Look What I Found! Fall 2026

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

Alicia Katz Pollock: Hey everybody. In this week's episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, we are going to do a look what I found, which is a kind of a smattering of all the little cool things that we've discovered while using the software. I'm Alicia Pollock from royale.com and I have with me Margie Remmers Davis of Acadian. How are you doing, Margie?

Margie Remmers-Davis: I'm doing pretty good. [00:00:30] Crazy busy as usual.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And especially with all the changes going on.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Oh my gosh, you're in the same position I'm in.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yep. Let's revamp all of our training materials.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. So Margie and I compiled a list of things that we discovered have changed in the software. Now we're not talking new feature releases. We're talking about little things in the interface that make life easier things that [00:01:00] we've been putting in feedback about that they were able to do something about and change or tweak or fix. Now, the things that we're going to talk about are not in order of importance. They're pretty much a random order of me finding things and dropping them into a document. I started this collection back in July, and we're recording this in September. So this is all the little things that we've discovered between July and September.

Margie Remmers-Davis: It's [00:01:30] a potpourri. It is a potpourri potpourri.

Alicia Katz Pollock: It's a it's a wonderful autumn term right there. All right. Now what I am going to do is share my screen because for those of you watching this on YouTube, it's kind of nice to have the video. And for those of you not watching this on YouTube. Did you know that you can watch these on YouTube? And so I'm going to go ahead and share the document that I'm working off of and, you know, a little bit of behind the scenes, you get to [00:02:00] see how we operate around here, but at least it gives you a visual picture of what we're talking about. So of course, because this is a podcast, we will try to make it as visual as possible using our words. And both of us are good at using our words. All right. So let's go. So the first thing was a product announcement that we also did hear about in, in the know last month. And that is that there is a brand new sales tax report. [00:02:30] Super excited about this.

Margie Remmers-Davis: It's so beautiful.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. What do you like about it?

Margie Remmers-Davis: Oh just the like the way that it's organized. It's organized by, uh, jurisdiction. I mean, look at that, that you can see all of the, how all of the individual things feed into the other things. It's so cool.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. So what Margie is seeing and reacting to is the fact we're looking at a sales tax report for North Carolina, and it has [00:03:00] nested rows for the state, and then every county and then every district inside the county. And then it talks. It has multiple columns for the total sales in that jurisdiction. How much was nontaxable or exempt? How much was taxable, what the tax rate was and what the amount of tax collected was. And this is amazing because it is pulling together several different reports that we used to have to go cross-reference, and [00:03:30] it even has the ability to customize it according to your state. Now, we talked about this in depth in the in the know episode, but you can even change it to, to codes as well, whatever it is that you need for your state's reporting. So it's going to be way, way, way easier to head to your state's website and get your sales tax reports in. All right. The next one. This is this is kind of a blink. If you blink and you miss it. But I just wanted [00:04:00] to make sure that everybody knows that they increased the federal standard mileage rate back in July retroactively to July 1st. And so they increased it from 72.5 cents up to $0.76. And you make sure your clients know.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Right. And what's interesting is that this is a mid-year change, which I think is highly unusual. I think usually it's, [00:04:30] you know, they change it every year or every couple years. But the fact that they did this mid-year is, uh, yeah, I think that surprised everybody.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Do you have any speculation for why?

Margie Remmers-Davis: I do not. Oh, is it elections, do you think maybe.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Uh.

Margie Remmers-Davis: I don't know.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That was one of my thoughts, but I think it's in compensation for rising fuel prices. The fact that that gas is through the roof, it's costing us more. And so it's compensating us more.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Okay.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So great for us, but [00:05:00] an unfortunate repercussion for an unfortunate situation. All right. Now the next topic. Changing topics completely. We've been talking about the changes to the Intuit Experts program. And there were two little things that I saw in the interface that really made me give, gave me the warm fuzzies about them actually following through with what they said. And the first one was that I started a screen share with Intuit support, and [00:05:30] it actually put up a little image of the person who I was talking about. And so I have on my screen an image of sharing QuickBooks screen, and it has a little picture of a woman and it says carry QuickBooks expert for 30 years. And so I could actually see the face of the human being that I was talking to.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Huh?

Alicia Katz Pollock: I thought that was really sweet. Yeah, yeah. And then the other thing is, we've heard in the. In one of the previous episodes, that they're changing the [00:06:00] onboarding and making it more available instead of 30 days. It's a 90 day onboarding. Doesn't matter whether your client has it, whether they're your client or they don't have an accountant user, this is available to everybody. Um, but there was a, I went into the my accountant section and it popped up a personalized setup call where we could actually schedule a call with and into an expert for doing or advising on the setup. And so it was [00:06:30] nice that it, you know, they're giving you the option of scheduling those calls and making that a little bit easier. All right. So that was the, the little interface things for Intuit experts changing topics completely.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Completely.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Completely. Okay. Now let's, uh, a couple changes in QuickBooks workforce. Of course, the big change right there is the term in QuickBooks payroll is now QuickBooks workforce. And, you know, we keep talking about the changes that they're making their QuickBooks [00:07:00] time, um, HR centers, onboarding workflows. There's a lot going on.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Well and aligns now it aligns now with the employee, like the app that they were, that they use has been QuickBooks workforce for a long time. So now it's just aligning that all together.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And it's a recognition that your workforce is more than just payroll. It's your onboarding processes, it's your contracts, it's your employee performance [00:07:30] reviews. And they're building out that part of QBO into its whole own center. So the one, one thing that I found though, made me so happy. You know, how with when you're setting up payroll, the payroll settings themselves are not in the payroll module. They're only up under the gear under payroll settings. And if you don't know they're there, you wind up completely screwing up your QuickBooks payroll. And I think [00:08:00] that's one of the reasons why it maybe even got a bad rap is that people were setting it up halfway and then not dialing in the chart of accounts and the tax settings and all of that. So the change that they made is payroll settings are now available in the settings. Yeah.

Margie Remmers-Davis: So they should be right now. Is this in addition to or is this instead of.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You can.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Still.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You can still get there from the gear.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Okay. [00:08:30]

Alicia Katz Pollock: But it is now in settings. If you go there from the gear and choose payroll settings, it opens up account and settings, and then you pick up where you left off, but it's now in the bar on the left hand side. The settings have a lot more in it now than they did before. And so if you haven't actually been up to the gear and checked out the settings, there's new sections for an accounting section, um, a reporting section, there's a lot of different things. [00:09:00]

Margie Remmers-Davis: Nice.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. The next thing that I wanted to call out as part of workforce is that they've really made the time off settings much, much, much more robust. There's a whole center for managing PTO. And so it has its own time off section with an overview and a place where employees can make requests and you can see employee balances and set your policies. So they've made a dedicated center specifically for [00:09:30] it. So keep an eye out for that.

Margie Remmers-Davis: That makes me so happy because I always felt like it was kind of buried and that it was it was like, it wasn't, it wasn't Intuitive unto how to, you know, find it and get there. So the fact that they're making it more obvious and front and center is just awesome.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. You can see how many hours they've taken this year. You can see how much their requests. There's all kinds of all kinds of good stuff [00:10:00] in there. And then in conjunction with that, in the reports, when you go down to the payroll reports in the reporting center, there's a bunch of new reports. There's time off balances, time off requests, time off taken, there's a performance review report, and there's a certified payroll report.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yay!

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Like the idea that we can actually run certified payroll now means that I can put a lot more clients on QBO payroll [00:10:30] that I haven't. I've had to, you know, shunt off to other payroll providers. So that's pretty cool. So definitely if you're running payroll, go check out the new reports that are available. All right. Next topic is bank feeds. A couple really cool things here. So one is the new customization settings. If you haven't gone and clicked on the baby gear to the just above the grid in your bank feeds, you can do all kinds [00:11:00] of things like reorder the columns, which I absolutely love. Turn on and off the columns that you want to. But one thing that is I did not realize until recently I found it by accident. But if you go, you know how there's three centers, there's the pending transactions, the posted transactions and the excluded transactions. If you go to the posted tab where all the transactions are in the bank feed that are entered, [00:11:30] and then click on the little gear. There's actually other settings in there. And it took me years to figure this out. And so the thing that's in here that I that was really cool is that there's automatic matching in QuickBooks payroll and QuickBooks payments that if you're using QuickBooks payroll, all the pay checks, when they clear don't show up in the banking feed, they just add clears to the checks in your register. Yeah. [00:12:00] And with payments, the fees, you don't ever see the fees. They're all separate transactions, but they just go straight to your checking register. And personally, I like that automation. I'm glad that it's less for me to do, but some people want to actually see and monitor and see the fees and see when payroll clears. And so you now have the ability in the settings gear under Post-It to turn off that automatic matching, [00:12:30] and then your payroll and your payments are visible.

Margie Remmers-Davis: It sometimes I think like when you very first start doing something, you want to be in control. You don't want the automatic thing happening. You want to make sure that it's working correctly. And then once you're comfortable with it, you're like, okay, I can trust this now. And then you turn on the automatic, you know, whatever. Um, and I think that is, um, I mean, [00:13:00] it's just such a great, it's just such a good way to have that flexibility. Because if, you know, if QBO is always going to decide for you, then that leaves us feeling, you know, disempowered, disempowered, and then we, you know, hate QBO because I was like, God darn it, you know, so, um, so yeah, so as much control as they can give us, I think it makes a lot of people happy.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So just know that there's an option. Didn't even know it was there until really recently. Now, [00:13:30] something else I noticed in the banking feed is that when you click on a transaction on one of the rows, there's now a new tab for policies. And when you go up under the settings up to Account and Settings, then there's also an accounting section that also has policies. Have you played with these yourself?

Margie Remmers-Davis: I have not played with them, but I did hear about I heard about the capitalization policy and I was like, dang, that's awesome. [00:14:00]

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So so really what you're doing here is you're training the AI as you're training the bank feeds to know what you require and, and what your thresholds are and your limitations. This is also feeding books, clothes. The new feature inside Intuit Accountant Suite. That's the one that's the paid tier. But it gives you those those checklists for closing the books every single month. And it's super cool. We're going to be doing new content on that pretty soon. But basically [00:14:30] let's actually talk about what these policies are. So when you're looking at the transaction posting policies, you can. Now category is always required, but you're from two. You can tell it that you have to have a payee on it. Um, and so that's really important because some people will let it go and others will are a stickler for it. I'm personally a stickler for it. You can make a set, a threshold [00:15:00] for um, amount where the transactions always require review and don't automatically enter. So for instance, you can say, okay, any transaction over $2,500, I have to review it myself. Um, but you know, that also depends on the size of the company. For some companies, $1,000 is appropriate. And for some companies, $10,000 is appropriate. So you can set that threshold. You can tell it where in the history you want it to start learning. What [00:15:30] is its. The A's information date range. And so it's. Most of it starts in 2024. But you can go earlier or you can go more recent. There is an area for post what they call transaction posting notes. And I've yet to see any documentation on this, but it's basically a free form text area that I think is being used to train the the [00:16:00] A your your own AI on a client by client by client basis. So this is inside each client's QBO. And what I did on mine is I said leave Amazon Uncategorized. And so I'm testing it to see if it still tries putting things in office supplies or if it's just leaving them empty. But I think this is where you can set your own prompts. Okay, then there's the capitalization.

Margie Remmers-Davis: And I'm sorry, go back. And if you said it's free form. [00:16:30] So it's like natural language.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yes.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah. I mean, that's that's pretty cool.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm. Yeah. So it's basically prompt engineering for the bank feeds. Yeah. Haven't seen it enough to try it out and test it and see how it works. But there's something going on there. Yeah. Okay. Then the next section is asset and expense policy for capitalization. This is what you mentioned earlier, is that you can now set threshold for your fixed asset [00:17:00] for your fixed assets and for your prepaid expenses.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Mhm.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So being able to take a look at when something should be a fixed asset, like a purchase or when your software expense for the, you know, it's all for the year. And do you want to parse it out on a monthly basis? Things like that. So being able to set those thresholds are really, really nice. And so again, where you go for this is up into the gear and to settings and then [00:17:30] to accounting, and there's a place to set the policies. And then where you can see them in action is when you click on any transaction in the banking feed, there's now a second tab that says policies. And like I've seen it, it'll say like 1 or 3, and it will tell you which policies it's applying in its logic.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Mm.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Pretty cool.

Margie Remmers-Davis: So yeah. So I mean that's just something to be. What just popped into my head is um cleanups. So [00:18:00] you have to be aware of, you know, a huge, a huge, um, reason that people have to do cleanups is, you know, we as bank rules just mess things up because people, they just happen and people don't know that they're happening. And, um, and so this could potentially, if somebody set it up wrong, this could cause a big mess. So this is just one more thing to check to make sure that you're, that it's not [00:18:30] doing things that you don't want it to do.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, that's actually a good point that if the bank feed is acting wonky, we should go look and see if the client went in here and started clicking madly and changed things and put in settings that they shouldn't have put on. Yeah, that's a really good point. All right, next one. Um, this might have been there, but I just noticed it myself that when you go into your pro partner portal, ProAdvisor portal and go to subscriptions and billing, that [00:19:00] there are some new tabs in there. And one of them is the sales tax exception or exemption that if you count as a reseller and you shouldn't be paying sales tax on your QuickBooks subscriptions, you can put in your tax exceptions and your reseller licenses or whatever your exception reasons are, and then Intuit will not charge you sales tax for your subscriptions.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Cool.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. All right. Now, here's a good one. Undoing [00:19:30] reconciliations. This isn't brand new, but I wanted to make sure that everybody knew that there was a complaint that regular QuickBooks company admins and primary admins and standard users could not undo reconciliations, and they had to turn to an accountant, their accountant user, in order to undo a reconciliation, which of course we would go, no, no, no, no, no, please don't, please don't do it. Don't do it. Um, do you have the same policy [00:20:00] that I do? If if the starting balance is off, what do you tell your students?

Margie Remmers-Davis: Uh, if the starting balance is off?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah.

Margie Remmers-Davis: I mean, you don't want it. I take it you don't want to undo the reconciliation because. Because for me, it depends on what the situation is. But tell me what you do.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. My party line is always just repeat the previous reconciliation that says your starting balance is off. Then go back and just [00:20:30] redo your reconciliation. Because if something changed, it might be there just waiting to be picked up again.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Huh.

Alicia Katz Pollock: But our clients don't know that. They're like, something's wrong. I have to do it all again.

Margie Remmers-Davis: And that's.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Really dangerous. Um, so they have now put it in so that admin users, so company admins and primary admins can undo a reconciliation. But it popped up this awesome dialog box that said talk [00:21:00] to your accountant first. Yeah. Accountants often have a specific process for undoing reconciliations. Check with yours before you continue. And then it actually gave their email address. And so before they unreconciled, they're given your email address to actually contact you first before they muck up all your hard work. So that was awesome. Loved seeing that one.

Margie Remmers-Davis: I need to go back to [00:21:30] your. Your policy is to do the reconciliation again. Is that what you said?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So like if if I'm going to do. Okay. So right now it's September.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Uh.

Alicia Katz Pollock: If I was doing my August reconciliation.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And it says, wait, your starting balance is wrong.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: My first thing that I did was I go back and do the previous month, which would then [00:22:00] be July. Uh huh. Right. Because I'm doing the August reconciliation. So July was the last completed reconciliation. So what I would do is I would put in July's date and July's dollar amount and redo July and then dollars to donuts. 95% of the time, whatever transaction changed. Is there waiting to be picked up again? It just got the reconciliation, got unblessed for some reason. So then you just check them off and you're done.

Margie Remmers-Davis: So are you undoing? You've already [00:22:30] done July. Yeah. You're not. How are you doing July again?

Alicia Katz Pollock: I'm just doing July again. You just put in the same date and the same dollar amount.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Huh? Okay. Yeah, that's an interesting tip. I will have to try. I will have to try out. I mean, you do have the reconciliation discrepancy report that will tell you precisely what changed, and you can go fix those things.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right. But if if they change a lot of the time, like if somebody changed it by changing the dollar [00:23:00] amount, you've got a problem. But if they just, they, they, maybe they, they had to take a deposit down and then redeposit it, fix something and then redeposit it again. Then all you have to do is just check it off a second time. And so that's my, my go to is just repeat the previous reconciliation of something's really wrong. You'll know. But if it's just some transactions got changed and they lost the reconciliation mark, you just put it back again. You're done.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Mm. Interesting. [00:23:30] Yeah. Things you learn from Alicia Katz. That's why we all sit with bated breath.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, good. Hopefully that was helpful. Helpful to somebody. Hopefully that's helpful to a lot of people. Yeah.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. All right. Uh, going back to the look what I found. Okay. Next up is the customer hub and the customer hub. We've all noticed that they've moved the customers out from the sales area and down into [00:24:00] its own section. And we're in the very, very, very infancy of a CRM happening, a customer relationship management or resource management inside your QBO. And it, you can connect it to your gmail and it looks for opportunities. And you can nurture people down your sales pipeline and from inquiry to negotiation to one and put in the dollar amount of the of it. You know, things that you would do in [00:24:30] Salesforce, things that you would do in HubSpot is now being built into your QBO. And one of the things that I discovered is that now there's, um, when you go into the customer hub, there's a button in the upper right hand corner that says, um, business knowledge base. And you go in here and this becomes kind of your, what they call a source of truth for your business that your AI agents will use to personalize the lead detection, as well as the drafted [00:25:00] email responses and draft proposals. And so you go in there and it's asking questions like, who's your target customer? What's your ideal customer profile or ICP? Describe a customer which is not ideal for your business.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So you kind of tell it who you do want and who you don't want. What's your unique selling value proposition? What services do you provide and what do you not provide? What specific information or intent in your emails confirms that a lead is qualified [00:25:30] and ready for follow up? Do they mention a budget? Do they mention a timeline? What's the sales workflow for the business? Do you do a demo call? Do you take an upfront deposit? Do you have a retainer agreement? Do you do a paid consult. And how long is it between each of those deal stages. And is there and then there's another box. Is there anything else your agent should know about your business? So this is teaching your QBO about how you operate and how you relate to your customers and the onboarding [00:26:00] process. And then eventually this is going to become part of that whole lead generation that they're talking about. It'll find it in your email. And then you can draft an email back to them, and then you can turn it into an estimate and all of these workflows. So this is helping the AI read your email and know what to ignore and how to reply.

Margie Remmers-Davis: And how do you feel about this new feature?

Alicia Katz Pollock: I [00:26:30] feel that it's going to be useful for people who don't have enough staff for really nurturing their clients. Um, and I, you know, I don't, I don't want it to do my communication for me, but if it helps triage my email and find the, the customer inquiries, I should be paying attention to that before I get lost in somebody's newsletter. Mhm.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So the idea of having a hub in my QuickBooks [00:27:00] where it's surfacing the things I should pay attention to first, which is new client acquisition and upselling. I think there's value there.

Margie Remmers-Davis: I just I just wonder this kind of gives me the vibe. You know, a lot of people are complaining about, um, Intuit putting their fingers into too many things, you know, like there is a big, big, you know, discussion in the industry [00:27:30] about should intuit just focus on the accounting, which they've become known for, which is what they built like, which is what we use them for, you know, and is it okay that they're like branching out into all of these things because there's an argument for, you know, jack of all trades, master of none. Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And the multifunction printer joke that I make all the time.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah, exactly. So I just wonder if this is gonna. I don't have a strong [00:28:00] opinion. I'm not saying that I'm on either side of this. I'm just saying that this is one of those things that I just kind of feel like, uh, are they overstepping or is this going to be really cool and useful?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I mean, right now it's, I think it's cool, but it's not useful that it's, it's, it's, it's just in the basic, basic, like you can see them building it. And I think they're just kind of like looking to see, are people paying attention to it? Are [00:28:30] they trying it out? Is it doing any good? Um, I've, I've been using the, the feedback thing and it asks a question, when do you want to hear from us again? And so I've actually been able to use that and said like, you know, they want to hear from you in September and September came and I looked at the list and I called the people and I booked appointments. Oh, so the places where it's increasing your customer interactions, that's going to improve your bottom line. So that's where I think it's [00:29:00] good. It's not going to be nearly as good as using an actual solution. Yeah, that's designed for it.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So, you know, so. So I think it's a good idea. But I think it's, you know, it's never going to be as good as a dedicated.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Process. But if it helps me make some new, make some more appointments and land some more clients, then there's something to be said for that.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah, my kind of like the kind of the, my guideline is if it's something simple that [00:29:30] I or my students can use now to get by without having to go, you know, like do research a bunch of other things and learn a bunch of other things, then I'm in favor of it. If it becomes something complicated that I wonder, like, are they going to be able to do as well as something, you know, some other software out there that's kind of where I tip and I'm like, ah, I don't know.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. [00:30:00] I mean, it's one of those solutions that if you don't have that solution, using what's here is better than not having it at all. Yeah, but it's not going to be like, oh, I'm going to stop using Salesforce. I'm going to stop using HubSpot. No, that's not the that's not the position for this at all. Yeah. So it's something to, to delve into. Now, along the same lines, when you go into a customer and you edit their customer details and their whole profile down at the bottom, [00:30:30] there's some new boxes that were not there before. And right now I don't think they go anywhere. I haven't actually seen the information used anywhere. But again, signs of possibilities to come. And what it is, is a relationship in sales area. So again, you go into the customer and you go edit their customer details and scroll way down to the bottom of the column. So under the sources, you can say, well, how did they hear about me? Is it a referral? Is it networking [00:31:00] and word of mouth? Linkedin. Instagram. Facebook. Organic. Search off of the website. Lead ads. A cold outreach like there's a whole list of of how did they hear about you? And then there's a referred by box and it pulls up all your clients. And then you can say, well, okay, it was word of mouth and it came from this client. So now you have a way of tracking who's referring to you, and then you can send them gifts and maybe give them a discount on services [00:31:30] or something like that.

Margie Remmers-Davis: If I can run a report using this, I can.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yes, exactly. Now, I haven't taken the time to go look and see what reports are available. And it's not showing up yet in the customer hub. So I think they are waiting to see if people use it before building reports around it. But it will be really cool if I can go ahead, go pull up a list of who referred clients to me and what the dollar amount was of the new client. That'd be [00:32:00] great. Totally great. Um, and there's other fields down here as well. Um. You can. There's a job title box. There's a role box, you know. Are they a decision maker? Are they an influencer? Are they evaluator. Are they the budget holder. Are they the primary contact or the billing contact. So you can say who they are inside their company. You can also specify their preferred contact method which personally I like. Um, you know, everybody's different right? [00:32:30] Some people like to be emailed. Some people want you to call them. Some people love texts. Some people are on WhatsApp. Some people do everything on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Margie Remmers-Davis: This is the curse and this is the curse of modern life. I think it is. The curse of modern life is that there's too many options, too many options.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, absolutely. So at least having a place where you know that, okay, this person I'm supposed to reach out to on LinkedIn and this person's in WhatsApp and then you know how to find them. So [00:33:00] I think that is actually really cool. Um, then there's also adding their social media profiles. So you can put in their LinkedIn page and their TikTok page and their Instagram page and actually keep track of where you would go to find their company, which is really good, helpful information, especially if you're doing advising for your clients, being able to go see what they're putting out into the world can help you manage [00:33:30] their finances. All right, switching topics, customizing QBO. Now, a lot of this isn't new. I'm including it here because if you haven't been paying attention, you might not have noticed that these features are here. And in fact, I was doing one of my, um, office hours, one of my open Ask Alicia anything sessions and somebody said, well, you know, the interface is so cluttered now [00:34:00] that there's so much stuff, how do I find anything? And I was like, well, you actually have full control over the whole interface and what it looks like.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And so I started going through all the different menus and all the different buttons and all the different dashboards and showing people how to customize them. And I'm turning it into a class. I'm actually going to be teaching it live on September 30th. But then the course will be available on demand after that. And it's, you know, I kind of sit in two [00:34:30] minds of this that I personally think customizing your QBO so that the buttons you need are right there on the surface, and the information you need in the dashboards is right on top is the way to make the software most usable. Yeah. But drawback is that it's going to be different on every client. Precisely right. So now. So if you're the kind of person where you need complete consistency and it has to be the same in every single client, you might [00:35:00] not want to take this, this extra step, or maybe you just do it in your own IAS, but you don't do it in your client files. Yeah, but I believe in showing this to your clients because it makes life easier for your clients.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah, yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah.

Margie Remmers-Davis: That was the big, you know, the big hubbub about business view versus accountant view. Yeah. Like it's not the same. And now it's kind of worse.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So, so I'm fully conscious that I'm potentially [00:35:30] creating a, creating an issue because oh my God, the business view versus accountant view was my was the bane of my existence. I remember, um, uh, I was at an event at Intuit and we were, they had us all out in an atrium and there's people sitting by the fire and I'm kind of walking by and Hector calls out to me. Hey, Alicia. Like what? How do you feel about the business view versus the accountant view? And I yell back. [00:36:00] The business view and the whole atrium just bust out laughing. So that is how I felt about it. But here I am teaching how to customize it. But, you know. But I think there's something to it. I think that the level of overwhelm and getting the things you need available at one click instead of fly outs, like I teach you, you know, if you're used to like all apps, accounting, [00:36:30] bank feed and you've got three fly out clicks, I can help you get there in one click. Yeah. So the things that I'm going to be talking about are customizing your app menus. So like the pinned apps down at the bottom, customizing your bookmarks, customizing my menu, customizing your available tools. Like, I don't know if you're anything like me, but reclassify and reports options. I go into all day long [00:37:00] every single time, and I hate that they're buried down at the bottom of my menu. So I'm teaching people how to get them to be the first top things on the menu. So a lot of different things about customizing, how to customize the widgets and make dashboards that are actually useful. Um, even things, here's a cool one. The advanced search.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Oh yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: The, the, the filters have, [00:37:30] you can actually customize the filters in the advanced search. So for instance, if you want to search for transactions that use a specific product or service, you can put that filter up front and center and then it's always there for you. So there's, loads of filters in advanced search. I think that's looking at the list. It's like 15 different filters.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah, that's really important because when I first looked at the advanced search, I [00:38:00] was like, I hate this. I hate this because it doesn't have the things that I want to use to search. And then like knowing that, oh, you can, you can just add them, you can control it is like, that's huge. That's huge. Again, this is like, this is why people get upset. At QBO. Or upset at Intuit is because they, we are not aware of [00:38:30] the functionality functionality. And I know you've been carrying this banner for like for a long time. It's like if Intuit would just tell us that this cool thing is there, then less people would be upset.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Like so yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I mean, there there's so many solutions for so many of the complaints. And but it takes taking time and being curious.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: To go find him.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yep.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yep. Yeah. So [00:39:00] so personally, I love this, this customizing class, like it's one of my most fun ones to teach. Okay, the next one I don't have a visual for, but have you played with the review summary report? There's an, there's an AI generated report that's only in plus and advanced that when you just go to reports and you just go to the standard reports, there's a banner across the top with their the kind of their AI spark and sparkles [00:39:30] and colors and it says, I've generated your August review summary. Would you like to see it? Oh my God. Click on it. It's awesome. It's great. It goes through your KPIs. It gives you charts. It gives you recommendations. It shows anomalies. It shows trends. It's really good. It's really good. So [00:40:00] again it's reports and standard reports. You're just on the standard reports list. And there's a banner across the top that you've probably trained your eyes to ignore. But don't click don't ignore it. Click on it. It's called the review summary. Amazing.

Margie Remmers-Davis: I'm not seeing it in the sample company.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yes. It's not in the sample company. So you do have to find it in one of your one of your real account.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah, that's a shame. Why don't they put it? I don't know why they don't just put everything in the [00:40:30] sample company so that we are all impressed.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Well, but if you think about it, running AI through a sample company, that is a hard reset every single time. Like it. That's one of the reasons we didn't have a sample company for a year after they started building in the AI, because they couldn't get the bank feeds to work, and they had to kind of like find a way to. That's also why the sample companies only in incognito now, because they had to like create that pristine [00:41:00] environment. So it doesn't surprise me.

Margie Remmers-Davis: You mean the sample companies only in incognito.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Um, I have had trouble getting into the sample company unless I'm in an incognito browser window.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah, but that's their cookie. That's a cookie problem. I teach how to, I teach how to do, how to deal with that every single Friday. And I do, I teach a free class every Friday and we use the sample company. And nine times out of ten we get an error. And I was like, okay, guys, here's how you clear it and [00:41:30] here's how you tell into it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So it's helpful showing people how to actually clear your cookies and your cache. Yeah. But I have just started telling everybody to go to an incognito window to run it.

Margie Remmers-Davis: I. Well, that's this and that's a whole that's a whole nother podcast episode.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay, let's put that one on.

Margie Remmers-Davis: I like, I get on my soapbox every week and I'm like, it should just work. I should not have to use incognito work. I should not have to use incognito [00:42:00] to use your thing anyway.

Alicia Katz Pollock: But that's but, but that's also, you know, we were talking about the, the people who are complaining that a lot of the time the problems that they're having are not QuickBooks and not Intuit, it's because they've got their browser set up or, you know, like people using Safari, I'm on a Mac, I use Safari for everything, but not QuickBooks. Because when I click in a contact field, it's always trying to put in my contacts.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And or I heard a [00:42:30] complaint from somebody that it's auto filling descriptions. And so sometimes you just got to use the tool that it's meant for. Yeah, yeah.

Margie Remmers-Davis: I just found that I just logged into my account, and I see that I generated a financial summary for August to give you key insights into your finances and then click review summary. Yes. Very cool. I'm going to check it out now. Okay. Now that I know it's there.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So everybody should check it out. It's really good. Okay. [00:43:00] Um, next one is, uh, I do cleanups a lot, and one of the things that's on my to do list is cleaning up the chart of accounts, especially accounts that have either never been used or are no longer being used. And so when you're looking at your chart of accounts, the new account button in the upper right hand corner, when you click the drop down arrow, there's an option called [00:43:30] Chart of Accounts Cleanup. Ooh, yeah. And when you click on Chart of Accounts cleanup. It gives you the option of inactivating. Chart. Chart of accounts or renaming them. And then you can filter it and you can say like, okay, last used, never used. And you can find all the ones that don't have a single transaction in them and inactivate them all at once, or transaction accounts that haven't been used for a year or two years or four years [00:44:00] or seven years, you know, the old stuff that used to be needed and isn't needed anymore. So now you can bulk inactivate. Chart of accounts that you don't need. So I really, really, really, really, really happy to see this one.

Margie Remmers-Davis: That's amazing. Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Last but not least is online bill pay has two new features and one is bill remittances. And [00:44:30] I actually pulled up the the article about it. So when you're using QuickBooks bill pay and you pay a bill, it will, um, it'll send two emails. One is it'll send an email to the vendor when you initiate the payment, even if it's like I'm going to pay you in a week. And then it includes a second one, um, that when the payment is actually processing so that your vendor gets that information. But [00:45:00] what's really cool about it is it's including a remittance advice PDF. So it's including your name and contact information, the payment schedule, the payment reference number. But the beautiful part is the bill numbers, the dates, the due dates, the amounts, the balances and the payment amounts. So that's always been a challenge with bill pay is that it didn't it wasn't giving you the giving the vendor receiving the payment, the insight [00:45:30] of which bills you were paying. And now it does. Yes. Okay. You can also manually trigger those that when you have a transaction on the on a vendors list under the drop down arrow, under the under the actions, you can now send a remittance from there as well. So that was, I think that's a really good, useful one. And then the last one is vendor direct. [00:46:00] And I am still a little unclear on exactly what vendor direct is. So what it does is it's the funding method is an ACH from your bank account. But the payment method presented to the vendor is a virtual card. And so what it's doing is it's hiding the ACH information. So it's a way of, of creating a privacy layer in there. But it's putting a layer of a virtual card in the middle. [00:46:30]

Margie Remmers-Davis: Huh. Interesting.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And so I. I'm just just just hearing about this. Um, but when you can go to your settings and then into accountant settings and click on your expenses tab. And then in the bill pay area, there's, you can enable vendor direct and then that makes it, um, that makes it able. And then not every invoice is eligible either. So this is a little, [00:47:00] a little muddy, but I wanted to let people know that this, that this exists. So there's this new direct pay instant payment method for paying your vendor bills.

Margie Remmers-Davis: So why, why wouldn't it just always be this, like, why would you, why is this a thing that you have to turn on?

Alicia Katz Pollock: I mean, maybe you still want to send them a check and maybe you still just want to pay them by a regular, [00:47:30] straight up ACH. And I think what it's doing is it's making it instantaneous.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Mhm.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And so it's, it's taking your money. But instead of having to go through the money transmission process, it is speeding it up. Um, but that's a good question. Why wouldn't you want to do this?

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So if anybody does have a suggestion for why you wouldn't want to do this, and maybe it's because you don't want to put into it payment method, another payment method in [00:48:00] the middle. I don't know. But you know, I think it's worth trying for sure.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. So if you heard anything here that was helpful, please do hit like and subscribe to the podcast or, and share it out to your colleagues. Um, send your questions and comments to unofficial QuickBooks podcast@gmail.com. We have a LinkedIn community and we also have a YouTube channel where you can actually see the visuals that go along with this episode. [00:48:30] At unofficial QBO podcast on.

Margie Remmers-Davis: I don't think I knew about the LinkedIn community. I gotta find that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Yeah. And so we we post announcements, we post them. You know, that's where you can get your CPE. Oh, and also don't forget that you can get CPE for listening by going to earmark.com.

Margie Remmers-Davis: So if you just go to LinkedIn and then search for the unofficial QuickBooks.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Accountant Pod.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Podcast, you'll find the LinkedIn group [00:49:00] or the community. All right. Well, you learn something new every day. Well, I learned lots of new things hanging out with you. So.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, that that is the goal. All right. So, um, Margie, what's going on in your world?

Margie Remmers-Davis: Oh, well, our biggest our biggest announcement is the launch of our new nonprofit, um, accounting course. This is for. Of all time [00:49:30] in the history of Akkadian, the number one most requested of all time. People have been clamoring. They have been begging for us to build a, um, a nonprofit, uh, nonprofit bookkeeping course. And, uh, it's finally, it's finally here. And I'm, and I'm super excited, um, that people will now this is a more advanced, uh, it's a more advanced course. So you want to make sure that you have, [00:50:00] like, you can't just jump into nonprofit, you have to like, have the basic understanding of accounting in general. And then you're going to layer on that nonprofit knowledge on top of it. But you know, I, my students are so hungry. I think that the reason that the reason that people have been wanting this for so long is just because, like everyone has such a great heart, like we want to help, we [00:50:30] want to help the organizations that we care about, you know, like the, the, the people, the thing people and, and organizations that are doing good in the world and people, you know, are our students. I'm sure your students feel the same way. Like they have this great skill, they have this great knowledge. They want to be able to apply it to, um, you know, the, the causes that they love, but they've been reluctant to do that because they know that there's all sorts of rules that, [00:51:00] and they don't want to mess anything up and they don't want to, you know, have their poor do damage to their organization that they're actually trying to help. So, um, so yeah, so we are super, super excited that now you don't have to have that fear. Now you can actually go in and know exactly what you're doing and know what you need to prepare For the tax accountant that's going to take the books off your hands and also be able to serve the organizations that you love. So yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's [00:51:30] really fabulous. Where can people go to find out about this nonprofits course?

Margie Remmers-Davis: Um, I will put the link in the chat because I don't know it off the top of my head. I'll put it in the description or like whatever.

Alicia Katz Pollock: We're so, so we'll put the link in the show notes.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yes, the show notes. We'll put the I will put the link in the show notes because I don't have it off the top of my head.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay, excellent. Okay, cool.

Margie Remmers-Davis: And what about you? What's going on in your world?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, we are gearing up for Intuit Connect. Yes. I'm really [00:52:00] super excited because Royal Wise is a sponsor this year. We actually have a booth on the exhibit hall floor.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Wow.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So it's one of the tiny little ones. And because I'm new, I'll probably be facing the wall. Um, so definitely come find me for sure. Um, but my husband Jamie, who's also our Apple trainer, will also be in attendance with us. And we'll be showing off the brand new e-book learning system that for [00:52:30] my textbook that is now available as an electronic book. So it's really, really.

Margie Remmers-Davis: So that will be so nice for you.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And it's like click by click and step by step. So we'll be doing demos. Yeah. And then.

Margie Remmers-Davis: You know, for you to update I'm sure.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yes.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yes. Um, so definitely, definitely come check us out at Intuit Connect and otherwise find us at royal.com.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Nice.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. Well, okay, Margie, we did it. Thank you so much for helping me with [00:53:00] all the. Look what I found and all the. Always great to hang.

Margie Remmers-Davis: Out with you.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. All right. So thank you, everybody, for joining us. And we will see you in the next one.