Now You Know: In the Know Recap September 2026

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Alicia Katz Pollock: Hey, everybody, this is Alicia Pollock from real.com and welcome to this week's episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast. This is our monthly Now you Know episode, our recap of Intuit's monthly in the know where on the third Thursday of every month at 11 a.m., they go over all the new features in the software. And so this is our opportunity [00:00:30] to not just help spread the information, but also give you our colorful commentary. And to help me out with this month's analysis, I have with me, Mr. Matthew Spot Fulton of Cloud Apps, Inc.. How are you doing, Matthew?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Alicia. I'm doing wonderful. It's hard to believe it's already been a month since we did the last one of these, right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: It seemed to be really fast this time. I mean, there aren't fewer days in August and there's not fewer days in September. But I swear that I had just heard from you saying, hey, are we doing that episode. [00:01:00] And here it was like, it feels like the day after tomorrow. So welcome back.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Well, they never seem to come quick enough. So I'm excited to be here today. And we can help share the information of what we now know.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Absolutely. All right. I'm going to actually go ahead and share my screen. Um, for those of you listening on the podcast, the links to the slide deck are in the show notes. And you can also go to our YouTube channel at unofficial QBO podcast on YouTube and actually get some visuals to go [00:01:30] along with the to go along with the commentary.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: It's always nice to be able to take a look at the slide deck as we're going through it as well. It helps kind of remind me of some of the touch points, you know, throughout the different events that, uh, we definitely want to highlight for everybody.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. So let's begin our now, you know, recap of in the know. All right. So in the know is hosted by Arti Patel Martinez, who's the program manager in charge of the ProAdvisor [00:02:00] training program. Soon to be the Pro Partner Program and in the agenda for the session, we. They always start with community news. Then there's three product innovations and they end with what's around the corner. When you attend live, you are eligible for CPE. But those of you who are listening to this can go to earmark.me and get CPE for listening to our show. If you weren't able to make it to the in the know. If you do want to hear the original on the know, you can go [00:02:30] to firm of thefuture.com and they have a hole in the nose section. And so they have the recordings there. So you can go back and review the real thing. So let's go start with the ProAdvisor community news. So on October 22nd they are doing one of their Better Together sessions. This is the program that travels around the country or does webinars helping business owners and ProAdvisor. Learn more about the Intuit products. And so they're [00:03:00] having one on October 22nd at 11 a.m. called AI for financial storytelling. Do you want to go ahead and talk about this?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So this session, the AI for financial storytelling, it's specifically focused around helping to teach us accounting advisors the best way to work with our clients truly to kind of underscore to uncover the business story. Or as they would say, you know, it's extracting the meaningful client stories, the key metrics and actionable trends [00:03:30] that they would want to see in their financial data. They're going to actually provide a live end to end AI demonstration and even provide you a take home, repeatable framework so you can, when you're done with this whole series, be able to put it into practice right away and help your clients even further.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So it really sounds like what they're going to be doing is demonstrating how to use IAS and QuickBooks and your favorite, That your favorite GPT, you know, ChatGPT or [00:04:00] cloud or whatever. To take a look at your QuickBooks data, find the stories that you need to communicate to your client, and then how to share them with the client. So I think that sounds like a great session. And so that again, is going to be on October 22nd at 11 a.m.. And you can go to firm of thefuture.com in order to reserve your spot. Another program that they are doing is called the Accounting Futures Program, and their goal is to upskill a [00:04:30] million students over the next five years, teaching them how to use QuickBooks, getting them certified, turning them into ProAdvisor. And so they're kicking off a program that is bringing pro advisors into the classroom, whether it's mentorship or resume reviews or guest speakers. And I'm proud to say that I'm actually one of the inaugural group of accounting futures professionals.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Congratulations.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Thank you. And so that's [00:05:00] something to keep an eye out for as the program develops. And we're kind of building it all together. But as it develops, there should be opportunities for you as well to be able to foster the next generation. All right. So that brings us to the product innovations. The first segment talked about the Pro Partner Accountants update, and it was led by Arlene Tang, who's the marketing lead for the Pro Partner Accountants program. And she started with a poll [00:05:30] asking, did we know that the Pro Partner Accountants program is succeeding the ProAdvisor program in early 2027? And in the poll, 42% said, yeah, we know about it. 35% said no, 13% said they're not sure. And almost 10% said, what are you talking about, Willis? So, you know, I would have thought by now that people would know about this and have heard about it, but it really still sounds like they've only reached, [00:06:00] you know, 40 or 50% of ProAdvisor to even let them know that this is shifting.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And this is of the audience that was in attendance, right? Which again, you would think if unless they're not attending regularly, they would have definitely heard it by now.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, you would think so. You know, I'm working my hardest off. We've had four episodes or five episodes where we've talked about it, including one episode with Margie Remmers Davis, where we actually went through and broke down the whole program and how the points work and [00:06:30] all of that. So we're going to re summarize again some of the things that you need to know.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. I would say that this session was it was heavily focused on the pro partner accountants program. So for those who are maybe not completely familiar, this is going to be a great episode for you to really understand some of the stuff that's carrying over the benefits and so forth.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So basically what they heard was that the program as [00:07:00] it has been, you know, which has been around for like almost 20 years, needed to be redesigned and updated based on our feedback and based on all the changes that are happening in the industry. So they redesigned the global partner program to continue to be in partnership with accountants like us. So the benefits that you still get, a lot of it, most of it is still exactly the same. The core benefits are still there. You still get [00:07:30] your free QBO A, not QBO A you.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Your IAS.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You still get your IAS portal for free. You still get your copy of QBO advanced with payroll still completely for free, you still get your 30% preferred pricing and the 30% discount pay for your clients during the first 12 months. So you still get all of that stuff. The ProAdvisor trainings and [00:08:00] certifications are also all still free. The only basic difference between Qbo A and we know it and IAS as it is now, is that the interface has been modernized and we don't have the black bar down the left hand side, and it looks like the same as our clients.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. Again, it's been a very I've been using it since they first launched it. It's been very easy to use.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And so making the change is literally just going up to the gear. And at the bottom of the gear menu it says upgrade [00:08:30] to IAS and you click yes and you're done. Um, it does ask you for a credit card. That's in case you are going to be using any of the paid services. But right now all of those paid services are also free right now so that you can try them out and see if they're relevant to your business and see if they're going to be useful for you. So it's not like, oh my God, they're going to start charging us. Know there's new features that have a price tag that may be helpful to you and maybe irrelevant [00:09:00] to you. And so try them out now and see if you like them as they're in development. And especially since this is the time to help guide them. You know, if it's like half of what you need, but if it did this other thing, then it would be useful to you, then this is the great time to put in your feedback.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, one thing that Intuit truly is, is good about is they let us know before they're going to turn on the pay for something, switch ahead of time very, very consistently. So this has been something I've had a lot of people [00:09:30] asking me about. There are a lot of people that are still under the assumption that I s that they're going to have to pay for it for some reason. So I know you just said it, but I really want to stress it again, Intuit Accountant Suite, there is a completely free version of that that does not cost the accounting firm anything at all to be able to use it. Matter of fact, like you said, extra features for free currently. So try them out to to find the value ahead of time.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yep. So everything you're used to being free is still free. [00:10:00] Free, free. Okay. Now there are new benefits and there are new features. So some of the things that they are adding in is enhanced customer support. So now there's a resolution center inside your qbo where you can go see all of your open cases and open tickets and see all of the, the case numbers and see if there's been any activity. So in the past, we were completely blind to that. We had to keep our own list, [00:10:30] and then we had to call in to see if there had been any updates. So now you can just, you know, log in and see that they haven't done anything about it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So apparently, apparently they're also now doing dedicated accountant support. And, uh, every expert's going to be ProAdvisor certified, which we've been saying would be phenomenal for a really long time and trained in financial principles and accounting specific workflows. Now, guys, this [00:11:00] doesn't mean they're CPAs, but it means that they've got some, you know, core knowledge is what I'm hearing.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. In the past, the support was really designed to help you with software issues, like literally programing issues, not how do I do this complicated accrual based mechanism. And so now when you call the person who you're going to be talking to is going to actually understand the context for your question, not just exploring if there's something wrong with the software.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I've already [00:11:30] noticed some of that recently, and I've been surprised. I didn't know that they were working on this. For the last couple times I've made requests for help. The person, it was a payroll thing. They actually understood how payroll worked. And it was kind of like, wait, what? So, um, it helped the process along much faster.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, definitely. I mean, sometimes it still depends on who you get. I did have a payroll issue recently, and the first person opened up a case, and then I called back and there was no resolution. And then I called back again and actually got someone who was like, oh, [00:12:00] I'll just update this. And she pressed some buttons and fixed it. So, you know, you do still sometimes have to try a couple times to get the right person for the job, but at least now we have some more transparency into the process and better quality from the get go.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now that is even supposed to increase as you it's supposed to, I guess, specialize into the higher tiers. Is that right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Um, now that there's going to be five tiers in the program, [00:12:30] when you hit the, the bottom two tiers have one level of support and then there's more of a premium support when you hit the the third and fourth levels. And that for me has always been the best part of being in the ProAdvisor program is getting that enhanced support. But now if you're at the premier level, if you if you hit the fifth tier, you actually get an even higher level of support, that [00:13:00] you get even more support hours and the representatives are even more specialized. So that is a great reason to definitely move up the tiers.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I think the key part that I'm going to be hoping to see is that those higher tiers that when we make a call in, we jump directly to the higher tier. Not that we have to work our way up to an available tier. Yeah, that's going to be really important.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I would imagine that they must have some sort of either a separate phone number for it or a way of identifying [00:13:30] your phone number. I know that they've always asked me who my, or the system would ask me if this is my phone number. And then it seemed to route me to the right person. Yeah. Okay. Now, another change that they're making is they're changing a little bit how the revenue share works. And so when you sign a one of your clients up for QBO or workforce payroll or into an accountant suite, the duration of the revenue share is moving from one year to three years. So [00:14:00] instead of just getting it for 12 months, you get it for up to three years. However, that 30% is now a variable percentage. And so when you're in a lower tier, it's going to start at 10%, but you're getting 10% for three years, which maps out to roughly that same 30%. But as you go up the tiers, you go up to 15 to 20 to 25% revenue share. So if you can get up to 25% revenue share over three years, that's good [00:14:30] money in your pocket.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: They're also going to be expanding the client referrals, I believe is what they were talking about as well. Um, you know, pairing certified firms with qualified businesses. So that's instead of it just being us referring business, it sounds like they're going to be expanding that them referring business to us as well.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I think that's kind of the next generation of find a proadvisor.com that find a proadvisor.com has been there for ages and it's nice that there's a [00:15:00] go to place. But, you know, in the last year or so, it's been getting kind of spammed. And, um, and the way that you do the search, it's still searching locally when in fact your best match could be global. So I know that they're looking at it. They haven't given us any details for what's going to be different, but they are trying to direct people back to us for, for support and for services.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So stay tuned for that, folks. We'll keep you informed. [00:15:30] Mhm.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. Now, something else that they have now confirmed. I had said that we were pretty sure it was happening, but it really is happening. That is accelerate is the add on for firms and team management and multi-client management. And so that has a price tag of $149 a month per console, not per person, not per ProAdvisor but for for the one large company [00:16:00] account for that management. And it is now going to be the fee is going to be waived if you're at the top two tiers of the five tiers in the Pro Partner program, which makes sense because the whole point of it is operating at scale. Being able to manage your teams trainings, being able to deploy your team to multiple clients, and being able to view all of your clients and manage your clients in bulk. And since the tiers are defined by the dollar amount, which we'll talk about [00:16:30] the dollar amount of business that you're doing, it makes sense that you would have already hit that tier where you would need that ability to use those features. So I'm glad that they thought ahead to build it into the program.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Of course, they're they're continuing their focus on education for us ProAdvisor as well. So they're going to have their traditional caste training and they're, they're going to be expanding, um, availability of information to help on the bookkeeping side, [00:17:00] training on AI for accountants and their training manager in IAS is also a major value add. So you can see how much of your team has completed the courses and who's still working on it as well.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, it gives you the ability to assign a learning pathway to each of your team members and track their progress in real time. Now, we already mentioned one of the Better Together events that they're holding, but they wanted to let everybody know that the kind of the road show is back. I cut my teeth on the the Road show [00:17:30] myself both learning as a ProAdvisor back in the, in, you know, 2015, 2016. And then I became a road show trainer from 2018 to 2020. And so I'm glad that the road show is, is back. And so Intuit trainers are coming to different cities around the country. So that's something that you can look forward to.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. They talked about doing four different cities throughout the summer. Now is that was that this past summer or they're talking about coming up [00:18:00] next summer as well, I assume. Right.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I assume that it's going to be continuous. Yeah. Not to not just one time thing. Okay. Now we already mentioned the accounting futures program. They put that again on the slide again, but we mentioned it already. Um, and then something else that they're adding is a pro partner accountants awards program where they are going to celebrate pro partners who are innovating, giving back and setting the standard for modern accounting. So they want to bring recognition and [00:18:30] elevate us as well. So I mentioned the tears several times that there are five different tiers. So let's take a minute and actually talk about those. So basically the pro partner accountants tiers, there's going to be five of them now. And the first tier is just called a member. And basically all it means is that you went to the website and you created an Intuit Accountant Suite account, so you can log in as an accountant. So that is basically a member. Then the next tier is a partner [00:19:00] in order to reach partner, which is their two star level, you have to have one active client and one certification. There's four different certifications. You can have any one of them, and that makes you a partner. That puts you at the second tier. Then you start earning points. And when you get between 50 and 199 points, your preferred partner 200 to 999 points is a premier partner. And over 1000 points [00:19:30] is an elite partner.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So what that means is the premier partner and elite partner are the two tiers you were speaking about before. That will include the accelerate for free in the future here since it's currently it's available to everybody, but in the future it'll be for those two tiers. Correct?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Now, the way that you get your points, the points are based on spend. It's the what they call revenue under management. And it's basically all the dollar [00:20:00] amounts attached to your, your, your Intuit Accountant suite account and all of your team members and all of your clients. So basically the higher level of QuickBooks that they're on, that's more points. You get one point for every hundred dollars of spend. And so if they're in simple start, they're paying $38, that would be 0.38 points. Yeah. And [00:20:30] if they're in plus and they're spending 140, then you're getting 1.4 points. And so you just keep adding up all the points for all of the services. Payroll Enterprise suite. Bill pay services, QuickBooks checking, whatever, whatever you're attached services are. So for every dollar of subscription fees, basically you earn a point.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And you know, I believe they said it's more [00:21:00] we're talking about are the points on the annual revenue basis or is this on a monthly basis?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, we talked about that. They didn't mention that in this one. But basically, as you increase through the year every month, you will they'll up you if you gain more clients. So you can walk up the tiers. But every July 31st, they'll check where you're at. And if you're no longer there, you'll drop down to your tiers so you can keep going [00:21:30] up and up and up through the year. But then if all of a sudden you forget to certify and you lose your certification and nobody in your firm is certified, you're going to drop all the way down to member and then you get your certification and then it will bump you back up your points path.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So part of the reason I ask it, which is why I think it's the annual revenue under management, 1000 points to be at the elite partner, if I'm doing my math correct, would be 100,000 in revenue under [00:22:00] management. Uh, either manually or monthly or annual is kind of where I was asking the question on that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh I see. Well, it's got to work for annual because you wouldn't be able to hit elite if you were just adding up the month.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I mean, you could, but you're pretty elite.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Um, so we can reconfirm it. I'm pretty confident it's what, as you were saying, because they're going to calculate what the expected amount would [00:22:30] be. They can never say exactly since variances happens throughout the year. So, um, throughout the entire year I believe is what that amount is. But you touched base on one other part of this, which is the certifications count towards 20 points per year Firmwide so per year it's going to be per year.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And it's five points per certification up to 20 points. And the four certification tests that qualify [00:23:00] are the level one and level two certifications, the payroll certification, and the Intuit Enterprise Suite certification. I actually was under the impression that the bookkeeping certification counts, but apparently it doesn't. Apparently it's the enterprise suite cert.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Mm. Okay. Yeah. Now the enterprise suite and the workforce ones don't expire the same way. Some of the other ones do is worth noting as well. So recertification wise.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Now that actually bears repeating [00:23:30] that the level one and level two certifications have to be recertified annually in the in that April to June recertification window. But once you have your Intuit Enterprise certification or your payroll certification, you do not have to renew those. It's a one time thing, which actually basically means since they were saying that you had to have one active certification, as long as somebody holds the EIS cert or the payroll cert, then you're good to go on your certifications [00:24:00] to hit the partner level at your minimum. So that's a good reason just to have that insurance.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now, of course, we here recommend strongly that you get your level two and you maintain it and you recertify every year because you don't want to have to keep retaking the whole test. So it's, it's worth taking the time to learn this stuff.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And I really like the level two certification because level one is basically like, I know where this button is to click on it. The level two certification is really showing that you know [00:24:30] how to why.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You're clicking.

Alicia Katz Pollock: The button. Yeah. Why you're clicking the button. Exactly. Okay. Um, all right. Now, one thing that's kind of nice is once you move up to Intuit Accountant Suite and you've pulled the trigger and you go away from QBO A, when you go look at the pro partner program or the ProAdvisor program is what it's still called. It actually is going to give you a projected tier and tell you where you're going to land based on where you're at right now. So [00:25:00] if you're going to be at a preferred partner or elite partner, it'll let you know. And then that way you can plan ahead if you want to bump up your certifications to get a couple more points that way, or maybe you have multiple realms if you have two different QBO A. I keep saying that if you have two different Intuit Accountant Suite logins and you have some clients under one and some clients under another, you're going to want to consolidate them and move all of your clients from one to the other. [00:25:30] Now they have a mechanism for doing that. You do not need to go in and edit every client and invite them to the new portal. There is a bulk move process. Um, I don't have the information about that in front of me. We have talked about that though in previous episodes.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I can tell you as a person who, uh, navigated those waters before this existed, be very grateful. It exists now to be able to move people from a different, older QuickBooks [00:26:00] online accountant, which gone wise to the new IAS, um, and have everybody in one place having that extra assistance is a powerful thing.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm. And it's nice that they made it in a way that you can do it in bulk. So you just kind of say, move these people from here to here, and it will just pick them up and move them. Okay. Now, some of the things that are included in every tier, they do go into that in the slide deck. And probably [00:26:30] the easiest thing really would be for you to go look in your ProAdvisor section, because all of that information is there.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: But they basically break it down into, what is it, five different sections. It's going to be efficiency, growth, financial education and community. And then within those different sections, it will list out the different tiers and what's included or not. It's the same kind of layout that they've done previously in the past. You'll be able to [00:27:00] see what kind of percentage of discounts you get, what access you have to different benefits and so forth. So worth taking a couple of moments to go check out where you're at.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Some of the things that it lists are discounts on MailChimp that we all get 75% off for your first year. You get discounts on proconnect tax returns ranging from 33% to 40%. There's marketing guides, there's the find a ProAdvisor portal, there's the new client referrals program. [00:27:30] Um, then it talks about those tears on the revenue share that I mentioned. Um, and yeah, I think, I think we mentioned most of the other things that are on here.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know what I would love to hear though, hear back from people either listening to the podcast or watching this. Are there certain features or within the program currently that you are using more than others and taking advantage of? Share. Share your thoughts with us.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, absolutely. We have a LinkedIn group, by the way. Um, [00:28:00] and so you can head over to our LinkedIn group or you're also welcome to email unofficial QuickBooks podcast@gmail.com. And we can share your comments on the air. All right. Now a couple things also came out of the Q&A, uh, that they wanted to remind you is that if you have not taken the certification tests, you have the option of either taking their trainings, which can be up to seven hours, but you get CPE for doing them, or you can just [00:28:30] jump straight to the test and try and test out and you get three tries for the test out. And if you get some of it right and some of it not right, you can go back and study just the parts that you need to study. And then if you try taking it three times and you still don't pass, there's a cool down period, but then you can pick it up again. But they've made it so that you don't have to go take all of the trainings. If you're already an expert, you might as well give it a go the first time around and see how you do.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now, I don't know if they fixed this [00:29:00] recently, but there was a when these first came out and if you were jumping ahead to do just the test, it still made it seem like it was going to be a two hour long test. It was not that long. So if you see that, don't get scared. Um, it's still very efficient to get through it all quickly. Don't worry about that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. That's just the amount of time they're allowing you to take the test. They're not saying it's going to take that long. And if you're like me and you go look up every single answer because it [00:29:30] is an open book test. But if you go look up your answers, it might take you two hours, but hey, you're going to get the answers right so it could be worth it. Okay. A couple other things that they mentioned. The content inside the ProAdvisor Academy is being updated quarterly so that it matches the interface. If you do your first certification in the level one or level two after November 11th, you don't even have to do the recertification in 2027. You'll be able to skip to 2028. So if you're not already [00:30:00] certified, I mean, hey, I always say just go for it anyway. Yeah, but we're so close to that November 11th cut that maybe you wait until after November 11th and save yourself a.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, take the course stuff now and do the test after the 11th.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. There you go. Now there's one more slide that has a number of different resources. And so if you want more information and to do your due diligence about the pro partner program, if you go to the firm of the future.com, there's some blog posts there. And then [00:30:30] the slide deck, which we have the link to in the show notes, also has links to explainer videos and a quick start guide and a program reference guide. And the PowerPoint itself is actually clickable. So it's a great resource. So head into our show notes and you can click to get the the PowerPoint with all of the direct links. Okay. And then they finish the section by asking, do you want Intuit to contact you to get your questions answered? And so that's one of the [00:31:00] benefits of actually attending the in the know live is that if you do have questions and you want Intuit to contact you, they give you an opportunity to get on the list to get that phone call to get some extra support. Okay. And okay, next topic was delegated onboarding for the bill pay and the payments programs.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And Abhilasha, who's the staff project manager in charge of fintech on the fintech team out of San Francisco was [00:31:30] the. Was the speaker She started with a poll asking, how often do you add QuickBooks payments or QuickBooks bill pay as part of the new on of a client's new Qbo subscription, with the answers being never, rarely, sometimes and always. And about 24% were never. 28% were rarely. Sometimes was 37%, and always was 10%. So I know that I always connect everybody, although [00:32:00] personally, I do it through my QuickBooks solutions provider, CPG. Um, but every time I have somebody who I'm setting up with a new QuickBooks, I always put them on QuickBooks payments and QuickBooks bill pay, even if it looks like they might not use it because at least it's there. And that one time they click it and they're able to use it and they experience that aha moment. Yeah, I like to have that available. And there's never any harm done in being connected, even if you're not actively using it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I [00:32:30] will say that the challenge that they're trying to solve for here, um, really, they nailed it. You know, what they basically heard is that as accountants, they've been experiencing a lot of different friction when they're trying to get clients set up with the Kiwi payments and or the bill pay. This is primarily focused around the whole know your customer or know your business type requirements, where you'd have to know additional details about the person, the EIN Social security number, date of birth, [00:33:00] which league they prefer, left leg, right leg versus you know, what college they went to. And you know, all the randomness questions that you really had to have that person, uh, on with you to get through. So they've, they've been trying to make this process a little bit easier by allowing you to get it started and then share the link over to the customer for them to finish it. But we'll talk a little bit more about that now.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I mean, when you're signing somebody up a business up for either [00:33:30] Qbi payments or bill pay. It has to be a really secure experience because you. They are financially responsible for these integration and these these payment rails. And so they have to authorize it. They need to give their actual personal information in order to set up the banking behind the scenes. And, you know, that's information that we don't generally have access to their social security number, their personal information. [00:34:00] And so this is a really huge improvement. So basically now when you start onboarding the client and saying, yes, I want payments or yes, I want bill pay, you can start the application and fill in the information that you do have already, and then send an invitation to the client to fill in that remaining information that you don't have.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Which it may seem silly, but it's all about trying to minimize the number of clicks for the client if we [00:34:30] can shrink down just a little bit of the questions that they have to go through. You're more likely to get them to finish it all the way through. So it is it's a wise process.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So by getting as far as you can and then handing it off, that sure beats just telling them, hey, I want you to go sign up for this thing. Yeah, exactly. They're like, yeah, I'll do it next week. And then next week becomes three weeks later and you still can't accept any payments or send out any bill pays. So this is pretty awesome. Um, it is a unified [00:35:00] application, which is nice. So you don't have to do separate applications for bill pay and payments, which you did used to have to do. Um, it is live, although it is being rolled out, so you still might not see it, but it's actively being rolled out in the US right now. And then Canada will follow after that. Uh, this is allowing your clients to get your pro partner pricing with your 30% discounts. Uh, if you are having any trouble along [00:35:30] the way. There is a little feedback link on the right hand side, and you can let them know that something in the process isn't working. Your client does need to be a primary admin or a company admin, so they do have to have a user account. So if you're not in the habit of making accounts for your clients where you're doing all of the book bookwork and they don't even log in you. They will have to have a sign in account for this again.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So think about what you were just saying there. [00:36:00] If they're not logging into their QuickBooks to do this stuff, they probably don't necessarily need an account to be able to run the the merchant processing or everything else. But maybe they're missing out. Maybe they, maybe they're not growing because they don't have access to this stuff.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, I mean, all that depends on your workflows that maybe you are the full service bookkeeping administrator and you don't want your clients in there. But that really is it's it depends situation. My clients are all [00:36:30] hands on in their books and I'm just sweeping up after them.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Big broom.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Um, and so, um, the, the next part of the slide deck just kind of walks through the whole application process. We're not going to tell you what's on every single screen. Um, no need for that. But it does end with an email invitation. You can CC yourself and that will send them an email or give you a link that you can send them a link separately under different cover.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: A [00:37:00] little bit different, but I just recently added the bill payments onto a different one of my clients that's been using a different service provider now for some time. And we jumped on together a screen share and was very pleased how quick and easy and efficient the whole process was to get through and be able to send out a payment within the first couple of minutes. So they were they were very, very happy to eliminate one extra login somewhere else.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Nice. Yeah. I mean, I'm a, I'm a big fan of QuickBooks payments in particular. And [00:37:30] the bill pay has definitely kept me from having to go out to other bill payment apps. So all the all the pieces are coming together. Okay. They ended this segment by asking how many people have actually tried this new experience. And almost 10% said that they've already used it and found it useful. 53% said that, well, I'm not aware of this, but I'll be happy to try it out. Another 9% said, well, it could be helpful for me, but it needs enhancements. [00:38:00] I'm curious to know what they found missing and 28% said, no, not helpful for me and I'm not planning to use it. All right. So that leads us to the third product innovation, which is a proconnect tax planning opportunities. And this one was presented by Chandrakant Nemoria, who's the staff product manager for Proconnect Tax out of Mountain View. Now, this segment is specific to people [00:38:30] who do tax. And the poll that they started with was, how often do you discuss tax planning opportunities with your clients? And 25% said never.

Alicia Katz Pollock: We don't offer tax planning services, and 12% said rarely, and 35% said sometimes, and 28% said always. Where are an advisory first firm? So really, the use of this one depends if you do taxes and advisory or not. [00:39:00] So in the what we heard section, they said that accountants need help with identifying the right client opportunities for tax planning and advisory, and they don't want to have to dig through proconnect tax clients return by return by return. And so while clients that have individual tax returns, ten 40s represent a large percentage of a client's firm base clients with business tax returns. In particular, S Corp and partnerships have really [00:39:30] outsized advisory potential. And so what they did is in the accelerate program, in the client insight section, they now have client insights for individual and business tax returns, including 1040 tax return data with effective and marginal tax rates for S Corp. With 1120 S tax returns, you can filter them by businesses and industries. And then it also includes 1065 [00:40:00] partnership return data.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. The business view is actually there's up to like 30 plus selectable attributes that they can choose to show up on their, their, their main screen when selecting which ones to look further into. It's pretty impressive.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So basically, again, kind of the, the, the facts that you need to know about this is you do need to be using proconnect tax. You do need to be in Intuit Accountant Suite, and you do need to have the accelerate [00:40:30] tier. And then when you have all of those things, you can go to the work in the left navigation and then go to Client insights. And then you create a new data view and you pick one of the tax data options. And this is already live and in process. And I pulled a couple different, um, different screenshots because what Scott was just saying about the different fields that are available, it [00:41:00] basically depends on which tax form you're actually running, but you can customize each one that it gives you, like you said, this giant list of statistics and you can pick and choose which ones are the ones that you want to see on the dashboard.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And then I think a key part to it is the different views you, you can of course save those views to go back, pull up quickly depending on the view. Once you're in it, you can then also see up [00:41:30] to the last, I think it's 2024 and 2025 years of information, so long as the things were filed through Proconnect.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And as time goes on, I mean, right now, it's going to start with 2024. So it starts with two years of data. And then of course, as you use it, you'll be able to see everything after 2024 and be able to, to call it up. And so basically these dashboards, so I've got a few of them pulled up on, on my own screen that if you're looking [00:42:00] at a 1040 return, you can see the client's name, you can see, um, who on your staff made the tax return? You can see the balance due or the refund that they're getting. You can see their adjusted gross income or AGI. You can see the client's age, which is important once you're getting up towards your your either retirement thresholds or your Roth IRA thresholds. Thresholds. So knowing their age is, is [00:42:30] important. Their effective tax rates are listed. Their filing status. Their filing status. Are they single or are they head of household? Are they married? Filing jointly? All of that is all their their marginal rates, their qualifying number of children, their state of residence, their taxable income, their total tax. All of that is just on this one dashboard that I'm looking at. So for everybody that you file 1040 for, you can just see all these statistics on one screen. Then [00:43:00] he switched and did a demo of what it would look like for your S Corp, your, your 1020 S client data.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And in that one, it pulled up the client and the industry and their gross receipts, their ordinary income, their officer compensation, their deductions. And then like you said, there's literally 20 or 25 different columns and metrics that you can filter by. You can look at their depreciation. You can look at their pension and their profit sharing. You can look [00:43:30] at their nondeductible expenses or their balance due. There's all kinds of information to, to scan and then same deal for your 1065. Now your partnerships have their own specific needs. And the dashboards on this one will even include the partners beginning capital and ending capital. So you can keep track of each individual partner as well in the dashboard. So [00:44:00] there's a lot of cool things there. So when you go in the ProAdvisor Academy, they actually have two different courses teaching you how to use this. There are each 30 minutes long, so totally quick and dirty, but there's one is tax client insights and the other one is a tax prep course. So if you are interested in seeing what it takes to provide tax services, or if you're new to Proconnect and you just signed up with it, there's training available for you. [00:44:30]

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, a little bit unrelated, but I have to tell you in my Instagram reels, um, in my, my feed, I'm consistently seeing, uh, advertisements for Intuit about, do you love learning new things about tax? Come join our tax team. So if that's something you've considered, you may want to check into it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I mean, for me, taxes are my Achilles heel. I just don't have any experience and any training in it. And I'm always really conscious about what I don't [00:45:00] know that I don't know. And so I kind of want to take some of these tax trainings myself. So at least I know the concept to figure out if I'm missing anything as I'm doing all of my, my book work with my clients.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I have a feeling they won't let me do the training without actually putting some work forward to. So, um, yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay, so that ends the product innovations. They ended with their what's around the corner section. And so they wanted to remind people that Intuit [00:45:30] has its own podcast called on the books. And so that's a great way of keeping track of what's happening both in Intuit and in the industry. They do have a QuickBooks toolkit for accountants that is always being updated. The toolkit is in the slide deck on page 64 or slide 64. So you can click that link and get to their toolkit. And that was the end of their program.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So Alicia, [00:46:00] I know you've always got stuff coming up. What's what's coming up next for you?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, now that it is October, I'm starting my new class series for the fall. So I have a bunch of different classes coming up. I am doing a deep dive on Intuit Accountant Suite and showing off the books, close, and the client insights and the work portal and all of these things. So if you want the actual training on how to use them, I'm going to be setting [00:46:30] up client files and actually demoing all of that. And so right now that class is tentatively slated for October 7th, although until it has told me that, um, at Intuit Connect coming up at the end of October, they're going to be debuting a whole slew of new updates to these features. So as always, I'm kind of chasing my tail and we thought about, well, maybe I should just postpone the class and do it in November, but I've postponed it four times already this [00:47:00] year. Every time they make some new product announcements. And so we just decided I'm going to go ahead and teach it as is and then update the content later on. So it's a nice way of really getting grounded in all the things that it offers. So I have my IAS class coming up. I just taught a class in how to customize QBO, so how to really trick out all the menus in the dashboard so that your QBO is giving you everything that you need in that one file without all of the visual distractions. [00:47:30] And then I'm going to be updating my payroll class, my workforce class, and my QuickBooks time class in November. And then in December, at the end of the year, I'm going to be doing how to do 1099 in QuickBooks online and, um, how to do my year end cleanup. Like what do I look at in my clients books to make sure that the books are tax ready? So I'm going to be teaching my routine of all the little hidey holes where I look to make, to find the bad data and root [00:48:00] it out and squash it and correct it before we go to tax season.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: It's hard to believe that we're already, you know, in the last stretch of the year that it's time to start thinking about these things. A. 1099. And the more we do the cleanup now, the better off we are at the beginning of the year, of course.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And along those same lines, I'm also going to be working with Marriott Martinez. And we're going to bring in her class, um, about the accounting lifecycle. So if any of you [00:48:30] are needing some more bookkeeping training about what are your roles and responsibilities, what are your compliance guidelines? What are your timelines and your deadlines for the work that you're doing? This class with Marriott is going to be four weeks in November and December, and it's going to be a combination of a video watch party and live work with Marriott to actually implement it in your own practice. So it's going to be a really unique experience. And so you can head over to Roy's dot com [00:49:00] and check out our class schedule for to sign up for all of those opportunities.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Beautiful.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. Well spot, we did it again. Thank you so much for joining me. And as always, everybody, if you found this useful, please share it with your colleagues. Um like it, share it, subscribe in wherever you are listening to us. Head over to earmark and take a short quiz about what you learned today and get your CPE. We appreciate all of your [00:49:30] listening, all of our long term listeners, especially now that we're at this three year mark. Thank you to all of our sponsors as well. You are keeping us thriving, and we appreciate you dearly. And if you're listening to any of our commercials and one of them solves a pain point for you, please, please, please go follow that link and go to their website. They give you special discounts for being one of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast listeners. All right. Well, thank you everybody. [00:50:00] This is Alicia Pollock from Royal Wise.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And Matthew Spot from Cloud Apps Inc, and.

Alicia Katz Pollock: We.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Will.

Alicia Katz Pollock: See you in the next one.