Now You Know: In The Know August 2026 Recap

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Alicia Katz Pollock: Hey everyone, welcome to this week's edition of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast. I'm your host, Alicia Katz Pollock of Royal wines.com. And this week my co-host is Matthew Spot Fulton of Cloud Apps, Inc.. Now, wait a minute, Cloud Apps, Inc., What happened to Parkway?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, Alicia, it's so Parkway is a doing business [00:00:30] as, uh, a few years back, I reincorporated my business and have the official name Cloud Apps, Inc. since where my true passion and love is, is working with app companies and the development side of it, helping them integrate to QuickBooks online. So it's been Cloud Apps Inc. for some time, and I'm going to start doing that transition away from Parkway Business Solutions. So new news here always.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's fantastic. I mean, when I think about you, I think about app [00:01:00] integrations and third party app partnerships. And so I think that is a good migration for you.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Thank you. I love it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Fits your branding. Cool. All right. So thank you as always for joining me in the hour. Now, you know, which is our version of Intuit's in the Know and in the know is Intuit's monthly webinar about all the new features and all the new releases where they are attempting to keep us, all of us [00:01:30] in the know about what is actually happening inside the software. I attend these religiously. I think everybody should be attending them. You can go to firm of the future.com and look for in the know. It actually has a pop up on the left hand side so that you can join them there. The third Thursday of every single month at 11:00 Pacific Time, which makes it 121 2 p.m. East Coast time. And what we're going to do is, as we're watching it, we sit there frantically [00:02:00] typing notes and asking questions and taking notes on it. So what we're going to do is kind of give you the summary or the recap of what's going on and add in our flavor content.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Which is why you can just keep listening to this podcast and you can miss the Thursday ones if, if you have to. But.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, the one thing that I do like about going to those is that a lot of the time they actually throw in little demos. And, you know, I'm all about the visual. So since we aren't going to demo their demos, what we are [00:02:30] going to do is share the slide deck as we're presenting. So for those of you who are listening in your podcast app, you can go to the show notes and, and pull up the slide deck. And you can also find us on our YouTube channel and on our YouTube channel. You can actually watch the visual of everything that we're talking about. All right. In the know is hosted by Aarti Patel Martinez, who's [00:03:00] the principal program manager in charge of ProAdvisor training out of San Diego. And the agenda for the whole entire session, the hour is ProAdvisor community news, product innovations, and then what's around the corner. And the topics that we're going to be talking about are Intuit Enterprise Suite Sales tax Liability Industry Solutions, and QBO advanced and advancements in Intuit Accountant Suite. And then it ends with the what's around the corner. I'm [00:03:30] going to skip all the stuff about the polling questions and session recordings. You can get CPE for attending their sessions. If you are live, you get CPE. If you're watching the replays, you don't get CPE. But did you know that you can get CPE for watching this episode? After you're done listening to this episode, you can go over to the earmark app and dial into this episode and then answer some questions about it, and you can get CPE for listening to us today. I don't know. I don't often [00:04:00] talk about that, but hey, we offer CPE for this.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Not only this episode, but past ones as well, right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So you can actually binge listen and go get a whole bunch of CPE.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Help us join your weekend.

Alicia Katz Pollock: It's much more fun for us to do this on a Saturday, isn't it? Okay. All right. So they started with ProAdvisor Community News on Thursday, September 3rd. Intuit is hosting a webinar introducing you to pilot and their new Meridian software. [00:04:30] We actually have a relationship with pilot. They are one of our sponsors of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, and we have an upcoming episode where I've interviewed Jessica McKellar. We had the ultimate geek girl conversation. I absolutely loved talking to her about Meridian and how it came to be and what it does for autonomous clothes. So listen to our upcoming episode or go ahead and join the webinar for that. Intuit is hosting on September 3rd. [00:05:00] You can register for it through the firm of the future website. There's also links in the handouts as well. So if you go to our show notes and download the handouts, you can click the link inside the handouts to get to the webinar. Intuit is also doing another hosted webinar with G-Accon, which is a third party app that allows you to manipulate your QuickBooks data in spreadsheet format. And so on September 10th, they are having a webinar with G-Accon so that you can do your reporting, [00:05:30] including consolidations and eliminations in Google Sheets.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. They're also doing a webinar with four lane on Intuit Enterprise Suite. And so they're doing a whole series on that. So you can definitely check those sessions out. Now here's a big announcement. They have finally announced the Pro Partner program and what the tears are and what the benefits are. Now spot and I almost went down [00:06:00] a rabbit hole to give you information about that in this episode, but we decided to save that for a future episode. But when you go into your IAS and go to ProAdvisor, you can go find out all about the new partner tiers, including what tier you're in right now so that you can figure out what you need to do in order to go up your tier levels to get your additional benefits. It's one of the reasons why they're talking about consolidating your realms or your consoles. So if you have multiple IAS accounts, getting them [00:06:30] all together into one nice, then they put up a reminder about Intuit Connect, which is going to be in Las Vegas October 20th 6 to 20 eighth in the Aria again. Are you going this year?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Uh, I don't think so. Possibly. Possibly. You know, there's always that last minute change because it's so close. But probably not this year.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. I hope that you're there. For us at Royal Wise, we are actually in the exhibit hall. We have a. Wow. Yeah. Um, [00:07:00] so this is this is big for us. This is kind of like the, the credibility and the step up in the world that Intuit has recognized that the QuickBooks training that we provide is world class enough to be shown on their exhibit hall floor.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Congratulations. That's really huge. That's great news.

Alicia Katz Pollock: It is really huge. I'm really excited about it. So all of you listening, if you're going to connect, please, please, please come visit me in the in the exhibit hall. All [00:07:30] right. Then they put in a little bit of an announcement about once you go into Intuit Accountant Suite, if you go into the team and time sections, there's brand new releases in the workforce app that you get Workforce elite through your ProAdvisor program. So all of you have elite payroll and QuickBooks time if you're not already using it. And the new features that it's bringing to the table is the ability to do your [00:08:00] hiring and onboarding of your employees right inside QuickBooks to track time off and performance and benefits and to see all of this seamlessly in your payroll and your financials. So if you are running payroll outside of QuickBooks and you're listening to this, you're actually leaving money on the table because workforce or payroll elite is part of your ProAdvisor membership.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I've been using it for years.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I have too. And I've had an absolutely seamless [00:08:30] experience with it. I know that, um, you know, just being honest and transparent. I hear feedback out in the world that, um, that QuickBooks payroll is not people's favorite payroll, but I, the only trouble I ever have with it is usually is user error when my, when my clients set it up wrong. So. All right. Um, Of. And there's also a webinar series going on of training you about all different features inside IIs in enterprise suite [00:09:00] and the whole entire ecosystem. So these started at the beginning of August and are continuing all the way into September. So definitely take a look at all of the new trainings that they're putting out. The more you know, the less questions you have and the less frustration you'll have. You know, sharing is caring. All right, so now it is time to go into the product innovations, my favorite part of the episode. And so the first thing that they were talking [00:09:30] about is Intuit Enterprise Suite. Daniel Malinov came back again. Daniel is a CPA. He's the product manager for Intuit Enterprise Suite, what they call the mid-market team out of Mountain View. And he's a regular guest on the show.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, I appreciate the fact he's a CPA in that role, I really do.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I do too. Yeah. You know, because he's somebody who actually knows what the CPAs need or can speak to the CPA experience.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So they start off immediately with the poll. Of course, the first one of the session [00:10:00] and their question was, if your IAS accounting suite is what we're talking about here, staff could be added to client approval workflows. Would you want one clients, the client to see the names of staff members two client to see a generic firm name placeholder three client to see a redacted placeholder or four not applicable. Ias firm staff would never be approvers for clients. So [00:10:30] again this is about the approvals workflow. Not all work being done.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm. And so it looked like almost 44% wanted to see the generic placeholder, which is what we have now. So it makes sense that that was the most popular one because it is what we're used to. But that was followed closely by we don't need this. We don't do this. The fourth option. And then actually giving the transparency where the client can see the names of the staff members. There were a couple people who wanted [00:11:00] redacted, but not that many.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I'd like generic firm. You know, as we have it now, it's important to for us to be able to still see that part. But for the client, they the firm is good enough.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I think so too, from in most cases.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now, they followed up immediately with the second polling question, and that one it was which of the following enhancements would be most impactful to your firm? One was having a posting period data and a document date [00:11:30] on transaction forms. Two was invoices and bills that are pending approval only hit the GL once approved. Three multiple AR and AP accounts or four journal entry Approvals.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Now, this was interesting to me because I was just having a conversation with some people on Facebook, really about the QuickBooks payments that when your clients click through an email to go pay an [00:12:00] invoice, it used to be just that one invoice, but they opened it up so that they can pay multiple invoices all at once, which is great because we need that ability. But the unintended consequence is that a lot of people will make invoices that they're not ready to send to their clients. They're either placeholders or working invoices or need the approvals or are pending. They'll make a whole year's worth of invoices that will then post in the in, you know, show up on the reports in the period that they wanted. [00:12:30] So when I saw the two, the first two options here, having a posting period and a document date, I thought that would be a really elegant situation to that use case, as well as having an approval process for invoices and bills that are pending that you can then post when you want them to actually post. The idea that we had come up with in the forum was a draft of the invoices, like. You can make an invoice and have it in draft [00:13:00] status. So hey Daniel, if you're listening to this or if any of the Intuit developers can pass this one up, we want an. Actually, an extra option to this poll is draft status for invoices and bills.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I mean, wouldn't draft kind of be the same concept of pending approval?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, but you can have it already in there. And yes, it doesn't post until you've pending approval. But even before you get to the approval stage, being able to save something that you're working on that isn't ready [00:13:30] for release yet.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Gotcha.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So that's, that's my, that's my, but I also think that idea of having a posting period and a document date is also really cool. You know, you make the invoice now, but you don't want to see it show up until the accrual period. So the first thing that Daniel talked about was intercompany journal entries that they're now going to have the ability to auto complete. Now that sounds good. What does it actually mean?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Well, to get started, they've given us a new acronym [00:14:00] ICJE so intercompany. Journal entry. Smartsheet complete is it's basically going to be using AI to analyze the transaction lines that a user will enter and automatically generate the required due to from lines, uh, for the, as well as the inter, excuse me, intercompany contacts and partner company mappings to produce a fully balanced entries what they've shared with us. Now this came about because up [00:14:30] to date it's really been a very manual process to do every single piece of this. So they're trying to use more of that AI to help improve the process.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So basically you create the journal entry one time and it will post across all of the entities in your inner company set up in eyes, so it will do all the due to frames for you. It'll include the names, it'll include the classes, it'll include everything in it, and go ahead and make every single entry in every single company so that you don't [00:15:00] have to sit there and have them open side by side and make sure all your due to frames match.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: It's the follow up. You know, I have a client that we're doing a lot of this back and forth stuff, right? And I can't tell you how many times I've found where one person will accidentally use the wrong due to or wrong do from inside of a scenario. So this would be a huge time saver for that and for the accuracy.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. The next new feature that they that they introduced is Cross-company [00:15:30] bill pay. And I'm going to talk on this one first because I please. Yeah, this is, this is one that I'm really happy about is, you know, how you have a business owner who has more than one company, but one of them's having cash flow, and so the other one pays the bill on their behalf. And then it gets super complicated because you have to categorize the bill to the due to from, and then you have to go make something in the other category that uses the due to from as the funding source to the expense. And there's no [00:16:00] actual bill. So this solution is going to solve those cross company bill pay situations where the cash is in one company and the bill is in the other, and it'll allow you to pay the bill in one entity using a bank account from a different entity inside eyes. And then go ahead and make the intercompany journal entries to match it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's interesting. So it's going to, if you're going to have separate bank accounts across the [00:16:30] different companies, but it's going to reach through and recognize that you can do that. I'm wondering if you're having to register through the bill pay in each of the companies for the different ones. You might do it ahead of time.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, that's going to be interesting to see how they actually make the money flow through all the different companies. But the fact that you can use a bank account from a different company in. Yeah, the first company that's really huge. That's one that again, I have one of one of my clients that [00:17:00] I would love to be able to get her in is so that we could do this because she bad habit, but she just paid everything out of whichever bank account has the most money in it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yep.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. The next one is, um.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Kind of the next one is an add on to the intercompany journal entries by starting to have templates for that and the dynamic allocations, I believe. Right. How how are the allocations supposed to work?

Alicia Katz Pollock: I [00:17:30] think what they're basically getting at is that if this happens a lot, either the intercompany journal entries that we've been talking about, or the cross company bill pays that you can create a recurring template for it, and then just call it up and use it so you don't have to create it from scratch every time.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Nice. And yeah, so it can be on demand that you just go and quickly use it real quickly or automatically reoccurring, I believe. Beautiful.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's really super nice. Okay. Then they talked about intercompany sales. And this is when [00:18:00] one of your companies is buying and selling the products and services from the other of your companies.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: This again, would be a situation would be helpful for one of my clients where they are, they're consistently selling, um, fuel from one company over to the other or even back and forth, uh, flight tickets. This would be a great scenario where we can actually have those sales easily recorded to save some of the time and the data entry on both sides.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And part of the element of this is that [00:18:30] you map your products and services between the companies. And then when you create a bill in one, it creates the matching bill in the other one and posts everything automatically.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So they've also made some pretty big improvements to like dimensions, um, inside of both, you know, the project reporting, uh, also kind of the transaction headers and like reparenting some of the dimensions you want to tell a little bit about how the, what they've done with the project reports.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So now they have [00:19:00] added the dimensions to way, way, way more reports than they were in before. So dimensions now show up in a bunch of different reports. I could rattle them off, but I don't know if that's too much detail, but your cost to complete by project, your project costs by vendor estimates versus actuals committed costs, project costs, unallocated amounts, unbilled time, and WIP reports now all include dimensions in them.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now, real quickly, just [00:19:30] as a reminder to people of what dimensions are, because you kind of gave a great analogy to me some time back. Do you mind just doing a quick description? What are dimensions? What are they talking about? How are they used?

Alicia Katz Pollock: So dimensions are pretty much the same thing as classes. Um, except that you can have more than one. So you can have multiple dimensions that you're tracking your company activity on all kinds of different dimensions that you can, [00:20:00] it's like having parallel classes. So you can have one transaction line that has four different dimensions on it that actually just comes with eyes. And then you can pay for pay more and have up to 20 different dimensions. And what that allows you to do is create pivot tables out of them so that you can have reports that are showing multiple dimensions in cross section. And that's really, really valuable, valuable information.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So [00:20:30] previously this, the dimensions have really been primarily at the line item level. And one of the changes they've done is they've made it to where it's now available at the transaction header. So you can do you can set those just once per document instead of having to do individual items whichever way you want to go. And then that also leads into the reparenting dimensions that if you have, you can have just like classes, a top dimension and then sub dimensions. If you need to move one dimension from [00:21:00] one parent over to a different like list of them, you can do the reparenting as the other part. They've now made all this stuff as generally accessible.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So that makes them way more flexible.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So as your company changes, you can move things around as well. And the fact that it's now available in the transaction header that really makes dimensions comparable to classes in a complete way. Because now the way that you can have classes by line by line by line or one per transaction, now you can assign a dimension to [00:21:30] an entire transaction. Okay. Basically all these features are rolling out now as we speak. They are us only. But if you're using Intuit Enterprise Suite, you should start seeing them now. One thing that they mentioned, there was a Q and A, somebody had asked about a proportional consolidation. And so doing consolidated reports where you're breaking it out proportionally across the companies. And he was delighted to say that it is available [00:22:00] in beta. It's not GAAP compliant, but it is necessary for a while for the way a lot of companies operate. And one thing that he said that I want to make sure that you all know is that they have an early access program. So if you want to actively beta test some of these features that are necessary to the way that you operate and you're willing to put in your feedback about them, you can go up to the gear in Intuit Enterprise Suite and under the gear, there's an option to join [00:22:30] the early access program, and it will give you some of the beta test features automatically there for everybody, but then there's others where you have to opt in and qualify. Like you have to have certain requirements, a certain, maybe a certain number of clients actually actively using the feature. But in that case, you can talk to your product manager or your sales manager and see if you qualify.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, this is something that is we've been asking for this for a really, really long time. People that we [00:23:00] wanted to have some solid way where we can be saying, hey, we want to be a big part of the beta test. We want to do that stuff. So that's a huge add on. Thank you for pointing it out.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And I like that they're giving the option of it because some people don't have the time to beta test. They just want things to work. Yeah. Out of the gate. So you hold off others. Other people like to actually put in their $0.02 about how the feature is developed and designed so that it works for them.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I like to break it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Me to me. [00:23:30] I want to put it through its paces and put it in my feedback so.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You don't have to.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Write it. Exactly. All right, shifting gears, the next product enhancement was all about sales tax. They have changed the sales tax liability report system.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I think this is has the makings of the biggest improvement to the program in quite some time. Depending on [00:24:00] how it fully rolls out this is a major improvement to the software.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Agreed. You know, sales tax is one of those things. Either you don't need it at all or you need it desperately for every one of your clients. And the new features that they're rolling out are really impressive. And both of us are really geeking out and looking forward to talking to you about it. This section was presented by David Goodale, who's the principal product manager on the sales tax team out of New York City.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You could tell he knew he had something [00:24:30] special when he was presenting it to. I'm sorry, but yeah, you could tell.

Alicia Katz Pollock: He was kind of giddy. Yeah. Okay. Um, and so the first poll that he gave was about, um, how often do you work with your clients on their sales tax set up? And the options were never and rarely and sometimes and always and you know, about 10% were never. And 18 or 19% were rarely. And almost [00:25:00] half around 45 were sometimes. And then there was a good 27% who were always. So, you know, this is one of those places where people niche down where you live in an area that has sales tax or your and you have to use it. And then, you know, hey, I live in Oregon for some of my bookkeeping colleagues, they're answer is never. Um, but I use it actually, I'm definitely in the sometimes because I help a lot of people with it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I wish I fell into the never, but maybe with this new features it'll be better. So [00:25:30] Well, they immediately rolled into a second polling question, which was which of the following sales tax report enhancements would be most useful? First option had about just about 10%, which was total for all columns. Our second one was codes like location codes, tax codes, jurisdiction codes came in at just under 24%. Uh, drill downs that filter precisely had just under 15%, while alignment with state forms was the clear [00:26:00] winner at about 33%. There was also other which was about a 2.7% and then not applicable at about 16.5%.

Alicia Katz Pollock: This was fun because the answer to the question is all of them.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And yes.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's what he got to present, is that the new sales tax liability reports have all of these new benefits. Yeah, [00:26:30] yeah. So what they heard was that the sales tax liability reports in Qbo were just they didn't have the same layout as what people were used to in desktop. They were all missing info. And so we always had to export them to Excel and then cross-reference between two reports and look at the underlying transactions. And it was just really hard to get the information that you need. So they leveraged the new modern reports engine and reimagined the entire thing, [00:27:00] pulling in some of the aspects from desktop and then putting in all new capabilities. So it's all pretty slick.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: What's funny is I was just talking with a coworker and good friend, Tanya Schulte, and we were talking about sales tax. I brought it up in her Construction Junction roundtable, and they were immediately complaining about Arizona Department of Revenue and all the different things that have to happen between city and county. So I was, you know, snapping [00:27:30] a screenshot of this to send over to her like, ha ha ha. Things are about to get better.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So every state does it completely differently. And that means that QuickBooks has to accommodate 50 different workflows. And, you know, so we talked about Arizona, where they need to see the city and the county so that they can file by county, whereas Ohio just needs, um, doesn't need the district. So this really allows you to, [00:28:00] uh, make it, make it state specific.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So not only does it change, obviously it changes by state, but by industry as well. So one of my least favorite scenarios of dealing with sales tax had to do with a used car dealership that I was doing the books for. And in California, which our sales tax is a pain in the rear. Anyways, we'll have city, county, everything else that you have to deal with and the rates can change at the city every quarter [00:28:30] in comparison to other. Yeah, it gets bad. Um, with with, uh, used car dealerships, the sales tax is actually based off of the location where they live, where they're, you know, they pick the vehicle from you, but wherever their home is on their IDs, that kind of stuff is what you have to calculate it for. So going in and calculating this, it would literally take me almost 2 to 3 hours every single reporting that we'd have to do and recognize that the amount of sales tax they would have [00:29:00] to pay out an error of 10% was an easy $3,000 penalty. So having to figure all this stuff out absolutely required us to take it externally. But some of the stuff they're talking about and showing this would have been so much easier now with what's coming up.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Excellent. That's a great use case for it. And yeah. Um, so it is only available if you are using the new sales tax version now. The new sales tax automated [00:29:30] sales tax is what they call it isn't new. It's been around for at least six years, but some people never moved from the old platform, the classic platform, to the new platform. Now you you're going to want to change in order to to leverage this, the reports are available either in the sales tax center or on the reports list. It is already been rolling out. This is us only, but that makes sense because it's US sales tax.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: They [00:30:00] did also mention that the two like the classic report view versus the newer view are tied together, which is kind of nice. So you know, the information should show the same but more information on the new ones.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So when you go to the reports center and look for the reports, you're going to see a sales tax liability report that has a little beta label next to it. But you still have the the other report, the report that we've had to deal with for the last five years. And that one is still [00:30:30] says sales tax liability report. But in parentheses it says legacy after it. So you can see the before and after. And if there's something you needed on the old report, you can still go grab it. Okay. So here are the things that it now does. So the first thing is that it has multiple nesting. It starts with the sales tax agency and then goes down to the state. And then it goes down to the county, and then it goes down to the district. And so you can [00:31:00] expand and collapse and see them at any of those levels.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: This is exactly what I had to do all the time when I was talking about that dealership, I'd have to create it all, do a pivot table to organize it like this, to figure out the amounts, and you can change how it's all being displayed now inside the reports too, right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. When you look at the report itself, it now has many columns on it. You have total sales, a nontaxable and exempt column, a taxable sales, a tax rate column, [00:31:30] and a tax collected column. And the best part is that all of them have totals right on the report. So you don't have to go cross-referencing two different reports to go find out the grand totals.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: This is in comparison right to the old ones where you'd have just the you'd have one column with totals, so you wouldn't be able to know the total taxable amount versus the other is what you're talking about.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Exactly. You had to go export it to Excel to go calculate it. Okay. Also, you can drill down [00:32:00] into any of the numbers and it will give you a report just on that number. So you can drill down on one particular county's taxable sales and see the list either by transaction or by customer. And you can. So you can even change how they display that way as well.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And again, part of the reason that's so important is when I would have to go in from California, and I have to file this information. I actually have to provide for that county or [00:32:30] that city, the total taxable sales amount. And it uses that as a verification. So having this ability to drill down and get the totals is a must.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm. Then when you go into the customize button, you can flip it from state to state. You can display whether you want the tax rates displayed as separate components or combined rates. You can combine different counties and districts together, and you can even [00:33:00] do pivot tables on it. So you can group whatever. You can pick whichever grouping your state needs. You know, is it by county? Is it by rate? And then look across all the different percentages from all the different districts. So like you could filter it and say, I only want to see the ones that are 1% for all of my district rates, and it will pull all of the 1% rates all together in one calculation.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: They're also allowing you, much like the many of the modern reports, to be able to do custom [00:33:30] calculations that will save on the report itself, I believe. Right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So you could say, I want to see these three rows column totals together and you can actually pick your pick your calculations. So love. Absolutely love that. Um, so he did give a demo. If you want to see the demo, you, um, you can, uh, and then he went into in the Q and A, he actually got giddily excited about all the things that they are [00:34:00] now also going to be adding in. So he mentioned a lot of reset the foundations. You've you've heard me talk about Nail the Basics, which is into its internal push now to go back and revisit things that were developed a long time ago and refresh them and update them and dial them in and solve all the little, tiny little details that were never polished. And so that's really what's happening with the this whole sales tax thing. So they're adding [00:34:30] in more subgrouping options. They're going to add in the reason for the, for tax exemptions. Uh, they'll split nontaxable and exempt right now nontaxable and exempt is in one field. But they're going to be able to split that out. They're going to be adding in location codes and making them a primary feature. So you're going to be able to, you know, if you're in Washington or Colorado and your taxes are all filed by code, you're going to be able to go code forward. You'll be able to [00:35:00] get more insight into local and state agencies. You know, if you're in Colorado or Louisiana, you can focus on the local level. Um, and they are actively seeking feedback. So definitely if you're using sales tax, go in and try out these reports and make sure that they work. Let them know if anything doesn't work. And most importantly, if it's there's something that it still doesn't do that you need for your local tax authority, please let them know.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And so what [00:35:30] that means is to all my fellow accounting friends out there when this rolls out, and if there are some little hiccups that they're going to be improving, let's help them improve it because they are focused on doing this and doing it well. I think this is a major, major improvement, so let's help them make this better.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Flood that feedback. I know and they didn't talk about it at all during this, but I know that they're also working on automated sales tax payments through the system. North [00:36:00] Carolina is one of the states that they do. I think there's about a dozen states that you can file your sales tax inside QuickBooks. The rest of them, you still have to go to your your agency.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yep.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. Then the next innovation was Industry Solutions in Qbo advanced and it was presented by Nithya Rathinam, who's the principal product manager out of Toronto, focusing on the mid-market on the mid-market vertical of construction.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: This is [00:36:30] another area that I was really interested to see the progress that they've got coming up. So in normal fashion, they start off, of course, with a polling question onto it. And they're the first poll was asking, how often do you work on projects that need stages or phased billing? About 27% said never. 30, just under 32% said rarely, sometimes got about 34%, and always had about 6.5%. [00:37:00] I think that the people that were on the polls for these, this one and the second 1st May not have been directly project and construction based, because I seem to always need project phases and the phased billing whenever I'm doing construction companies.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, this is one of those features that either you need it for your client base or you don't. And if you do need it, you need it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So basically what um, so you know, what [00:37:30] was generating this or causing the need for change is that they found that contractors running projects were always running them in phases and had no way to track what was going on inside of QuickBooks, whether it was budgets, estimates or invoices, they needed to be able to see that by the different phases of the work itself. So that meant kind of rekeying how the contract details the rebuilding invoices manually to get the same kind [00:38:00] of information.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. What's an example of phases? If you were one of what's one of the the sets of phases for one of your projects?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So we're, um, we do, we're working with a company right now to help them establish their phases. And it's an electrical company. Um, this one, they'll usually have demos, one they'll have, uh, roughing in as an example. So it's the different like sections of work that are happening, uh, finish work. You have to, you really have to kind of talk to each company [00:38:30] and figure out throughout their process because most will have like a full process. Where do you want to break up the chunks of work and be able to track your cost versus, um, your budget versus actual, your actual cost going into it for profitability and such.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Because some of those phases could be major and being able to, to cost them out separately can be very, very useful. Yeah. So one of the things that she demonstrated was that there's a new project management [00:39:00] agent where you can drag and drop your existing documentation from outside of QuickBooks and drop it in the little drawer and upload it, and the AI will go in and scrape it and create your phase structure. And then you can work with each of those phases and it can each one can have its own set of estimates and invoices, and the percentage of progress is phase by phase by phase. So you can see how far along are you in your demo and how far along are you in your construction? [00:39:30]

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That really becomes important when you start stepping into the whole AI A billing is why they need that part of it. So, um, traditionally when you're dealing with a multi-phase project and if you are doing this AI style progress invoicing, you have to be able to stipulate, okay, we have finished this percentage, uh, to date during this billing period. So without the new functionality, this new functionality, they wouldn't be able to do the A appropriately. It's [00:40:00] a big step forward.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And this was actually developed as part of enterprise Suite. And they realized that it was so essential to any project workflow if you're working in construction that they actually brought it down to advanced and made it available to everybody in advanced.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I think they learned a lot of this with the relationship with NOAA is really a big, big part of it notifies focused on the construction industry. And one of their primary things they offer is [00:40:30] true AI billing. And I think it's been that direct relationship and the strong integration between the two that's helped them improve and see how this can be done.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Great. Well, it's great that they had that insight and now it's really valuable. You know, I, I really like the idea of bumping up the features in advanced. I think advanced is a great piece of software, but it's pricey. But if you need it, you need it. Okay. All right. So then they the second thing that she talked about were change orders. And [00:41:00] she did a poll about how often people use change orders. And you know, it, the, the biggest one was never because apparently, you know, not everybody does construction. But when you do again, it's what. It's what you need. And altogether, roughly about half the people on the call are 60% of the people on the call needed change orders in some fashion. Um, 8% were very frequent, 35% were rarely. But this is another one that when you need change orders, you need [00:41:30] change orders.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. Most construction, most construction companies, if they're not doing using change orders, they're, they're leaving money on the table because you need to have some way to, to, um, agree with the client like, hey, we're doing this different thing. The scope of work is changing and it's going to cost this. Um, so you've got that as the backup. What they're doing though, which you're about to go into is positive and negative change order capabilities, not to get ahead of ourselves, but [00:42:00] it's pretty nifty, I think.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So, you know, change orders. If the scope of your project was changing, it always required either editing your original estimate and adding and removing lines or making new estimates, and there was no such thing as a removing. Estimate. And so you would have to like add a line on your on your existing estimate to subtract something back out again. And so now change orders can, like you said, be negative. You can reduce the scope of a contract. [00:42:30]

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. You know, little tip what we've often always done with construction companies is you end up having a secondary like a new phase. That's where your change orders will live into will make things a little bit easier, that you can always track it easier through your budget, you know, your budgeting, your estimating budget versus actual, I should say. Um, so the change orders play into the phases they're adding as well to really help you track it all.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And anytime you make a change order, it goes in and it recalculates the [00:43:00] estimate that it belongs with so that your estimate stays up to date. And you can have complete clarity on how it's evolved and spot. You mentioned that there is something that concerns you though about this feature.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. So one of the biggest things with change orders is you need to have the you want to have, of course, the ability to send it out, which you can share with a client, but you want to have an approval with a signature on it, whether it's a digital signature or not, but you need that on there. So you don't have a situation that towards the end of a [00:43:30] project, you're like, well, I had all of these change orders. The analogy being, you know, we can go in and create extra invoices at any point in time we want and say, here's all the extra stuff, but you want a signature. So the person approved it and they can't try to say later on, like, I didn't approve to do this or I didn't approve to do that. It's super important to have like a sign off on all of the change orders.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay, so if we have any Intuit managers listening to this, go ahead and please send that one up the chain. [00:44:00]

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. Super important.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. And then the last section of the in the know was about some new enhancements in Intuit Accountant Suite. And that's the playbook in Intuit Accounting Suite. And this was presented by Zenobia Madani, who's the principal product manager in the small business team, which is basically accounting suite out of Mountain View. And she did that poll again about [00:44:30] have you tried Intuit Accounting Suite ranging from I have not heard of it to haven't tried it yet to trying it currently. And I've been having fun with this over the over every month they ask something similar to this. And back in the beginning of the year I had not heard of it was a significant percentage and now it's down to 2%. I haven't tried it yet. Is still hovering at 50%, but trying it currently is now at 44%. And that originally was 13% [00:45:00] at the beginning of the year. So they're gaining adoption. The percentage of people who tried it and went back to using QBO. A is only 3%. I don't even know why you would go back. Everything is so seamless when you move over.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah, it works great. Now, what they did kind of give us a little insight on is it's just about been a year that IAS has been out and about, apparently.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm. Okay. So the new feature that they talked about this time is called playbooks. This is in accelerate. [00:45:30] So and again accelerate is the paid tier. That's $150 $149 a month. But it's geared to multi-person firms. And so if you're an independent bookkeeper, you don't have to do any. And I'm saying this because I am reading it in the forums, okay? That's why I'm saying this of people going, well, I don't need this accelerate and I'm not going to pay money for it. Well, don't get mad about it. It's just it's not for you. It's an add on feature for the people who actually went [00:46:00] to Intuit and said, we're having trouble on a mass scale. Can you put these features in? So there's something for everybody here.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: The anchor there real quick. Sorry to interrupt you. Is there is still absolutely a free version of Intuit Accounting Suite for everybody to use. You don't have to step up to a paid tier, but if you want extra features that didn't exist ever before that are really cool, you can upgrade to a paid tier.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And the feature that we're about to tell you, even if you're [00:46:30] an independent, this may be worth it to you. 150 bucks a month may really be worth it. So what a playbook is, is basically setting up your repeatable workflows so that you can standardize across all of your clients, and you basically make a set of SOPs and checklists, and then you can deploy them and you can, when you onboard a client, you can pick which playbook you want [00:47:00] them to be set up in, and it will actually go through your settings and your features and and everything and push it across your clients.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now, a big part of it is there's basically three different sections that this is going to that you can use it for. One is client setup. Second one is service delivery. And the third is firm settings. And we'll kind of talk about those now. Right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Mhm. So the client setup is when [00:47:30] you're onboarding a brand new client, instead of having to go through the chart of accounts and manually update it and then go through account and settings and manually toggle everything on and off. You can create your own sets, including policies. So that's, you know, what's your capitalization threshold and what's your materiality threshold. And you can go through and set all of these. And then when you set up a new client, you can just apply all of the settings all at once.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. The company, like [00:48:00] the client settings are, um, initially like the, what's the beginning of the year. Cash versus accrual. The automations of, um. Do you want certain automations turned on? Do you want notifications about duplicate numbers? Those are the things that are always kind of annoying that we have to do that are automatically in there. You can have set up right away.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Um, it makes it easy. They've had a chart of accounts templates for a while. So you can create your ideal chart of accounts by industry. And then you can make a playbook by [00:48:30] industry. So you can set up all of your restaurant clients with one chart of accounts in one set of settings and all of your construction clients with a different chart of accounts and a different set of settings.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's, it's pretty neat what you can do. And a key part of this is you can have as many different playbooks, I believe, as you wish set up. So you may have, um, a whole bunch of people in the same type of industry, but want to still break it out by different service offering. So you could have different, the different workflow setups onto that part as well. [00:49:00]

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. This includes a set of templates specifically for the book's close feature. If you decide to use books close, you can create a playbook for your books close setups, and you can also apply your firm settings like who on your who on your team can access the client. You can even make a whole set of custom fields and deploy a whole set of custom fields at once as well.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Talk about being able to really, truly standardize the whole process. You know, when you're bringing in your team or even adding [00:49:30] new team members, cross training will be a lot easier, I think, with these playbooks.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm. When you create a playbook, you can apply it or publish it up to a thousand clients all at once. And then you can also add and remove clients to the playbook. So and one of the things they said was kind of interesting that if you, you can add them to deploy it and then you can take them off. And then any changes to the playbook don't apply. Now, we had some questions about how this is actually going to [00:50:00] play out.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. I mean, now that we've kind of shared how fancy it looks. Yeah, this was one of my bigger areas of concerns. I mean, while everything looks beautiful and I know that this will continue to evolve over time, I was I'm still a little worried about how the rollout works, that if you set up a client using it, and if you then have them still connected to receive updates, what happens if you go in and you change the template to where you want the beginning of the year to be on July [00:50:30] for some reason on something instead of January? Does that mean it's going to go into every one of them and go backwards to change all the things? Or is it, you know, just how will the updates play out if you change chart of accounts? It'd be great to be able to have if you make standardized chart of accounts change and you want it across all of them, that you could click a button and have it done that way. But what if you don't want that to happen? Uh, that's what I'm worried on. Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So we have questions and these are good questions for Intuit to make sure that [00:51:00] they have answers for. So we'll look forward to the clarity once we actually begin pushing this out. And I will be covering the playbooks. I'm doing a class on Intuit Accountant Suite coming up in. I think it's at this point, it's October. We've had to push it out and push it out and push it out because it was scheduled for August, but they released a whole bunch of new stuff, and then it was scheduled for September. But I'm working on my book. So now it's, I think it's October, but I will have a class where I'm actually demoing and using accounting suite, and I'll make [00:51:30] sure that we demonstrate a playbook as well in that class.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I want to add one other piece of clarification, which of course, you would cover in your class as well, is when we talked earlier about the ability to add playbooks on. It's a part of accelerate. And accelerate is a package of features. So it's, you're not paying for each different function. When you upgrade to accelerate, you get like the books, clothes, the playbooks will be a part of it. So there's, um, they're adding more and more functionality and benefit to the [00:52:00] accelerate option of subscription.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Now I want to actually put in a piece of clarity there. Books. Clothes is separate from Accountant suite, but all the other stuff, the ProAdvisor management, the team management, the, the dashboards across all of your clients. It's basically anytime you have, you want to apply settings across your team or across your clients or look at your KPIs across your entire client base, that's what accelerate [00:52:30] is all for. But if you treat every client individually, books close is on an individual basis. You can use books closed with just one client. Yep.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's why you're the top trainer, writer, educator.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's why I listen to my own podcast to remember what I talk about. Okay. Um, so the playbooks are live and ready for use, so definitely test them out. This is one of those features that Everybody since accelerate right [00:53:00] now is free. You should sign up for accelerate and see if this is something that you could use, that this may be worth $150 a month just for this one feature. If you on board a lot of different clients. So the In the know webinar ended with their last section about what's around the corner. They basically just wanted to remind everybody that they have their own podcast called on the books. And their upcoming episodes include an interview with Chris Ortega on the future of CAS, and [00:53:30] checking in with Simon Williams on the Intuit and Accountant relationship. And I definitely want to continue that conversation because I really am seeing that Intuit is turning over a new leaf and realizing that they got to take good care of us.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Keep watering the plants so the leaf stays green.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh, what a great way of putting it. Okay. And then they also pointed out that there's a QuickBooks toolkit for accountants, and they update this constantly. There's a link in the handouts [00:54:00] that you can. That's an interactive link that you can click on to go find it, or you can go to firm of thefuture.com and search for the QuickBooks toolkit for accountants so that you can, as you were making the transition to all of these new features, you. They tell you everything that you need to know about it. All right, so there's the thank you slide. So we have reached the end of the in the know. And now, you know.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So Alicia, what do you have coming up next.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So [00:54:30] I am doing two major projects right now. One is that the publisher that I write, the, my QuickBooks, step by step, hands on textbook for is working on an ebook version of it that we're hoping to make widely available, not just to colleges, but if you are an instructor in a classroom setting, it allows you to actually manage a classroom and the students can go click by, click by, click through the textbook. So that is I'm really, really jazzed about this [00:55:00] project. And I'm also doing a whole season right now of kind of finishing off my great QBO refresh that I started literally a year ago, almost to the day where I revamped all of my content for the new interface. Now I'm in the phase of all the things that are new. And when you're listening to me talk about my classes, by the way, my even though there's a webinar date, that's the date that I'm presenting it live. Everything is recorded and then available as a QAS self-study CPE [00:55:30] class. And so the new topics that I'm doing are the, um, one specifically on the AI agents. I'm doing one on how to customize QuickBooks online. And then, uh, a big three hour one on Intuit accountant suite. So that's what's taking up all my time these days. And how about you? What's going on in your world?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Well, I, uh, have been working with Hector Garcia and with right tool and he's asked that I start helping [00:56:00] out with some, uh, user meetings or, you know, webinar type things, uh, basically where people are using right tool or considering to use it if they're looking for more of advanced assistance instead of it always being Hector or Mark, he's going to bring in a couple people, such as Dan DeLong and myself to jump in and handle some of those. So I'm always excited to be able to talk with my fellow accountants, share the little tips and tricks of things that we've learned, how to save time with, you know, different apps like [00:56:30] right tool. So that's going to be a lot of fun.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, right. Tool is one of my essential equipments. The paid version. I mean, it's, it's 75 bucks a month, but oh my God, it made me so much time. Absolutely love it. Even just the silly things. I was going to say stupid things, but the silly things like the up and down arrows and the debits and credits and the journal entries, it's just amazing.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: The one that I've been using like crazy right now is I. With this client, we have receiving payments. They'll have ten pages of different invoices [00:57:00] to receive payment against and having to go and try to find the right one, having the amount that's at the top that shows you the number of transactions, the dollar amount, oh my gosh, saves so much time doing the searching through it. So those are the kind of things we'll be able to cover.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I actually saw that up there and I was wondering what the use case is for that. So good. Thanks for letting me know. All right. Okay. Hey, spot. We did it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yes we did.

Alicia Katz Pollock: This is a marathon for us today. Um, awesome, everybody. So thank you all for tuning in to [00:57:30] now, you know, um, I hope this gave you some insight into things to look forward to. I'm Alicia Katz from Royal wise.com.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And I'm Matthew Fulton with Cloud Apps Inc and QB community Live.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And we will.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: See.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You in the next one.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: One.