Pricing vs. Features: Where's the Beef?

Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding!

Alicia Kats Pollock: Hey everybody, welcome to this week's edition of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast. And let's just leave us in laughing. Don't even don't even edit this out. Um, hey, this is Alicia Pollock from real.com and I'm joined by my good buddy spot, Matthew Fulton from Parkway Business Solutions. How are you doing, spot?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Doing even better now, Alicia. [00:00:30] I'm excited to be here today. Thanks.

Alicia Kats Pollock: I'm glad to have you. So, um, our episode today is I'm calling it where's the beef? And it's about the conversation about pricing versus new features. And the inspiration for this episode came from two different directions. One is spot and I were having a conversation about how to present the messaging to our clients about the pricing increase, which just happened a week or so ago. And [00:01:00] then also I was on Reddit and I was reading a thread that somebody made where he's like, well, where is she? I don't know. I was like, well, you know, Intuit increased my, my, my software 41%. And what new features and functionality did I get for that money? And well, first of all, the price increase wasn't 41%. It was 20%.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And second of all, they didn't know that, um, you were behind the [00:01:30] scenes ready to introduce all of the tons of list of features that are actually added, right?

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. So my reaction to it was literally standing in my bathroom dictating a giant list of all sorts of new features and functionality that was actually in the software. And, you know, my perspective, I maintain that we just spent the whole last year getting used to the new QuickBooks on the Intuit platform and learning the new navigation and rebuilding our [00:02:00] muscle memory and just getting caught back up to where we were before the interface change. And for the most part, people's feedback about the new interface has been a positive one. But that also means that we haven't had any time whatsoever to explore, to go check out the new features and the new things that are popping up. And some of the changes are so natural that we don't even notice them happening.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah, I would agree. You know, it took just a bit of time to figure out setting up your own bookmarks on the side [00:02:30] so you could navigate just as quickly. But there are a lot of functionality improvements as we've kind of talked about now over the past couple of months, things are smoother.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Mhm. Yeah. It's to the point now where they're quashing bugs so fast, you don't even notice that there's a bug anymore. Or, and I also want to encourage people that if something didn't work and you put in feedback about it, go check it out again in a couple of weeks. And sometimes it takes longer than a couple of weeks, but things that weren't working now start working. [00:03:00] But there's no grand announcement that things have changed.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Well, you just shared with me the whole Cannae, um, back page. I know that's a conversation for a different time, but, um, Intuit has its own cannae page where it's got this stuff that's there asking, should we work on things? They are working on things they've already finished. My mind was blown looking at that. So it's pretty, pretty cool.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. If you haven't already been to the canny board, you can go to QuickBooks dot canny canny.io, [00:03:30] and then you log in and create an account and it has different development boards where you can go in and put in feedback about the bank feeds, payroll, modern reports. There's even new boards for the books, clothes as well. And so when you find a bug, I mean, we still should be putting in it in on feedback. But going here, you actually start a conversation with the developers they'll actually ask you for screenshots and ask if they can take a look at your computer. And then there's a change log reporting [00:04:00] the different changes that they've made. And so it's absolutely fabulous. Um, we actually did a whole episode on the canny board called the canny can can. I think it was episode 130. So go check it out. It happened in January. So if you go back through our archive to January, go look for the canny can, can and will and, and find out all about it. But I encourage everybody to go check it out.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So this kind of leads us to our topic of the day, which, you know, the, the price increases that are [00:04:30] happening, discussing also what are the new features and as you touched base on ultimately, how do we get that message out to the right people?

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah, I mean, I do my best with this podcast. I send out emails to all of my clients, and here I am posting on Reddit and Facebook and Buffer and all of those. So, I mean, all I can do is communicate as best as possible. I wish Intuit was doing more besides firm [00:05:00] of the future.com, which is the place to go. And I highly recommend everybody goes to firm of the future.com. And, you know, I learned stuff from Murph at Insightful Accounting a lot. Um, but you know, since the Intuit Trainer writer network folded, um, we, the, the army of people who are out there saying, hey, have you checked out this new feature? Look what I just found. Um, I'm, you know, I had to trademark look what I found. And that's kind of like my calling at this point is pulling out [00:05:30] all the new what's news and trumpeting them to the world. Make sure people know.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So why don't we, um, for those watching us on YouTube and such, why don't we share the article that kind of details out some of the stuff and we can kind of talk through. And what do you think?

Alicia Kats Pollock: I think that is a great idea. Um, let me go ahead and get that shared. So where [00:06:00] we are right now is on firm of the future.com. And there's an article called the QuickBooks Online August Pricing Changes and Product Updates, Frequently Asked questions. And the link will be in the show notes. And so this is an article all about the pricing and what's behind the pricing. And, um, so let's go ahead and kind of go through it a little bit.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So obviously, I think the most important part to [00:06:30] everybody is going to be is they call it their core workflow improvements. And, uh, a big area they've been focusing on heavily is the bank feeds, of course. Right. That's where a lot of the magic happens.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Um, yeah, for me, for me, that's like the core feature in the hallmark of QuickBooks online. So I consider it the central hub of all my activity.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. So they, as you can see here is, you know, transaction categorization. They, that it's getting smarter about learning from [00:07:00] what we're doing is basically what they're, they're talking about through here, right?

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. And this is something that a lot of people don't realize is that when they first turned on the new banking feeds, a lot of people complained that this isn't better than what I had before. And that's because you actually have to build your own AI engine on a file by file basis. And so yeah, we all went through a period where it was not auto categorizing appropriately, but once it sees one of everything in your company's file, [00:07:30] then you've got your accuracy and you've got your history. So I think most most listeners at this point have been on bank feeds for a while. And if you haven't made the switch over to the new bank feeds, you need to. It's time. Um, but now I find that my bank feed is doing a great job I don't have a lot of issues with with incorrect categorizations anymore.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So one of the areas where this may not be quite as helpful to some people, if your process requires you to have [00:08:00] every transaction in and you're just doing matches, then your, your workflow won't change much because you will already be pulling stuff in, of course, but that's also a good thing. It's going to learn that and it's going to maybe stop trying to like suggest stuff quite as much for you, which is great. Um, the next one, PayPal, this is one I've got a client that PayPal has been the bane of my existence for quite some time. So I need to test this out pretty quick here and see if it's finally doing some magic of, [00:08:30] you know, recognizing as it says, the bank deposit, um, if a bank deposit and PayPal transaction represent the same sale and trying to match it appropriately, um, sorting through that can be very, very challenging.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. I'm really happy to see that they had released a new PayPal integration. I guess it's going on about a year now. And that was one of those where I was like, well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, because it took a while for it to really get up and running. But what I like about the PayPal integration now [00:09:00] is it does map to your products and services so that it can make new sales receipts on the fly. But one of the things it was not handling well were the transfers and I was getting duplicates, but it looks like they have quashed that and that's now working.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Beautiful. And then you've got the client document requests. So that's been in there for a bit of time of course. But I think just getting people more, making it easier to make those requests, making it easier to get the responses back and get the information to the right place.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Mhm. [00:09:30] Um, also, one of the things I like about the bank feed now is that you can rearrange the columns and resize them as well. So I personally like to put my vendor name and my category on the left hand side and then have the reference information on the right hand side. So I go through and I flip my bank feed around for every client.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now, is that locking and saving in the file, I hope please.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Please.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yes. Okay. I'm imagining once you do.

Alicia Kats Pollock: It, once you do it, it stays there.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's beautiful. Yeah. Talk [00:10:00] about locking. You've also got. And this this is actually pretty neat. The ability to lock accounts like parent accounts. Um, so if you have parent and sub accounts, you can make sure the top one is locked and no transactions are going into it. And they always go into sub. So you don't have to do that part of the cleanup at the end of the month every time. It's phenomenal.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Everybody who has seen it has been excited to see it. I haven't heard anybody criticize that particular one. That one's fantastic.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So invoicing and autopilot. I haven't actually used this much yet. Um any have [00:10:30] you had much experience with it?

Alicia Kats Pollock: I think it's in beta. I have not even seen it. So all we can do is reflect what Intuit is saying about it, that you can drop in multiple documents, and QuickBooks will create invoices in bulk and then send them to you for your approval and then notify you when you get paid.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Interesting. Okay, I've got a client I can actually try that out with right away. So maybe I'll report back on that piece.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah, I'd love to hear it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: They've [00:11:00] also added to that, of course, like the automated payment reminders. So sending out to clients, I, I'm sure we can really fully customize how frequently it's doing that. So at the beginning, I don't want it to be too annoying after a while. I want it to be extremely annoying if they haven't paid, of course.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Absolutely. There's also the ability to do bulk editing, bulk edit where you can tell it. For example, update the payment terms for Acme Corp to net 30 and it will go [00:11:30] through all the invoices and update them without having to do it individually.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Okay. That's pretty huge.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah, yeah. Um, and then there's also push notifications when somebody pays you so that you have real time visibility into your cash flow.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So a big thing that we've heard about, even just in the, you know, the, in the last excuse me, in the know was the auto categorization and what's happening with that? Um, what, what's what's new? Alicia. [00:12:00]

Alicia Kats Pollock: So they have, um, have rebranded QuickBooks Live and are now calling it Intuit experts. We actually talked about this in last week's episode. And so when you're using Qbo plus, you have the option of turning on in direct billed client files, the ability for the Intuit experts to go in and validate the accuracy of the bank feed transactions in the back, in the background, so that you're actually getting an extra set of, [00:12:30] of hands on it. And, you know, again, we assure you, we've talked about it in the last few episodes that if the client is firm billed, the clients don't see it at all. You have to turn it on. And if the client is paying for their own subscription, if you have if an account user is attached, it's off by default. And if they turn it on, it tells them to go talk to you first.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now, this may be covered in an area below, but it's kind of in the same kind of concept of the categorization [00:13:00] of bank feeds. One of the things that we just recently noticed was the policies that are new also for like expense policies in the bank feeds that you can establish, right. And. Set up structure. If something is over X amount, it requires an additional approval, you know, different functionality like that. That's kind of a behind the scenes add on that we know of at least.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah, I've seen a couple files with it, but I have not. I've seen signs of [00:13:30] it, but not having it in action. And but I do know that it's related to the books close. So basically what spot's talking about is the. You can set your expense policies like does it need to have a vendor or not? What's the threshold for capitalization? Is it $2,500 or do you want to change it? And so it's going to give you some controls over the books, the both the books close and the bank feeds activity. So [00:14:00] keep an eye out for that. It's coming soon. If you don't already have it, look for policies inside your banking feed.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Beautiful. So back to the article itself. It starts talking about the reporting with the modern reporting. Um, having everybody changing over that transition. It's it's here everybody. So you're going to want to get used to using the modern reports. They have done some really cool stuff, especially with some of the management reports where you can add in, you know, P like different graphs, charts, more information [00:14:30] to present the financials to your clients.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Mhm. Okay. Uh, we've also seen the new business intelligence. So that's the little sum of the sparkles that show up across QBO. And especially the Intuit assist in the upper right hand corner, where you can go ahead and ask it questions and get business insights. You can tell it to compare scenarios and just ask it questions like, you know, like, what's my liquidity ratio? And it'll go ahead [00:15:00] and, and tell you, but it's really nice to be able to ask it questions instead of going and running a whole bunch of reports and having to cobble those answers together.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now, I think it's also kind of important to note, um, Intuit intelligence, which is a portion of this. It is only available currently to the admin users. So, um, you know, if you've got just standard users, Intuit states it's specifically for admin users at this time.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Okay. There's also a limit to how much you can use the, the one in [00:15:30] the upper right hand corner that there's a limit on how many chats you can do a month, and I think they're going to. I've heard that they're going to start charging for after you reach your threshold or reach your limit, but I haven't seen that actually in action yet.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. They had mentioned before that you could do like an add on subscription for that specifically to, to have more use of it, but we'll have to report back on that part as well.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah, we need to see it in the wild first. When we're talking about the business intelligence, they've also added [00:16:00] KPIs and dashboards for going all the way down to essentials. So Essentials and Plus now have a key performance indicators, scorecard and pre-built dashboards for cash flow and balance sheet. So that um, and so that you can see at a glance what's happening in the company.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now I believe those functionalities that will be in software, you don't have the same ability to add them into the management reports like you do with advanced or, um, so forth. Right. But [00:16:30] you can visually see it in the program.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah, I haven't tried it in the reports, but it would be really cool if we could put those in the reports. Yes. Yeah. And I do want to actually point out that these features have been in QuickBooks online advanced and they're moving them down to essentials and plus. So that is part of the, the logic in the pricing changes that you're getting these new tools. Okay. Now QuickBooks Online advance also had its own huge price increase. So let's just focus for a minute [00:17:00] on some of the things that are new in, in advanced.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So the first big change that has come out with QuickBooks Online Advanced is it's around the reporting of their analytics, of course, and they've now added in a full financial reporting suite behind the scenes, basically behind the scenes. It gives you the ability for custom management and industry specific reports, uh, self serving analytics, and then the AI powered forecasting, which is really cool. You go in and it will actually build [00:17:30] on the spot. A custom report for you based on your numbers and what you want. And you can choose what areas, what graphs, anything you want in there.

Alicia Kats Pollock: All right. That's that's really cool. Another feature that they're adding bill pay elite is now included in QuickBooks online advanced at no additional cost, whereas it was $90 a month. And then you had some transaction fees. So now the ACH is completely free. I think they even took off the limit [00:18:00] of how many you can actually send, I think across all different levels. And there's custom approval workflows, there's audit trails, and it also includes 1099, e-filing. And so if you were subscribed to Bill Pay elite, that was $540 a year just for that. And now it's part of Qbo advanced.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: It's going to be important when we talk about the price change. So that's it definitely helps validate it for sure.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: They've also done some industries, you [00:18:30] know, specific solutions. Big one, of course, right off the bat is the construction. They've been working pretty hard on, uh, setting up the ability to do budgets by phase IIA billing or AI billing, I should say, and change order management, which for, you know, larger and growing construction companies is an absolute must.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah, I was really happy to see that change orders were now included because I've always either just had to make a new estimate or go back in on an estimate and add some lines adding and subtracting. So I'm very [00:19:00] happy to see that.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: It kind of leads also to consulting architecture, creative, you know, project based firms that could be as accountants as well. Think about it. Right. Um, we can do project margins, project budgets, cost versus budget. And like we said already, the change order management.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah, basically a lot of the development that they've been doing in enterprise Suite, they're taking some of those improvements to the project center and dropping them down to advanced, which is a great.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Great solution. Yeah.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So [00:19:30] now this is the new stuff, right, Alicia. This is the continuous clean books.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. So this is one that we spoke about in the episode last time about, um, about Intuit experts and continuously what they're calling continuously clean books is specifically in QBO advanced and it's the Intuit experts. It's the old QB live who are actually working in the file to categorize and match [00:20:00] transactions in the banking feed and make sure that they're accurate. And so they're doing regular check ins. Um, and then they do a, also a meeting with the client each quarter so that they can take a look at anomalies because an anomaly could be incorrectly categorized data, or it could be a trend that you need to pay attention to. So they're actually introducing those meetings to the client. And as a reminder, I'm going to say it every single time, is that [00:20:30] it's available to the clients who don't have accountants attached. If there is an accountant attached that's firm billed, the client doesn't even see it, although you have the option to turn it on. And if the client is direct billed but attached to you as a client, if they if they activate it, they will be encouraged to check with you.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yes.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yes.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So everybody's probably wondering about prices since that's kind of what we've been talking about [00:21:00] here. And we can do somewhat of a summary of the different functions again. Um, on the screen we've got the data table provided by Intuit that tells us the different prices and the functionality, the different levels that you get. So Alicia, do you want to share the pricings.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Okay. Uh, so simple start is staying the same at 38 a month. Essentials is going up to 85 a month. Plus is going up to 140 a month, [00:21:30] and advanced is going up to 340 a month.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And I'll put the note for those that are only listening podcast wise, that 340 has two asterisks at the end.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Scroll down to the bottom to go find out what those mean. Right. And so then they also include a chart showing what all the different features are in all of the different levels. And you know, I used to be able to rattle this off in my head, but at this point, keeping track of [00:22:00] which AI features are in, which version is going to be a little bit more challenging. So, um, so for example, the Intuit Intelligence chat is available across all of the different ones, but the accounting AI, that's all the bank feed improvements are not in simple start. They're only in essentials and up. Which makes me wonder what's going to happen with simple start people. Are they going to get bad data? Does the bank feed not work? [00:22:30]

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Um should still work the same way I would think as it does currently. But you know, not have the I there's part of me that's a little concerned on the auto categorization. I want to know if I can turn that off if I need to. I'm really worried I'm going to wake up one day and find all a whole bunch of transactions that have been magically auto categorized and accepted.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Well, I think they know that we need those guardrails and not just unless you set a [00:23:00] rule to auto add.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Or you tell it to just go ahead and do whatever you feel like. That's a danger zone.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Skynet is real and it starts with accounting.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Oh, okay. Um, I think with the accounting AI, the part that's probably not in simple start are the flags that are on the P and L and balance sheet where it's recognizing those anomalies. I'm guessing that's the part that's withheld.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yes. Okay. That makes sense. So then we've got the conversational business intelligence. [00:23:30] Um, that is one of the newer functionalities. And that's going to be across all of the different ones with it says with limited capacity. So we'll have to figure out exactly what that means.

Alicia Kats Pollock: I think that just means what we were saying, that you only get a data limit for the questions that you're asking or how many questions you ask. Okay.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Kpis dashboards currently only in advanced are coming all the way down to essentials not available in simple start.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Right. And [00:24:00] then the reporting and analytics suite is new to advanced. Okay.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Last, uh, during one of our last episodes, we talked about the new, um, intelligent onboarding, uh, where anybody who's just getting started. They'll have a whole new process to get onboarded that also kind of and that's across all of the different software versions, I should say, in QuickBooks online.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. And it's also available whether or not they're attached [00:24:30] to you as an accountant. Basically, anytime somebody makes a new qbo file, the Intuit experts are going to be checking in to make sure that everything's okay. Do they need help with the chart of accounts? Do they need to learn how to use the bank feed? Do they need to turn different features on and off? Are they connected to payments and bill pay? Do they need payroll? All of those?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Exactly. And that's where. So auto categorization as we mentioned already, that's plus and above only. And [00:25:00] then the continuous clean books that's advanced only. So another big one of the other add ons that is of great value of course is the bill pay option, right.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. So the bill pay basic is going to continue to be free and available in all of the different options. But for a while, bill pay was not even in simple start. That was what distinguished simple start from From essentials was that it didn't have any accounts payable. But now that's not a distinction [00:25:30] anymore at all. And as we mentioned, Bill pay elite is going to be free in advanced.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now if just for clarification wise, the actual like bill pay service itself is free. There is a per charge on the ashes that um for depending on the ACH is you're sending out. Is that correct?

Alicia Kats Pollock: Well the first five were always free in, in all the different versions, but I was just looking at it with a client yesterday and it didn't have transaction number limits [00:26:00] anymore. And so I'm wondering if now all ACH is free.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Beautiful. I just had a client asking me about this yesterday, so now I get to report that back. Beautiful.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yep. All right. Another feature that's a new one that I still haven't seen in mine, but I'm waiting for is buy now, pay later using a firm. And that's going to be in all the different versions. Um, that I'm hearing people.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Mixed.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Reviews, pushback [00:26:30] about this a little bit. Um, but I want to assure you that if you actually look on any shopping cart now it's in Amazon, it's in eBay, it's in Etsy buy now. Pay later is a standard payment method now, especially the millennial generation or Gen Z, where they don't have credit cards and they don't want to rack up debt. They're putting everything on a buy now, pay later. That basically says, okay, you're going to pay $100. And it says, okay, well, you can [00:27:00] pay it $10 now. And here's how much we're going to charge you in fees. You as the, as the company, get your money completely in up, front with the same merchant service rates that you already enjoy. So there's zero change to you. But it does mean that your clients can break the payments up without you having to make a payment plan for them.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yes. And then the invoicing on autopilot. So this is [00:27:30] a newer functionality still in beta. Uh, this kind of ties in with the ability that you can set up a recurring invoice, have it sent to a person to where they kind of still approve it, and then it auto can be auto charged, if I remember correctly on that.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. This is one that's still kind of a mystery to me. So we will, um, have more information and actually talk about how it's implemented. Once we actually have, have something we can demo it on.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, I've had, um, correlated [00:28:00] to this and I'm hoping this will kind of fix it. I've had a major issue in the past where we set up recurring transactions, usually sales receipt to where they're set up to auto, um, bill and multiple times those sales receipts will air quotes process, but they never got charged. And then we end up having to find after the fact like, hey, it wasn't this wasn't charged and going back to the other person. So I'm hoping this will help maybe fix some of that and smooth out that workflow for us.

Alicia Kats Pollock: You know, I'm glad that you brought that [00:28:30] up because I actually did some troubleshooting this week for one of my clients where there was a whole bunch of money in a balance sheet account called credit card receivables. And I was like, well, what's credit card receivables? And it was all of those sales sales receipts that did not process. So keep an eye out. Everybody who's listening to this should like drop everything and go look at your client files or put it on your on your due diligence list. Because if there's something in credit card receivables, [00:29:00] it means that like spot just said the sales receipt ran, but the money never hit the bank.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: It's the the other place where I caught it right off the bat a long time ago was doing the reconciliation, of course, because it creates a transaction, puts it in there, but there's no money. So, um, don't want to go too far of a side tangent, but money is how everybody pays everything. So it is important folks pay attention to it.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. Okay.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Squirrel.

Alicia Kats Pollock: But a squirrel, the kind of squirrel [00:29:30] that I, that I love. All right. Um, and then the, the last section in the feature list was industry solutions. And I think we mentioned all of these already that the there's now sales orders and purchase orders in, in plus and advanced. And then, um, we already talked about the, the construction tools and the advanced financials. So I think we're good all on that section.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So key reminder pricing wise, just real fast, simple [00:30:00] start $38 a month. Essentials, $85 a month plus 140 per month advanced 340 per month. But it also includes the bill pay elite as part of the pricing and other additional features.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Mhm. And also, just to be specific, that QuickBooks online ledger, um, has no price change. And there's also two new versions. There's a QBO free and a QBO [00:30:30] Lite. And those were, um, it used to be QuickBooks money where it's basically just a holding tank for your 1099 or, or QuickBooks checking for, for people. And then there's a lite version that allows them to make, I think it's one invoice a month, or maybe it's three invoices a month, but I think it's just one invoice. So somebody who just has to do some invoice, like send an invoice has something that they can use. I've never seen [00:31:00] anybody actually on either one of those two options.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I do like ledger though.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah, I do too, I do too.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Okay, so when are the new prices go into effect?

Alicia Kats Pollock: All right. The new prices go into went into effect on August 1st. And so the way that they do their price rollouts is anybody who creates a new subscription as of August 1st gets the new pricing automatically. Pricing is going to be displayed on the QuickBooks website as [00:31:30] of August 3rd. And then for those of you who have all of your clients on subscription, the next subscription cycle is going to have all of the new pricing. So and I've even had some years where they said it was August, but nothing actually changed on my wholesale until October. So that's something that I tell my clients, right? Well, I actually, I tell my clients, I won't update your prices until they change them on me. But, you know, I probably, I [00:32:00] could be changing my prices and get a little bit of extra revenue stream on that one.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, maybe as we're kind of close to the end of this part, this is a good time to bring up the the concept of, again, who is this message to? Right. So we talk obviously to a lot of accountants. And if as accountants, we're the ones that are doing a wholesale billing and then we're just including it into our services to people. You're the one that maybe is feeling that price. And of course, you should hopefully have set up into the structure of your, your monthly [00:32:30] pricing that as software increases, you can pass that part on. But for the end user or client, if we're the one in between, if they're the one that's paying the bill, we really it's our job to make sure they understand what is in there that they can be using and or what we're using to do more and do a better job for them. So they're not just seeing a price increase and being like, why am I paying so much more for this? And I'm not even doing anything.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah, [00:33:00] a lot of this is really important communication. It really, really is. Um, they do have a little disclaimer here that there is a price protection period. If somebody just signed up for QuickBooks online, they get a six month price protection so their invoices won't go up for six months and then it'll go up on the seventh month.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Okay.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Okay. Um, okay. Here's some of that information that we wanted. Um, about QuickBooks Billpay. [00:33:30] Perfect. And so the bill pay elite subscription price actually decreased from $90 down to $45 a month if you're not using QBO advanced. And they took off and I was right, they did take off the transaction limits. So you no longer have the five ACH and basic and 40 in premium. It's unlimited across all of them, and there is no 50 cent per ach fee. All the [00:34:00] ACH is all completely free. Wow. Yeah. Which basically means the difference between basic and premium now is really just, um, 1099 and scheduling up to 50 payments all at once. So premium gives you bulk payments, whereas basic is individual payments. So that's the difference in the pricing. And premium is now just $15 a month. Um and then what elite adds to all [00:34:30] of that is bill approvals, payment releases and roles and permissions.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I mean, that really makes sense as the company is much larger. You need that. It's it's nice. The client I was telling you about, they've been using a different bill pay software, and we never been able to get the two softwares to actually talk to each other correctly. And trust me, we've tried. So it's been a frustration to be able to like, look at one place and go over here and have to pay it. So now having it all in one place here, it's not. It's actually [00:35:00] less money. Now does the auto matching, um, it's going to make my job a lot easier.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah, it definitely streamlines the workflows as the AI likes to say. Um, I also want to throw in here that I have been hearing about bad actors that are leveraging bill pay for fraud inside QuickBooks files. And the one thing that they are doing when one of the most important things that they're doing is making bills and hoping that you don't notice that it's not a real bill, [00:35:30] and then you're paying them. And I really, really, really, like emphatically stress that the bill approval workflows inside QuickBooks, you should be turning them on now. They are only available in either advanced QuickBooks online advanced, or if you're using plus and below the turning on the elite bill pay either way will work. But having somebody actually monitor the bills who's [00:36:00] not the bookkeeper and approve them before they are paid is crucial because a bookkeeper may not know if something is legitimate, bill or not, but a business owner is going to look at that and say, who the heck is this and why am I paying them $90,000?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's a great point. And if you I mean, you better have multifactor authentication turned on by now onto your subscriptions, please, people. It's important.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. Or the or the authenticator app.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yes.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Authenticator that are doing that that do fingerprints like one password I love it. [00:36:30] I don't put in my own password anymore into QuickBooks. I just use my fingerprint.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Nice.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. Okay. So I just want to emphasize this one more time, is that my personal opinion is that everybody should be using bill pay elite and using the bill approvals and the payment releases so that you don't wind up being taken for fraud. The next part of the article was basically just reminding us that ProAdvisor does get preferred pricing. You get the 30% discount for 12 months [00:37:00] and a revenue share on that as well. And then also with workforce or payroll, you get 15% of the employee fees as well. So here there's really no change to the the ProAdvisor billing part of it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So, Alicia, to circle back on those two asterisks I made a comment about before, um, it lists out as talking about bill pay elite pricing and features. Availability may vary based on your specific subscription plan and dates of [00:37:30] renewal. Please check your account settings for the most accurate details regarding your subscription tier. And then we actually discussed the tiers earlier. What's involved there?

Alicia Kats Pollock: Mhm. Okay. All right. So all of that is what Intuit wants us to know about these price increases. Um, I'm actually going to share. I want to circle this back around to that Reddit post that I referenced in the very beginning where they were complaining about [00:38:00] their 41% increase, which I've calculated is actually under 22% price increase, but it's still a price increase. And so what I, what I did when I was replying to them is I just like off the top of my head, made a list of all the new feature things that I thought were relevant to his conversation. And so I just want to share my list of what the things that you might not have noticed as you [00:38:30] are using your QBO and just getting your work done. So this is Alicia's list of why the price increase is justified.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I love the fact that off the top of your head, you were you were able to go into multiple pages like, that's good job.

Alicia Kats Pollock: So take it. Okay, so the first thing that I pointed out was the new customer hub that you can turn it on so that it finds leads directly from your gmail or your outlook that you can send contracts and PDFs for signature [00:39:00] with initial fields and date fields and signature fields so that you don't even need DocuSign anymore. You have the ability in the settings to turn on an option that when somebody pays a receipt, it will also ask them to rate your company on a scale of 1 to 5. And if they give if they give you a 4 or 5, it'll ask them for a testimonial. And if they give you a one, 2 or 3, it will ask them for feedback so that you can improve your services. And then there's also some additional features [00:39:30] rolling out. There's an appointment scheduler. So if you're not already using a calendar app, you can do it inside your QuickBooks and the ability to host video meetings. So that is pretty cool. I have not seen it in action. I mean, I use fathom and I have a whole AI system going on, but if you just don't want to pay for a Zoom subscription, boom, you can do it right inside your QuickBooks.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Interesting.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. Okay. Another change that has made is [00:40:00] that the deposits function used to just be a prepayment on an invoice, but deposits now are available on estimates and on invoices. And so the customer can pay their deposit. And it's held as a true liability instead of an initial income payment.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That is phenomenal. I just recently spent a lot of time going back and having to adjust or fix people's deposits that were in as a sales receipt that then had to be applied [00:40:30] otherwise. So I'm going to have to show that client that.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. So, so basically there's an unearned revenue workflow now that's completely built in. So customer payments and work to be performed is really now a liability. Okay. Some other things with payments and transactions, you can forward not just receipts for expenses, but you can also forward expenses for income facing transactions as well. So like if my publisher gives me a payout, I can actually have the receipt go [00:41:00] along with that.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Oh, nice. Okay.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Um, and then there's also a new feature for recurring invoice payments, not just recurring invoices, but a recurring payment. So you take an invoice and you send it to the customer and say, well, we're going to charge you monthly and they approve it and they put in their payment information. So you don't have to gather in the payment information. And so it's kind of like a recurring sales receipt, but you're taken out of the loop.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, I actually love that. It's always been a [00:41:30] frustration. I don't want their credit card information or their checking information. I just don't want anything to do with it. Right. So having this ability is, is phenomenal.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. So I've been using that one. I'm really glad to take that liability off of my plate.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. Okay. Another change is inventory. Uh, first of all, inventory is not just for plus anymore. You can add inventory on at Simple Start and Essentials for $40 a month. It now has moving average costs. So if you were coming over from desktop [00:42:00] and your cost basis was average cost, you can now do that in QuickBooks online. Personally, I'm a fan of Fifo. I think it's more accurate, but hey, it's there. So you don't have to make that inventory valuation adjustment. And now there's also an option, a different workflow for inventory, including item receipts, which gives you that middle step. So you've got a purchase order. You can receive the purchase order but you don't have the bill yet.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Oh beautiful.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yes. But it's an either or. You don't get both. If you [00:42:30] turn on item receipts, you no longer can use bills for inventory and expenses. You have to do the purchase order item receipt to payment.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Got.

Alicia Kats Pollock: A whole other category. The banking feeds. The banking feed is now extremely customizable. We mentioned that it's now got expense policies. You can now if you are missing transactions, you don't have to go to the bank and download a CSV file. If you have a statement, you can just drop a statement in and it will scrape it and load [00:43:00] the transactions into the banking feed. And you can also drag and drop attachments. So if you do have a receipt in the bank that you want to add to the banking feed, you don't have to go into the into the transaction and then click upload and then go navigate to it. You can just drag it and drop it on the line and it will attach itself.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's really cool.

Alicia Kats Pollock: It is. Okay. More changes. Justifying the costs is that you can drag your customer invoices and your vendor bills [00:43:30] into QuickBooks, and it will go ahead and harvest the date and the vendor and the line items and.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Bundle it together either way. Sorry, this is I love this. I'm using it all the time. Keep going. But I love this part.

Alicia Kats Pollock: I don't know, you tell me what you're what you love about it, because it's not something I get to do a lot.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Um, we have a specific client that some of our, most of our stuff goes through a third party app through like no fee for construction wise, but there are certain, um, bills that have to go in because they're not being [00:44:00] tracked to a specific job and we're able to just download the PDF directly from the email, upload it right in, and it's getting all the information correct. It's, it's getting the terms, it's got memorized, it picks up the vendor appropriate, the bill number. Um, we initially wanted to line item breakout and you'll do a separate line for tax everything else. But we can, we can click one little button and it will bundle everything all up. Still with a good description of what was purchased. And it's been 100% accurate [00:44:30] so far, which to me, like I, yeah, I'm going to repeat that 100% accurate for us so far. I'm just amazed.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Even on the on the line items with the products and services.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: For what? For what we need. So I should put a distinction. We're not trying to match products and services inside of the books. I haven't tried that part of it yet because the third party software would be doing that part. Um, for this one it is, it's capturing the right category and then putting [00:45:00] description in correctly. Um, but it's recognizing the category category based on the vendor without it being set inside QuickBooks. It's seeing it from the history and doing that. Correct as well.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Okay. So it's, so it's getting the categories right. We don't, we are, we don't know if it's doing products and services yet.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Haven't tried that yet. I can play around and we can, we can do a guess what we learned at some point. Guess what we broke.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. And for anybody who's listening, head down to the comments and wherever, you [00:45:30] know, if you're on our YouTube channel or if you're directing app or you're in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, wherever you are, go ahead and let us know if you have experience and have seen the products and services part in action on drag and drop invoices and bills. Yep. Okay. Um, and then, uh, some other things that are also on my list of things that justify a price increase. The entire interface is now customizable and people I don't think have been playing enough with this. I [00:46:00] am actually going to be doing a new class on this in. We haven't scheduled it yet, but sometime in the next 2 or 3 months, I'm going to be doing an hour where I'm going to go through and completely trick out my QuickBooks online as a webinar. So there's the custom dashboards, there's the shortcuts, there's the bookmarks, there's the pinned, um, the search bar, even you can pick which fields show up as your search filters. It's really cool. Um, the search bar also now does natural language [00:46:30] searches. So you can tell it show me all the unpaid invoices from Parkway Services between 2022 and 2024 over $1,000.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I heard this guy's pay on time, so you're okay. But.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Uh, but I love the fact that they're basically doing natural language, which means it's multiple filters, and you can just tell it and it will pull it up.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah, it's it's even doing a better job. [00:47:00] You know, if you've been using it for a long time, you'll remember the ability just to kind of like filter or like type in a number and try to get something to pull up. It struggled for a while, but now it's doing a much, much better job of getting you exactly what you need quickly. Yep.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Okay. The reporting enhancements with modern reports. I mean, we struggled for a little bit, but I really overall really like the modern reports. I can get much more data and analysis [00:47:30] out of them. The profit and loss and balance sheet have a little sparkle if they have anomalies. So when I see that, I'll split it up by month and go look and see what what is different that there's something that's off. And then the report filters. I love having stackable filters with multiple end ORS. So I really can hone in on the data that I want. That was just not available before.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Plan to spend some time. But once you created, you [00:48:00] know, learning those. Once you create a beautiful magical report, even with formulas built into it, you can save it and, you know, pull it up every month or however often you need to.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Mhm. And then one of the last features is that they're also now introducing a resolution center. And I've seen it there in the past, but I wasn't actually seeing cases there. But you are now going to have records of all of the support calls that either the client user or the accountant user made, [00:48:30] and then actually see what the resolution was. So for those of you who are accountants and you would like to know that your clients are actually calling into it, you can go see what those conversations were, go see what the results were, and make sure that if there's been any bookkeeping advice, given that it meets your standards and your policies.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's great.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. So and that again, that was just a list off the top of my head. Responding to a Reddit, a frustrated Reddit poster poster [00:49:00] who just said, you know, what am I getting for all my money? Well, these are a lot of the things that you're getting for your money.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And if, if the Reddit person hears the podcast and you still have questions, reach out to either one of us and we can even show you what exactly the benefits are, of course.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah. Always, always, always happy to help. Okay, so welcome everybody to your new pricing. And, um, all [00:49:30] right.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So, Alicia, I know you've always got something else coming up or a class. What's coming up next for you?

Alicia Kats Pollock: Well, we just started our hands on training class and which I'm excited about. And also my publisher showed me something really cool that they're turning the textbook into an ebook that's interactive that you're going to be able to follow with the book and it'll say like, you know, go click this button, and then you check off that, you clicked the button, and then you go to the next step. [00:50:00] And so it's a checklist of tasks. And then it's even going to have an Autograder where you export an Excel spreadsheet of your of your report, and it will tell you what you got. Right.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So how neat is that?

Alicia Kats Pollock: It's really, really, really cool. So this is a little bit of a preview. It's not out yet. We're beta testing it in my hands on training class. So super excited that that cohort is now off the ground and up and running. And we are also beginning to get our fall class schedule [00:50:30] going. We're going to have classes in Enterprise Suite Accountant Suite. The customization course that I was just mentioning, a course about the AI agents. At this point, my curriculum got completely revamped. Starting in September of 2025 with the new interface. And so now we're really diving in on everything that is brand new to the software so that we can, you know, help educate people about all these new [00:51:00] opportunities to streamline your workflows and get more work done and get it done better. So to sign up for any of these classes or to join our membership, which gives you free entry into all of these classes, head over to realize.com. And what about you, spot? What are you up to?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, right now I'm heads down into a pretty big project. It's with a company based out of like Guam and Saipan. Still US books, which is cool. But, [00:51:30] um, you know, it's fun being able to work with people all around the world. So I've got my head down working on, on a major project there, helping them get their different advanced company files set up and organized. So that's keeping me pretty busy at the moment.

Alicia Kats Pollock: Yeah, I always like working with you because you really focus on the technical, like a lot of the details and data migrations. So I'd love that. That's one of the things that you bring to the table.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, I'm just a nerd. I like working with the tools. And if somebody's got a big project, they need to update, fix, [00:52:00] delete, whatever, something of that nature, those are great things. Reach out if I can help you, I'll be more than happy to.

Alicia Kats Pollock: All right. Well, thank you for joining me on this analysis of where's the beef? Uh, pricing versus features. So, uh, thank you, everybody for listening. And we will see you in the next one.