take a, take a look [01:15:00] around the interface, click on everything that you haven't already clicked on because, you know, a lot of people have either it's been tax season or a lot of people are resistant to the changes. Go play around with it as part of your study and like root out little things, because the whole idea is that you can provide better services to your clients. And as AI is taking over the analysis, this opens up a huge opportunity for us to do the analysis. Our [01:15:30] clients want it. They they don't know how to do it themselves. My clients are actually. Interestingly, I've had clients for ten years who are, who are now for the first time saying, well, okay, Alicia, that's great, but what do I do about my margin? And so this is going to actually start giving you the tools to level up your services and your professionalism.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: For those who are watching on YouTube, we would love to hear from you. What's one of the features? What was your Wow feature? What's the thing that you're going to go back and [01:16:00] share with others. We want to know what you liked so we can, uh, you know, share it with others as well. Leave a comment.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. Awesome. All right, so spot what's going on in your world.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, for me right now, happy to be back and helping or be on this show at this time. I've been busy for year end stuff and getting people booked with, uh, just building up their business at the moment. So heavily focused on getting client work done.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Excellent. Excellent. [01:16:30]

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And yourself what, what what's going on for you?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, I am entering a new phase of the trainings that I've been given. Um, I have gone through the entire interface and now I'm focusing on the different versions of QuickBooks online and what distinguishes them. So I started a couple weeks ago with QuickBooks Ledger and solopreneur. And now I'm doing advanced and then I'll be doing Intuit Accounting Suite. And then in the [01:17:00] summer we'll be doing Enterprise suite as well. And so for me, this is like the light at the end of the tunnel because I've done all of the, the, the basic rerecording. And I also am going to be adding some new classes specifically about an overall about the AI. You know, I've been building the AI into all the courses. So the accounting, the accounting AI is all in the bank feeds course and the reporting AI is all in the reports courses. So I haven't needed to to do that, but I am going to do one course that's kind of [01:17:30] an overview of what AI means in the context of QuickBooks.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So what I'm hearing basically is for those who are listening, but who have not subscribed or joined to, to learn from you, from your different videos, everything else, there is no better time than right now with all of the new changes to the dashboards, everything else you're going in and you're going to be helping everybody understand how to use that the best way possible. So where do people go to sign up and check all that out.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So everything that we have is at Royal wise.com, and [01:18:00] you can take any one of these classes individually, either the live webinar, which is then recorded and turned into an on demand course. So if I mention a course that you missed live, you can sign up for it any time. But even better, become a member. All of the members of our community get full access to the entire library, so you don't have to pay for individual courses. You can just go pop in on whatever course that you want to, and you're automatically enrolled for all of the live events.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's awesome. That's really good.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. [01:18:30] All right. So we did it. Matthew.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: This was fun. Thank you so much. And I, you know, hope this helps people. Again, leave a comment. Let us know you passed your research. We want to hear about it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Absolutely. All right. Thank you everybody. And we will see you in the next one.