IES Updates with Hector Garcia

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Alicia Katz Pollock: Hey everybody! In this week's edition of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, I have with me special guest Hector Garcia. And he's going to do his quarterly review of Intuit Enterprise Suite updates. However, that being said, we didn't do last quarter. So this one's going to be kind of a combined session of really what's been new in their development over the last year. So [00:00:30] Hector, thank you very much for joining us. How are you doing?

Hector Garcia: Very good. Are you?

Alicia Katz Pollock: I'm doing. Yeah, I know. I mean, this this has been kind of a puzzle for us to, to talk about because the innovations are so rapid fire that, you know, we can't even at this point, it's hard to figure out, well, when did that show up? Is that actually still new? And then so many of the things are moving down to advance that this really could be an enterprise and advanced. What's new. But [00:01:00] for our listeners, some of our listeners are diving in on Enterprise Suite and some of them haven't taken the leap yet. Maybe they just don't have any customers who are operating at that level. So it's going to be kind of a mix. So as we're going down these, I want to just let you know that the challenge of figuring out when did this get released and which version is it in? You can probably even let go of some of that. And let's just talk about all the new cool things that are coming [00:01:30] into the software for construction and multi-company and, and large company management. How does that sound as an approach?

Hector Garcia: Yeah. That's great. I think we could probably start with the stuff that you uniquely will see into Enterprise Suite, and then kind of talk about everything that they added this year and what the value proposition is. So people go, okay, I think I know the type of client that this will work really well for. Um, and then afterwards, maybe we can talk about all the things that started in Intuit [00:02:00] Enterprise Suite. And they kind of realized that, uh, for QuickBooks online advanced customers, that could work as well. And they've actually innovated in IIs, but brought it down skew, which is actually kind of a new thing for Intuit to add something to a higher level skew and all of a sudden bring that feature down skew, which is actually, I find that to be a net win for everybody. Uh, because all the energy, all the development money, really the heavy duty of it is on IIs and then they realize, you know, this feature could work really [00:02:30] well for advanced customers and it doesn't remove from the IIs value proposition.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I think that probably explains why there was such a big price jump in advanced this past month as well, because there are so many new things that are showing up in advance that originally were enterprise Suite. And so it was like, well, shoot, everybody could use this. Let's go ahead and monetize this development by bringing it downstream.

Hector Garcia: Exactly. So I'll get started with, um, when an end to an enterprise suite customer is probably [00:03:00] a good fit. First of all, it's not going to like the fact that I'm going to say it this way, but in enterprise suite is QuickBooks online. Like it's, it's the same system visually is the same system from an API standpoint, which is actually a really good thing, not a bad thing. Uh, because all the apps that worked on your QuickBooks online will still work with IIs is the same system for migrating. So when you migrate from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks online, it's the same [00:03:30] mechanism to go to Intuit Enterprise Suite. I'll put a little bit of asterisks on that because Enterprise Suites has some additional fields. And of course, that's a little bit different. But you know, the mechanism is about the same. So if you already are in QuickBooks online, plus advance whatever, and you move to into enterprise suite, there's no shock in terms of like what buttons to press and what does what. Like it's just going to feel about the same as QuickBooks online, plus some additional features. And if you're coming from [00:04:00] desktop and you already are kind of familiar with the migration process, you're pretty much familiar with what might happen if you go from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks online.

Hector Garcia: So the best way to think about it is it's just QuickBooks online with a different name. Now they call it a different platform because in reality, Intuit is changing some of the guts of QuickBooks online and Intuit Enterprise Suite and also QuickBooks online accountant going to Intuit Accountant Suite. A lot of these is just labels, [00:04:30] but at some point in the next couple of months to maybe a year, uh, you basically would have got it all the legacy QuickBooks stuff, and it would be all in the newly updated platform, which should allow everything to work faster, just like we've seen a heavy improvement in the way reports render. That's because that, that, that small micro change in platform. That's the same kind of philosophy they have with Internet Suite. You're seeing that. So hopefully very, [00:05:00] very soon we're going to see performance increases across all of QuickBooks, all the screens where everything gets migrated into a new platform. But as a user, all you have to know is if I know how to use QuickBooks, I know how to use Intuit Enterprise Suite. I just have to learn the additional functions. That's the first thing to mention.

Alicia Katz Pollock: When they moved to the new appearance. And it's been over. It's been right about a year now. The formal name for the new experience was QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. And so [00:05:30] that's when they started really leaning in on Intuit as not just QuickBooks, but Intuit as all of the different apps. And then each of the sections, you know, what we call the project center is now an app. And so that really leans in to what you're saying that it really is one big ecosystem.

Hector Garcia: Right? And you have to understand that for Intuit's corporate strategy, just selling the monthly subscription for the accounting software is [00:06:00] not enough. Like, you know, the the corporate strategy is the cross-selling opportunity, cross-selling the bank accounts, cross-selling the loans, cross-selling the payments, cross-selling bill payments, uh, cross-selling, uh, payroll. Like that's our cross-selling MailChimp. It's all part of strategically as a company of, of how they want to go. Like they develop these products, not just so they can trivially be, they're just laying around just in case somebody needs it is [00:06:30] because just like a bank would, you know, um, you know, they want to have multiple attachments to the core product. Like you can't go to a store to best Buy or whatever, buy a computer and they're not going to sell you the case, the cable, the cleaner, additional software, etc., etc.. It's because that's how, that's how companies work, right? They have one home run kind of core product. And then, you know, for. For those companies that need the additional stuff because they're buying it elsewhere, right? People are getting payroll from [00:07:00] ADP or they're getting payments from stripe, or they're getting their banking needs from their local bank, etc., etc.. It's like, well, Intuit has, uh, the user base, if the user base has trust on them, they have the core accounting. If we can save them a couple of clicks from going into another platform and be able to do everything in-house, it's a net positive value proposition for the customer. And of course, an opportunity for Intuit to increase their basket of goods that they're selling. [00:07:30] Of course, you know, objectively it needs to be good, right? For, for, for us to like it. But but the reality is that's how it is. Now. Intuit Enterprise Suite uses that philosophy a little bit, but a lot of the stuff is all built in and added to it. So you don't have to add more apps to it. That's kind of the idea.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I mean, think about Microsoft Office Suite. We use word and we use Excel and we use PowerPoint. And there's other apps out there, but they all have the same menu bars, at least at the at the home level. And so it's kind of the same thing.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. [00:08:00] It's just having one unified UI, UX for customers to do all their small business, medium sized business things, so to speak. So that's the first underlying thing from a pricing perspective. Um, Intuit has not been transparent about the pricing, not because they're being Machiavellian about it. It's just that the Intuit Enterprise suite is positioned as a mid-market product. And every single accounting software out there, you know, Microsoft, Sage, NetSuite, [00:08:30] whatever works the same way. Like they don't, they don't they don't have like a flat monthly fee that, that you're showing there because they want to customize the solution based on the number of users and number of entities and number of dimensions, which we'll get to, and then be able to give a custom price each time. So I can give you a general ballpark idea is whatever QuickBooks online advanced cost, you know, double that and add a little bit more. And that's probably what Intuit Enterprise Suite is going to cost. And of course, the variables [00:09:00] are how many users, how many entities in a multi entity scenario, how many dimensions, whether or not you want payroll, whether or not you want MailChimp, add ons, that sort of thing. That could change the fixed monthly price.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Do you have an idea of what an average is? I mean, I know for a while it was roughly like $1,800 a month.

Hector Garcia: That that would be an average for like a three entity setup, like three entities with payroll. That would be about the average, right? Like, again, I can [00:09:30] only speak in averages because I've seen all sorts of prices, uh, throughout. But again, if you're spending $300 and change for into an enterprise suite, sorry for QuickBooks online advanced and you want to go to enterprise suite, I said, you know, double it plus a little bit more. So you can you can expect at least for a single entity at least to pay anywhere between 750 and $800 a month. So that's kind of the price point that's important to mention. Okay. Got it. It does come with five users, uh, similar to plus in [00:10:00] that sense. Uh, but you can go up to 500 users, I believe, I think it was 101st and now it's 500 users. Wow. So, uh, with QBO advanced, you're limited to 25. So if you need to go above 25 users, you have to go to into enterprise suite no matter what. It has additional dimensions, which is basically a class like the way we're used to using classes like in like in QuickBooks desktop or QuickBooks online plus or advanced, you have this class, but the dimensions are like multiple classes in which you give them their own label. [00:10:30] So instead of having a thing that says class and you add your classes, you give your, your dimension, whatever name you want, and then whatever options you want as a dropdown. And what's really cool about dimensions like classes is that can work either at the transaction level, like locations is limited to, or they can work at the line item level, which is generally how we're used to using classes. So you get your your original class plus four or more additional locations with the base product, and you [00:11:00] can pay a little bit more and go all the way to 20 dimensions. So imagine every line item in every transaction has 20 different attributes. You could be tracking separately for the purposes of slicing and dicing in different reports.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So if you have found yourself making subclasses and subclasses of subclasses, that's a big sign that dimensions would be a big problem solve for you.

Hector Garcia: Exactly. Now with QuickBooks online, you could have multiple companies and you can switch [00:11:30] among multiple companies. You can do that already with QuickBooks online. You can do that with QuickBooks desktop, but with into enterprise suite does is when you purchase a subscription, and you pour it over all your QuickBooks online files to the IIs platform or create additional entities. If you're starting from scratch, whatever, they can all be tied together for two purposes one for entity consolidation from the perspective of reporting. So you can run a PNL [00:12:00] by company, you can run a balance sheet by company, you can run individual detailed sales information by company. You can even drill down on a multi entity consolidated PNL and see all the transactions across all the companies in a regular QuickBooks report, which is like super interesting. Um, right. But if you, if you do click on one of those transactions, it switches over to the file and opens the transaction in that file. But from a reporting perspective, in a single click, [00:12:30] the same way you're used to using QuickBooks online, you get your consolidated reports. And currently they have about 2020 consolidated reports that you can get in in In detail. Consolidated sales. Consolidated. Consolidated balance. Very good. Very good at that. There's also a concept called eliminations. So in the QuickBooks desktop world, when we used to do consolidated financial statements with QuickBooks enterprise, you had to create a separate entity in which you created this journal entries [00:13:00] to move things across your PNL or across your balance sheet to eliminate things that should not be reported in a multi entity scenario.

Hector Garcia: Without getting deep into the weeds of this, you know, a, a company that's a conglomerate of multiple companies could pad their sales by selling a bunch of stuff to each other, right? Because if you're just adding up all the sales across all the companies, you can make your revenue very inflated, right? Because you're selling to [00:13:30] each other. So in order to prevent that, uh, when you prepare a consolidated financial statement and it compares to GAAP, you're supposed to grab all the intercompany transactions and eliminate them out. So through a journal entry. Now, it's impractical to do that in every company level because when you report each of the individual company sales by themselves, you don't want that to be eliminated. You only eliminate from a consolidation standpoint. So what is really cool about [00:14:00] Intuit Enterprise Suite is you can create these things called the eliminations or the non posting eliminations, where you create this journal entry that doesn't affect any of your books, but it affects your final consolidated report to be able to remove those things for you. And that's the manual process.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Is it fair to say that in a consolidated report, you're only looking at at externally facing transactions and any internal transactions between the companies are not represented?

Hector Garcia: Correct. [00:14:30] They must be eliminated, so to speak. Yes, that's exactly right. That's the best way to illustrate that. Now there's also and they added this recently in August. Super exciting is they also added automatic eliminations, which means that I generate an invoice from one company and then I have an accompanying or a linked bill in the other company. And it knows that this is a company intercompany transaction. So I don't have to go and [00:15:00] create my manual elimination. It does it for me automatically. And you configure, which is your intercompany loan account in the balance sheet for it to for it to clear through. So you have automatic eliminations as well. If you create transactions between the companies, which also has an automation process to automatically enter that for you. So from a data entry level, I open one of my companies and I create an invoice. And as long [00:15:30] as my, my customer that I'm invoicing to is a customer that's linked to that, um, second company, the second company automatically generates the bill on the other side and it waits for you to approve it, to post it. So it's not just, you know, doing the elimination, but also creating the actual transaction. So you don't have to enter the information twice. And you have to map your item list. That's going to be in your invoices with your chart of accounts from the other company. So [00:16:00] it knows where to post it to.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And so the part of the setup process then would be like going through and identifying all the things that are, that are related to each company so that it just automatically knows this belongs to this, and this belongs to this.

Hector Garcia: Exactly. And it takes hours and hours and hours, by the way, to actually do a setup. I don't want to scare you, but at the same time, I want to tell you a huge revenue opportunity as a consultant. You get somebody into, is your clients going to need a lot of help configuring that mapping [00:16:30] because you have to do that mapping in order for all that stuff to be automated, because if you don't do the mapping, it will post to random places and basically the whole thing will break, right? So for this to be truly automated is you have to do some of the thinking. And as a consultant, it's a huge, I think the biggest opportunity that we're going to have in the next couple of years to really, really make a lot of money as consultants, as technical consultants in the Intuit world will be with Intuit Enterprise Suite. The [00:17:00] other piece that's important to mention is Chart of Accounts. So when you have a consolidated report, one of the challenges you have is that if every company has a different chart of accounts, your report, your consolidated report is going to be a disaster. So they're giving you two options. One option is to create a standardization system where everybody can. Every company can have their own chart of accounts. And then you have a mapping mechanism to map it to like a primary one. [00:17:30]

Hector Garcia: So when you generate the consolidated report, everything is converted, so to speak, to that one standard chart of accounts. Or you also have a second option, which is to actually copy the chart of accounts across all your companies and with some AI speed up the process of like actually transforming each chart of accounts. So they all look the same. So option one, they can all look different. And you create one set of mapped one where everybody, everything links [00:18:00] to for the elimination purposes or option 2 in 1 fell swoop, you clean them all up so that all the exact same chart of accounts and you lock them it by locking them means if you don't have admin access to the consolidated view, you cannot add new accounts into the chart of accounts. You have to be in the consolidated view, sort of in the control center to pick which account gets added and which companies have access to that specific account. So it keeps the structure of that account. Of course for PNL, that's very easy to do [00:18:30] for a balance sheet that's a little bit more unique. But that's a really important feature because anytime you deal with consolidation, you need like sort of one person to control what the final presentation of that consolidated report looks like. And Intuit is learning through all these implementations what people require to do something like that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And all that makes sense because it depends on what the nature of the company is that if you're talking about holding companies for real estate, they can all have the same chart of accounts. [00:19:00] But if you're talking about a like, I've got a, like I have, I have one company that is a, they do construction, landscaping, construction, but they're also opening up a nursery, which is essentially retail, but they're growing their own plants and selling them to the construction side of it. So they both have a different need for a different chart of accounts. But it makes sense to be able to map the two of those together.

Hector Garcia: That's absolutely right. And speaking of construction, so [00:19:30] one of the value propositions that Intuit Enterprise Suite came up with was first released in September of 2024. And we've had, you know, about eight quarterly releases since then. And the nut that have really been trying to crack here is how do we serve our construction clients, which were which was the industry that was most second most resistant to move out of QuickBooks desktop because of a lot of features that were in QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise [00:20:00] that you didn't see on Internet Enterprise Suite. And I'm glad to announce that as of August of this year, I believe that there isn't just product parity with QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise on construction stuff. There's actually more features in Ise for construction that you don't see in Intuit Enterprise that you don't see in QuickBooks Desktop enterprise. And I can go through them, and I think it's very important to go through them. Um, so let's go through like the stuff that you were not expecting in QuickBooks [00:20:30] online, uh, to be able to do, uh, with reporting. So now we have full reporting. Uh, it can show you your estimates versus actuals across multiple jobs. It can show you the work in progress, including the amount of revenue you should be recognizing because of the percentage of completion method, including revised contract value, which means that you have an original contract and then you have a bunch of change orders. Uh, so now you have not just the original contract, [00:21:00] but also the revised contract stuff that QuickBooks desktop didn't track. You also have negative change orders where you can create a change order not just for increasing the project, but for decreasing the project.

Hector Garcia: So like in the past where we had to decrease the contract value in a project, we had to go back to the original estimate and add negative lines, which created a whole bunch of messes. Now you can have a separate document, which is your change order document that links to that original estimate. And that can either be a positive [00:21:30] value or a negative value. So we got full product parity there. We have some additional enhancements like, uh, project specific user permission. So this is really cool. So you can have someone that only has access to a particular set of projects when they log in into, into an enterprise suite. So you can have like a job foreman that only has four active projects. And you say, this person can only look at these four projects, and they can only create transactions for those projects or look at transactions that have those [00:22:00] projects. So it's super interesting how they're doing that. And they still have to work out some of the kinks of what should they have access to? You know, what if there's one transaction that affects multiple projects, could be they're still working through those kinks, but the concept of, you know, allowing a user that's not like an accounting power user, it's not someone that's privileged with payroll information or bank Information to be able to at least track what's going on in their projects via Internet Enterprise Suite. That's a huge lift [00:22:30] from what, you know, the limitations that we have with QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I'm really happy to hear that because one of the clients that I had, the there was a user type of, of project manager, but they could not even get in to manage their own projects with that type. So I'm really happy to hear that there's a way of actually assigning a project to a security level.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, it's pretty awesome. And you also have the ability to set a target profit margin [00:23:00] for the project. So you can say this project is supposed to be at 30%. And then while you're transacting, like, let's say, for example, you're supposed to end this in a year while you're transacting, and while you are creating invoices or progress invoices and adding bills or checks or expenses, and you're in the project center and you see what your margin is on that project, you will always know whether you're on target or off target. So now you have a really quick way via a dashboard to know which which projects are on target [00:23:30] and which ones are off target. And each project can have its own individual target market projected margin.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's really cool.

Hector Garcia: Right? You also get a full dashboard with KPIs for projects, uh, things like under billings and, and over billings, you get that in a graphical format, something you don't get with QuickBooks desktop enterprise. So don't get that in QuickBooks online either, which is really, really awesome. Uh, there's a lot of new innovations with [00:24:00] AI, particularly with the conversion of your old Excel style calculations or PDF documents. So what's happening a lot is, uh, is, has a lot of construction companies and they came to into it and they said, look, my challenge is that in order for me to create an estimate for a project, I have to use this big spreadsheet. Like we can't change the spreadsheet. This is the spreadsheet that contains the cost of [00:24:30] every little thing that we use and the cost of every labor item, and we just don't have time to set that up, you know, in QuickBooks. So what you can do now is you can upload that spreadsheet and then through AI and look, it's not perfect because AI is not perfect. It will like pre-fill your detailed project budget with every single line item, every single cost component, every single markup component to really speed up that data entry process that people were doing really, really in a real manual way. [00:25:00] And that's something that you don't get in QuickBooks desktop world that you're starting to get into an enterprise suite, which is super exciting.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So instead of making it so that you're doing the detailed job costing in QuickBooks, you still get to use your project spreadsheets that you've been relying on. And then you can import that detail without having to manually recreate it.

Hector Garcia: That's exactly right. Exactly right. There are two additional features that I'm actually going to talk about towards the end of the episode that started as an eyes feature, and now there are. It's actually available [00:25:30] in QBO advanced, which is cost groups and project phases. So let's park that and talk about that towards the end. And the last big new enhancement on, um, on construction for eyes is something called a A style billing, which is a specific document format that the association of, I think Institute of Architects or something like that, uh, put together that most construction [00:26:00] companies come conform to, particularly for like government projects or, or large, uh, contract projects where they have to create something called a schedule of values and they have to invoice in a very specific way. This will now Grab your original estimate in the traditional way that QuickBooks is and convert it into an AI style invoice format. So the person on the other side doesn't have to doesn't delay the payment because your invoices don't look the way you want them to look, or you don't have to [00:26:30] sit there and convert your QuickBooks invoice into an AI style AI A style billing, uh, workflow.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's really great because that saves a lot of steps and opens up, opens it up to a whole different group of people who weren't able to use it before.

Hector Garcia: Exactly. And there's a couple other little things here in the workflow sections and the task management sections for construction specifically, but nothing that really will, you know, make, help make will entice you to move because of that. So [00:27:00] those are little dilators that you're going to see, uh, in terms of industry focus. So they're pretty much almost done with like, I would say the bulk and the chunk of the work of porting over construction related items and focusing on that construction industry. And I'll continue to add more stuff to it. Like, don't get me wrong, you're going to continue to see construction things in there, but where, where they're focusing on now is that second group of really resistant QuickBooks desktop, [00:27:30] uh, people that were not wanting to go to online, which is the inventory and the manufacturing. So they released in August already in beta. So you can sign up in beta, um, a couple of features with manufacturing to do, uh, build a material. So to actually build an assembly, uh, they released, uh, together with that, they released multiple units of measure, which is actually not beta that's actually released.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I'm [00:28:00] going to stop you right in your tracks. Units of measure is now in Qbo.

Hector Garcia: Yes. Multiple units of measure is in Qbo, which means if you buy yarn by the case, that includes 600 100 yard, uh, rolls. You can count it by the inch, by the yard, by the yarn, by the yard, by the case, whatever you want. And the unit break it and I'll break the cost and the price based on that proportional division of whatever [00:28:30] you use for that multiple units of measure.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I'm going to venture to say that that is probably one of the biggest missing innovations in Intuit history, because that was the major thing for me of what determined if somebody in manufacturing had to stay in desktop or were able to go online, that if you had to, if you were buying by the case and selling by the unit or buying by the unit and using um, to assemble by the [00:29:00] fraction, it was literally impossible. And if you, if what you're saying is true, and obviously it is, that is groundbreaking.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, I'll clarify by saying that everything I'm saying is true. Let's just start with that. But but but what's also really cool about multiple units of measure is that you see this live in is and a couple of QBO advanced customers have access to it too. So this gives me, and [00:29:30] this is very interesting. This leads me to believe that multiple units of measure is also going to make it down skew into QBO advanced. They haven't none of their websites have have announced that officially. But that's one of the features that we're expecting to also see it come down skew. So don't, uh, so don't be surprised if you actually see multiple units of measure in your QBO advanced file.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That will be fantastic. I mean, they already made it so that moving average cost is now available, not just Fifo. [00:30:00] And now we have sales and we've had sales orders now for a couple months. And so I would love to see units of measure. Even if it's just being able to move my plus people up to advance, that's a huge step.

Hector Garcia: No problem. And I'll give you a personal demo on that a little bit later on so you can actually see how it works. It's actually pretty cool. I'm actually pretty excited that I've been working with their inventory team for the last two months and will continue through Intuit Connect, and hopefully we'll be the guy showcasing some [00:30:30] of these things at Intuit Connect. So it'll be pretty point of pride to not just show a cool feature, but a feature in which I had my little bit of magic touch across a couple of the little things that we were iterating harrowing, harrowing it out in the process.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So I'm glad your fingerprint is on it, and I hope they give you the honor of being able to just to debut it for sure.

Hector Garcia: Yes. So, um, what you're also expected to hear as a big announcement into connect, um, is, you know, the next [00:31:00] phases of bringing inventory and what we used to call advanced inventory in QuickBooks desktop world. So things like multi-location, inventory tracking, lot numbers, serial numbers, uh, barcode scanning, all of those things are being built as we speak. So like, I am super excited about that and not just from a product parity level, but also in every interaction I'm having with them is like, how can we be even better [00:31:30] than desktop? How can we even be better than desktop? Um, so they have this like virtual challenge against desktop, but it's because, you know, people are resistant to move. So like we, it has to be better. It can't just be a copy. It has to be better. So I agree. And the one, the third industry that also has a lot of focus on their team and I haven't worked with them one on one with this. I hope hopefully they're working for someone that knows this stuff is nonprofit. So like there were some discussions around trying [00:32:00] to solve problems like grant management and restricted asset tracking and things that you really don't get in in the QuickBooks world. They're going to build this in. And that might be more of a 2027 thing, a 2027 thing that we're expecting to see. But those are the three major industries where is is going to attack, right? Construction, manufacturing and inventory and nonprofit. On top of being able to generally work with anybody that needs [00:32:30] multi entity and dimensions as we spoke earlier.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right. Well, I hope those nonprofit tools are ones that do go downstream to other levels because there's so much in, in enterprise suite that a nonprofit might not need, especially if they're kind of low level, but being able to track restricted grants is enormous. That would be so nice not to have to do an annual adjustments.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, I've, I visualized it a little bit different. Like I, I would like to see [00:33:00] all the nonprofit stuff to be into enterprise suite and then into it having a way to allow nonprofits based on their revenue level to just make it really affordable for them, that that way it just doesn't get very confusing because the reality is that the reporting requirements of nonprofit are inherently complex and advanced, even though they usually can't afford a complex and advanced type system. You see what I'm saying? So like, I feel [00:33:30] that bringing that stuff downstream will take away from the fact of how complex the non, the non-for-profit reporting system is out there. And if you actually look at third party apps that do that in the nonprofit world, they're priced in crazy numbers. So there actually isn't a market for 100 bucks or 200 bucks a month that can give all the complex nonprofit and most of the nonprofits are using probably free labor to spend hours and hours on these stupid spreadsheets to, [00:34:00] to present to the boards. And because that's kind of been the industry norm, no one really has attacked this market. So I think it kind of makes sense for is to do that because a lot of nonprofits have a lot of money. Just because they're nonprofits doesn't mean that they can't afford, um, you know, software actually, you would argue that because most of the labor is free, you know, they have a lot more money, a different conversation, but okay.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, I would, I would imagine that it will be available through Techsoup, which is basically, you know, you can get a year of plus for the price of a month and a year [00:34:30] of advance for the price of a month. And so if that same pricing structure works, then that's going to be enormous for Intuit and a huge gift to the industry.

Hector Garcia: For sure.

Hector Garcia: I want to fill in a couple more gaps on like the new, exciting things that came out specifically in August. So they finished adding dimensions across all the transactions, across all the fields. So nothing is left out of a report in dimensions. So like when the first came out, they only added it to a couple of transactions. [00:35:00] Now every single transaction that would otherwise have a class in it, including timesheets and payroll, can have a dimension. So you can run a PNL by any dimension. A detailed expense report by any dimension, a detailed sales report by any dimension. And you can also have cross-dimensional pivot tables where you can have one dimension on the row and one dimension on the column, which makes it super cool. And if you're like a Excel pivot table nerd, I think you're visualizing, you know, [00:35:30] all these different amazing ways to slice and dice your data. Um, also bringing the balance sheet by dimension, like aka the balance sheet by class that we've been asking forever. That's being beta tested right now in August. So a few subgroup of people have that. So balance sheet by class or balance sheet by dimension should be available uh, soon. And they also added uh, artificial intelligence dimension backfill. What the heck does that mean? It means a couple of things. It means one if you're [00:36:00] going from a system that doesn't have multiple dimensions to one that has multiple dimensions, like is you're going to have a lot of past transactions that don't have those dimensions in them, right? So they added dimensions to the reclassified tool. So the same tool that we use to reclass transactions or change categories of transactions, you can historically look at transactions missing dimensions.

Hector Garcia: And you can go back and backfill that with, you know, the, the, the mechanistic way using the reclassified tool. But with the AI [00:36:30] backfill, it will look at patterns on how you've been entering your dimensions. Now based on the item, based on the customer, based on the vendor, whatever. And they'll go back and go, you know what, based on the way you're entering this stuff, we believe these transactions should backfill this way. And I'll give you a way for you to approve and like it will go back and backfill stuff. And if it misses a couple, you can just manually reclassify stuff because the biggest value of dimensional reporting is with the historical data. [00:37:00] And that's a huge gap because when you go with that multi-dimensional system like IAS and you don't have dimensions on your on your past data, it's impossible to see the value of this, which is why so many people are having a tough time implementing dimensions because they can't see it on the back data. So they go, what's the point of just doing new data? So this is what they're working on. They have version one of the dimension backfill, but I'm pretty sure in the next couple of months they're going to go really, really hard on like get my eyes up and running and go back [00:37:30] in time 2 or 3 years and get all my dimensions filled in so I can get to the value of a dimensional report fairly quickly.

Alicia Katz Pollock: To me, dimensions are one of the features that I love the most. It just, you know, fits the way my brain works. And I've had that experience of like, okay, well shoot, now we're midway through the year. What are we going to do with the whole beginning of the year? So I think that this is really a necessary tool for adoption.

Hector Garcia: Yes. So now let's talk about some interesting news about [00:38:00] QBO in some cases plus, but mostly advance that pertain to I s. So Internet Enterprise Suite has been experimenting with a lot of new features, adding a lot of new features and into it has noticed that some of these features could work well for like a QuickBooks online Advanced type SKU. And they shouldn't be gated in like in eyes only. And a couple of those features have already made it downstream. Uh, particularly for construction [00:38:30] for projects is one called cost groups. Now you're going to, when you go edit an item in QBO advance, you might now see a new drop down menu. So like if you go to an item, you're going to see a drop down menu for category, you're going to see a drop down menu for, uh, default class. So these are the two drop down menus you see as attributes to items to products and services. At the moment. You're now going to see one more called cost groups. And the point of this is that if I want to see a sales by [00:39:00] item or sale or purchases by item or cost by item or project, cost by product or service, instead of seeing every single item in your arsenal, you can group them in smart ways. So, for example, I have a lot of construction companies that have 17 different items for labor like labor, Mike labor, John labor, overtime, labor 50, labor 40, like there's all sorts of different reasons why they want to use different labor items to track or to track ultimately a labor [00:39:30] cost of some sort.

Hector Garcia: You know, maybe they want to map it to a different account in the chart of accounts, or maybe they want to see what type of labor or who did the work, whatever. However you want to frame it, you can have a whole bunch of labor items, but you put all those labor items in a labor cost group. Same thing with materials. I have like 300 different types of materials. I can put them all in a materials cost group again without messing with the categories. And then I can see my report just grouped and pivoted by that labor equipment. Uh, [00:40:00] um, uh, materials category, which is very common in the construction world. So you can really see it in a high level way without having to have use a class or a dimension and every transaction in the first place, because these cost groups don't get added in transactions, they're an attribute of the product used itself. So that's huge. And that made it down skew. So super exciting about that. So I'm super excited about that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. It's interesting because it kind of blends together the use case for a [00:40:30] custom field by product and a class by product. And just being able to be creative with the, um, the, a different level of grouping together.

Hector Garcia: Right?

Hector Garcia: And for custom report building, like for someone like me, that's like, like more of an operations consultant, that's always great to feel that at the end of the day, I may have a way to create this super easy to read report that summarizes the data, and the customer could always double click and see the details. But in a high level way, we [00:41:00] can group it that way. And that's something that was always missing with items. People were always stuck with using items and subitems or categories and QBO, but categories could be something else. Right? Like I have a client where their categories is the brand, you know, so they have Nike, Reebok, whatever. But then under each one, they could sell shares or shoes or whatever. And if they want to see all their shirt sales, they can't because the category is being used by the brand, you know? Or you could go the other way too.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah.

Hector Garcia: Having that is just great. And again, it's sort [00:41:30] of a byproduct of multi-dimensional reporting, but tied to the particular product and service. So that's one that made it down skew. The second one that made a down skew, which I love and I hate for each for a separate reason, is project faces. So I love project faces. So think of a project face sort of as a sub project, but you don't configure them as its own individual project. What you do is inside each project, you can create multiple phases and then you label [00:42:00] the phases, whatever you want. Phase one, phase two, phase three or foundation walls, uh, punch out, you know, whatever. Like you create whatever phase you want in whatever project you're creating. And then when you're doing your job costing, when you're creating your anything, it's all, it's mostly with expenses. So when you're creating your, um, your bills or checks or expenses and your job costing them, you can pick to which phase it belongs to. So then when you look at your, [00:42:30] your profit and loss by project, not the profit project, but a profitability report by project or an estimate versus actual by project or a whip report by project, you can break it down by project phase to see, you know, what subsection of this project is this expense going to. I love that. What I hate about it is that I can't turn it off. So like, if I'm not using faces, um, it just has a blank face, uh, column and you might already be seeing this [00:43:00] in like QBO plus in advance where you see a face little field there and you drop down and there's nothing there because you didn't create any faces. So it just creates extra space and into it. All they have to do is just ability to turn it off when you don't need to use faces and turn it on when you do need need to use faces, because the number of customers that actually need to use faces is probably a very small number.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right? If you need them, you need them. And if you don't need them, then it's just extra real estate.

Hector Garcia: Right?

Hector Garcia: Especially in something as sensitive as the [00:43:30] space in my line item, while I also have classes and dimensions to deal with. Right? Because the more stuff that you add, like I don't want to have drop down menus for things I'm not going to use because I just don't. I just have so much space and not everybody has a double wide monitor where it doesn't, that doesn't matter. Like everybody has a regular 16 by nine monitor, and it's just so much space for you to have fields in there, or you have to zoom out so much that the text is unreadable. So obviously that's, that's that real estate is really important. So if you don't need that face, they got to get rid of it. The other [00:44:00] feature that you're seeing down skew is called proposals. Proposals is really cool. So you create your estimate that has all your your costs and stuff. And at the end you have like your estimate that you give to your customer, but maybe you don't want to print the estimate from QuickBooks, which is like that square invoice looking thing, but instead you want to grab the contents of that estimate, add a bunch of text to it. So you have like a template where you can add a bunch of text to it, press a button and it creates [00:44:30] more like a PDF document that goes, hey Mr. Customer, we're glad that you consider us for this bid. You know, we really want to work on your house and make your, you know, new bathrooms look pretty or whatever. Here's your estimated cost and it basically makes it look very pretty. Not like an invoice. And it has your signature. And at the end the customer can electronically sign via via QuickBooks online. So you have an evolution of what a QBO has always had with the ability to kind of add a signature line to [00:45:00] the estimate. The evolution is we're doing it in a template where you can add a bunch of text to it. And on top of that electronic signature workflow. So that's great.

Alicia Katz Pollock: My design and build folks are going to love that because sometimes I've done qbo setups, and they were just flabbergasted that you couldn't change the appearance of the forms, that you couldn't make an estimate or an invoice look pretty the way their, their original ones did in desktop. So being able to put it into a proposal [00:45:30] that has has a design element in it is phenomenal. And I've been really, really liking the ability to send PDFs with fillable fields for contract signing and I'm seeing it inside estimates. I'm seeing it inside customers. I'm seeing it inside payroll as well. So for those of you who have DocuSign or Panda Docs, you might not need those external subscriptions anymore.

Hector Garcia: Exactly. I agree 100%. There are two more features that started [00:46:00] in the Intuit Enterprise Suite world and they made it down skew. So one of them is calculated fields and reports. So they started experimenting with adding some calculated fields in reports where you can grab any two data points in a report, in a summary report or a detailed report and say calculate these two. Uh, so that started with IAS and they brought that down skew. I think that's even in plus. I don't remember if it's plus or advanced. So I'm I'm sorry if I if I wasn't precise on this, but I've seen it [00:46:30] for sure in advance. So you're going to start seeing calculated fields in their.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Calculated fields is a huge add because it allows spreadsheet style reporting without having to export everything to Excel and then retool all your reports there as well.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. And the last kind of feature set that you're starting to see down skew in, I believe in both plus and advanced is an improvement of the purchase order page. There's a lot more fields, a lot [00:47:00] more customizability there. And um, an improvement of this sales order, specifically, the sales order can now have a one to many relationship. So you can have a single sales order that connects to multiple purchase orders. When sales orders first came out, which, you know, they weren't very good. Uh, you could only go like 1 to 1. Like I create a sales order and I can only do one purchase order from it. But in the real world, you have a customer that orders a bunch of stuff, you put it in a sales order and you might have to go buy that stuff [00:47:30] from three different vendors. So you can now create directly from a sales order, one purchase order, two purchase orders, three purchase orders and maintain that linkage. The other thing that you may have seen is this concept called item receipts. Now, if you're if you use QuickBooks desktop, you're kind of aware of that feature. I have a, I have a bit of a love hate relationship with item receipts, mostly because if you turn on item receipts, then every [00:48:00] single time you create a purchase order, you have to use an item receipt.

Hector Garcia: And every single time you have to close that item receipt with an accompanying bill. So it's an additional transaction. Whereas if you don't turn on item receipts, you can go straight from purchase order to a bill. The only challenge that that has sometimes is that some companies receive the items way before or way after receiving the bill, and they want to have [00:48:30] a different bill, bill, due date database than the receive item receipt database for the purposes of counting and availability, but it's not very common where there's such a gap between the day you receive the item and the date you know, the in the invoice, the vendor bill kicks in. So in order to avoid that confusion, generally I recommend for people to stay within just a Po and and bill. But at any point in [00:49:00] time that that is the required to know the difference of when they have the items versus when they owe for the items. Then you turn on item receipts and they started as an eyes feature, which came really from QuickBooks desktop enterprise. Um, and, um, and now you can see this even in QBO plus or advanced, I believe that's available there.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right? And I remember seeing and let me know if this isn't true, but it sounded like once you turned on item receipts, not only can you not go back, but your bills and expenses can [00:49:30] no longer be used for inventory management that you have to go pee. Oh item receipt bill that you can never go straight to Bill anymore.

Hector Garcia: Correct. And if you go straight to Bill, you're going to mess up the numbers. Um, I don't remember if QuickBooks gives you an error. If you try to use an inventory item in a, in a bill. Uh, because you might still use the same vendor for, uh, an expense type thing, not an inventory type thing, which shouldn't require an item receipt because that would be confusing. [00:50:00] But particularly with inventory, you have to use that workflow because QuickBooks creates a clearing account. I think it's called inventory offset, uh, account or something like that, where it needs to temporarily put the value of that inventory before it moves it to accounts payable, or temporarily put an accounts payable before it puts it into, uh, into your inventory asset. That way, because, you know, accounting is perfect debits and credits, like if you receive it, that needs to be a debit to a credit. So in order to bring the inventory [00:50:30] up, you have to bring accounts payable up. But if the bill doesn't exist, you can't bring accounts payable up so you have other liability. Temporary thing that then gets cleared out when you create it. And if you miss that workflow, you're going to have a value in that clearing account where the clearing account really should be zero.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That all makes sense. Yeah.

Hector Garcia: And that's it. I think that's a really good synopsis of what IaaS is and everything that you're expecting to see up to August of 2026. And hopefully at some point post November [00:51:00] after Intuit connect and Reframe, we could do a recap of what else came out afterward.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And everything that you just said makes me wonder, reminds me to remind people that if you turn on a feature and it doesn't work, or you try it out and it doesn't do exactly what you need it to do, like you were talking about sales orders, that the sales order could only go to one one purchase order, and now it can go to several. So if you ever try out a feature and [00:51:30] then you dismiss it like, oh, I can't use it because of X, Y, or Z that you really do need to go revisit every 3 to 6 months or so and double check to make sure that if you put in the feedback and you tell them what you need it to do, you got to check and make sure that feedback was actually seen and acted on.

Hector Garcia: Right. And I would, I would burn it up like this. It's not like, oh, you have to give into the feedback, otherwise they won't do it. Listen, every time into it loses a customer. Now they're going deep into figuring out [00:52:00] why they left. And if a feature isn't missing, they're creating a task force around filling that gap. And I know this firsthand because I've been literally hired in several locations, so. Hey, guys. Hey, Hector. We're looking at this particular use case, you know, like if if you have you had clients that had that give me some feedback. Is this worth, you know, building so into it is really, really trying to figure out like, they don't want to lose any customers and they shouldn't, like every [00:52:30] business should act like this. So like this is a this is a new into it. This is not, you know, they're adding features because they're being nice. They're adding features because it is fundamental to keep customers in the accounting world where when, you know, uh, with VI coding or whatever, people are creating their own custom solutions. So they want to make sure that their systems are robust enough, especially with Intuit Enterprise Suite that they're making claims that this is for mid-market, mid-market customers. Don't mess around. [00:53:00] I'm telling you, you know, like if you're going to pay $20,000 a year for software or whatever, you can't say, ah, okay, it's just QuickBooks. No, it doesn't work like that. They say it doesn't work. Let's go somewhere else. Because generally they have a lot more money than what they're paying for software, uh, invested in these systems. And one little error with inventory or construction not working, it cost the company millions and millions of dollars. So they're willing to invest quite a bit in software, which is the opportunity that Intuit sits with enterprise Suite, which is why [00:53:30] you see so much investment and so much innovation in this particular area.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So it's definitely a great thing that Intuit is going after this new market because we're all getting the benefits of it. It's just like, you know, because of NASA, we have Tempur-Pedic.

Hector Garcia: It's perfect analogy and, and zippers and Velcro and all aluminum foil, all that stuff.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Exactly. All right. So Hector, thank you so much [00:54:00] for that synopsis. And we will come back around in the, in the end of the year or so and see how things have further developed. So what's going on in your world?

Hector Garcia: Still chugging along. Uh, trying to like, uh, prepare for, interconnect and prepare for reframe and adding new features to right tool every day. So I'm heads down just doing, doing what I know how to do best.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. Awesome.

Hector Garcia: And yourself.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I've [00:54:30] been doing my deep dives into Intuit Accountant Suite and really getting to know it and figuring out who are the right use cases for it and how to do books close, and really trying to dive in and figure out who's the right fit for it. And of course, as always, get in my $0.02 about how to improve it and make it so that it's a feature that is right for everybody. And if you check out royalties.com and there's a link in the show notes, I'm going to, I have a [00:55:00] class about what I've discovered so far.

Hector Garcia: Looking forward to checking it out.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Thank you. All right. Hector, it was great having you on. It was great hanging out with you. So thanks for being here. And thanks to all our listeners for tuning in, and we will see.

Hector Garcia: You in the next.One.