Bank Feed Secrets with Kathy Grosskurth

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: Everybody. In this week's episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, we are going to do a deep dive on the banking feed. I'm Alicia Katz Pollack of Royal wives.com, and today my special guest is Kathy Grosskurth of Bookkeeping Clean and Simple out of Ormond Beach, Florida. And she focuses on one on one QuickBooks coaching. And I've known Kathy now for about 15 years, [00:00:30] and she's about as big a QuickBooks bank feeds geek as I am. She even did a sessions on it at scaling new heights, just like I used to do back in the day. So welcome to the show, Kathy.

Kathy Grosskurth: Thank you. Alicia. It is so thrilling to be here with you today. And thanks for asking me.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, absolutely. All right. So let's go ahead and dive right in. So the first thing I want to know, Kathy, is why are you a bank feeds geek like I am? What what makes you enthusiastic [00:01:00] about it?

Kathy Grosskurth: Well, Alicia, I will have to say that over the years of working with people one on one and in small groups, I've discovered, and you also know this as well, is that the bank feed is kind of like the central hub of all the activity, because that's where all the transactions come through, and you have to deal with them right there. Even if you have invoices that are pending or bills. It you just have to go through the bank feeds. It's, it's a necessary evil for all of us.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. [00:01:30] I consider the bank feeds kind of the hallmark of QBO. And like you, the central hub. And, you know, some users are doing all their manual work and using the banking feed as the double check process. And others are just using the banking feed for all their data entry. And so it's nice that you can use it however it fits your workflow. And starting with when, when QuickBooks moved to the new Intuit platform with this whole new layout. They [00:02:00] also completely revamped the banking feeds, and it's more powerful than it ever was. And, you know, personally, I love it, but I do also hear people's frustration with it sometimes. And the one thing that I want to really make sure that people understand is that when it moved to the new AI driven features, you had to start, kind of start over again and retrain it, at least initially. Now they've changed the model a little bit. So it looks at your history. But when they [00:02:30] first implemented the new AI, it was its own pure model. And you had to kind of teach it what to do and send all the transactions through at least once so that it had a background of knowledge. And now it's actually looking at your last two transactions for that payee. And once you build up that body of experience for it, it's becoming really accurate. What's your experience been?

Kathy Grosskurth: I agree 100%. And when I first started preparing [00:03:00] for my class at scaling and working with my own sample file, I have a test file that I use and that I also demonstrate the concepts out of. I noticed right away that everything pretty much started from scratch. You had to reteach it everything, and that seems to be one of the things even one of my clients had complained about that. But once I explained to her how quickly it got up to speed, she switched right away. And I found that within about the four month [00:03:30] period that it took me to work with it right before I taught my session, it was basically learning pretty quickly and I would say probably about 90% accurate at that particular time and over time of using it. Even with my other clients, it seems to be pretty accurate now, especially with some of the other changes that hopefully we're going to talk about some of those today.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Why don't you go ahead and start? What are some of those changes?

Kathy Grosskurth: Okay. Would [00:04:00] you like for me to share my screen?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, that would be great. So for those of you who are listening to it, um, to this podcast through one of your podcast apps, we do have a YouTube channel as well at unofficial QBO podcast on YouTube. And so we actually have a visual up where Kathy is demonstrating the bank transaction so that you can actually see what she's talking about. Now I'm going to do my best to interpret that for the people who are listening.

Kathy Grosskurth: Well, one of the things I really love, [00:04:30] and if you go down to where the table is, you can start seeing these little codes. And they used to have the little sparkles, and they still have that in some places in the platform. But what they've done is they've added what they call review signals. And these review signals are, are fairly accurate. And for instance, you can actually see where some of these check marks, these green check marks means that they're pretty much certain that this is correct. And like Alicia was saying, it goes back [00:05:00] over, uh, past history, recent history to kind of guess for some of those transactions, the, the from to and the match categorize. Now, some of them have these little signals right here. If you click on these little signals right here, you can actually see the not only the suggestion, but why the suggestion was made in the first place. Okay. And so you can actually see. So they were saying that multiple categories were used. But yeah. [00:05:30]

Alicia Katz Pollock: Let me go ahead and and visualize this for people. So when you look in the banking feed in both the from two column and in the match categorize column separately, there are three different kinds of indicators. There's a green check mark, which is it? It is pretty darn sure that it knows what it is. And that is actually based on a transaction history of two or more. And the more you have the. Or actually. Well, I think I think it's two. But [00:06:00] the more you have than the more confidence it gets. And it turns out green. Then there's a blue information circle. And that's the ones where it thinks that it knows, but it's not quite sure. It doesn't have enough data in its database to know that this is correct for this particular client. And then there is an orange exclamation point. And those are the ones where it's suggesting or best guessing. And those are the ones where it thinks it's got [00:06:30] a suggestion for you, but you definitely want to check it out. And then if it doesn't even have that to go on, it just leaves it blank.

Kathy Grosskurth: Right, right. And I did find one with the two greens for the from two and the matched categorize. So if you click on that check mark under from two, it kind of gives you a reason as to why that is. And it'll say that this provider is in your vendor list, and you can actually add it from there if you want to. Uh, and then this other check mark, [00:07:00] we're under the match categorize. It basically will tell you if it's always used for this vendor. So once you start using certain ones, always for a certain vendor, then you're pretty 100 will probably 99.9% sure that it's probably correct, even though you'll still have to go and verify, especially if you're using a vendor, but have a different type of category that you want to put them in. And that's the key. You want to make sure that you trust and verify, because it's still up to us [00:07:30] to determine whether or not that's categorized correctly in the end, but it certainly helps do the heavy lifting, and it'll save you lots of time when you're going through and doing like some batch entry of data.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And one of the things that I do like is if it's a vendor that is that varies in its categorization, like, let's say Amazon, if you click on the transaction itself and drop down the drawer, it has a categorization history link that you can click on, and it shows you [00:08:00] all the recent history of the different ways that you've categorized it and how many times and how recently it was. And then that way you can just pick it off the list. You don't even have to enter it anymore. You can say, oh, this is office supplies and just approve it and it will go ahead and do that categorization for you so you can manually explore your categorization history.

Kathy Grosskurth: Yeah. And everybody has their own way of doing things. I have my own way of doing things. And so, you know, for me, it just, it's just [00:08:30] really speeded up the, the work that I do on behalf of clients and, and it makes it easier to go in like every day or every other day and catch up pretty quickly.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Absolutely. What other features do you see that you like?

Kathy Grosskurth: Okay, well, I will go ahead and a lot of these are already incorporated into the customization hub. Where's that little small gear icon? Wherever we call that thing. These days, I always forget.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right. So the [00:09:00] technically Intuit calls it the grid gear. I call it the baby gear. And so Kathy is talking about the time, not the gear in the upper right hand corner, but the little tiny gear that's just above the bank feeds grid over on the far right hand side. And if you have not clicked on that or haven't clicked on it recently, this is something that you should go into for every single client because that's where you set up how you want the bank feed to operate for that particular client. It's not universal across your clients. [00:09:30] It is per client, and they have put in a lot of really cool features in here to allow you to take control over how it works.

Kathy Grosskurth: They sure have. And one of the things that I really love, there's a couple of things that I really love here is that if you go back up to the top here. You have the ability now to drag to change the order of the columns, which you didn't have before. And I think, Alicia, that was one of the things that you were wanting to see happen for a very long time, from what I understand. [00:10:00]

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I actually had a live meeting in San Jose in Mountain View with the bank feeds team, and that was one of the things that I asked for, that their logic was the things that come in from the statements with the date, the full bank description and the dollar amounts, those should be on the left hand side because those are hard and fast, and that the work you're doing should be on the right hand side. And my argument was that I wanted my work on the left hand side so that I could make the fields [00:10:30] a lot bigger and fit them all in and focus on those. And then I could use the information on the right as the cross reference, especially since it was supposed to be categorizing things for me already anyway. And so we went back and forth on that. And what they decided to do was the best of all worlds, which is allow you to move them in the order that you want them. So when you click on the baby gear, the very first thing that you see is the ability to turn on and off which columns you want to see, [00:11:00] and then use the little six dot waffles to drag them in the order that you want them. And so myself, I put from to and match categorize on the far left. The one thing that was hard for me, though, was that my muscle memory is just click on the row to drop down the drawer, but you can't click on the variables. You have to click on the hard coded stuff. So now I have to click on the right side of the row in order to get the drop down. So I had to kind of retrain myself on that.

Kathy Grosskurth: And, [00:11:30] and I just did what she just said. I actually dragged and dropped the from to and the match categorized so that they're directly behind the date. And for me, what I like to do in the files that I'm in, there's the, there's this new feature called request. But we also have the old feature which has been revised called the files. And, and I actually like to move that actually close to the front. So when I'm dragging and dropping files, which is another thing maybe we'll talk about [00:12:00] in a little bit, it's right there where you can see it and it's not hidden behind everything on, on the right hand side. So it's a sticky setting. It will remember where you put it until you either move it again or some, some other thing. So I've got those rearranged now and totally different than what, what we started out with.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Sure. And, and let's go ahead and actually talk about files right away. So files is the ability to add attachments to it. And so you could [00:12:30] have the little plus sign there, which allows you to go navigate to the transaction and go grab it from something saved on your hard drive. But Kathy, you know about the drag and drop, right?

Kathy Grosskurth: Yes, I most certainly do so in the demo. You're probably not going to be able to see the window that I opened up, but what I did is I went in there and opened up, uh, the, the, the files tab and I navigated to where I just found a document here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag it and drop it. [00:13:00] Let's do it on this open AI one. I know it has nothing to do with it, but as you're going through here, you can actually see where it tells you where to drop it. So, uh, you got to be careful. Make sure you're dropping it in the right place. So it says open AI ChatGPT subscribers. So that's where I want it to go. And then once you drop it in there, it shows up as a number one, that you have one attachment in there and you click on it and you can open it up. And from here you can actually [00:13:30] open up the document, which I won't do it here, but you can actually click on it and it'll show you that that document in there.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. No, that's, that's actually an improvement to even the last time that I did it a week ago because now it's got a little before you would just drag and drop it and it would attach it, but it wouldn't tell you anything. Now it actually tells you what it which transaction it's dropping onto, which is handy because, you know, those rows are kind of thin. So it helps give you the visual that you're in the right place. [00:14:00] And I love that. Then the files column, instead of just being a plus sign, tells you how many attachments that you have, and you can just click on it right from there. You don't even have to open the drawer.

Kathy Grosskurth: Right, which makes it convenient. And the other thing that you can do too is you can actually click on this plus sign and navigate to the file folder that you're wanting to do. And then you can actually drag it from there and drop it where you want it to go. So say like you did that and it'll allow you to, to drop, drop the file. So I'll drop it in [00:14:30] that same folder. Why not? I mean, that way you can see when you do that and then it'll just cancel that out. And you can see we have two file uh full. Now we have two fouls in there now.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. The Intuit's goal with the new bank feed interface was really just to eliminate your clicks. That's what their number one goal was, is let's get you as much information on the row as you can and as little clicking as you need to do. And so the fact that you can [00:15:00] just drag and drop means literally zero clicking. You just drop it in.

Kathy Grosskurth: All right. There's a couple of things all over here in the categorization hub or the, the baby gear.

Alicia Katz Pollock: The baby gear.

Kathy Grosskurth: Yeah, to talk about again, that's really helpful. So the dragon, the, the, um, dragging and dropping your columns is good, but there's a lot of things in here. Well, really [00:15:30] some key things that I really love. Uh, as you can see, I've got several of these turned on. Uh, one of the things that I really like is where you don't have to go ahead and click through like Alicia was saying. You're you're saving clicks by not having to open up all these transactions to do a lot of things. So now you have it where you can show the match categorize, toggle in line, because if that's not turned on, then you have to actually click in through the transaction to work with that. But now that I've got it turned on, you [00:16:00] can see you can see these over here. So it's all.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So, so what Kathy is pointing to is in the the row, there's a little selector that has the option for categorize, which is the default or match. And for the people who are doing all of their work just inside the banking feed, the default to categorization is really handy, but sometimes they need to physically go look and manually match [00:16:30] it to something else that exists. But the match is not coming up. But if you are never doing any actual work in your QuickBooks and you're just living off of the banking feed. You basically don't need this toggle, in which case you can hide it and then gain an extra inch of real estate and it's still there. If you click on the transaction, it's still there, but it's not taking up your real estate in your your one click efforts.

Kathy Grosskurth: Yeah, for me, I like having it there. But like Alicia said, you have the option. [00:17:00] There's always options. So you can actually set this up how you would find it, optimizing your use of it, which is what I really like.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay, good. What else do you like in here?

Kathy Grosskurth: Well, one of the other things I like in here, and it seems like a minor thing, but the alternate row color I've got turned on. All it does is that it darkens every other row in there. It just makes it visually, uh, more able for you to, to tell what row you're on. Because without it on, you can. [00:17:30] I'll show you what it looks like with, with, with it turned on off. Everything kind of just jumbles together and it's just visually helps you as you're working in, in, in the banking center and across the different line line items there.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And that was something that was specifically user feedback when they went to this new bank feed, the big complaint was that it was hard to use because everything was just flat colors. And so they actually worked hard to revamp, revamp the palette. And they went through a couple different color palettes. And [00:18:00] now it's at the point where it feels kind of natural, but it's visually easy to use.

Kathy Grosskurth: All right. And then another thing that I really am glad that they finally put this in here, even though it comes with a caveat, because it's still not quite as robust as I would like to see it. Is this warn if missing vendor and client? I'm going to demonstrate this feature because when it's turned on, if you go to attempt to post this without a [00:18:30] from two or have a some kind of payee in there, you click on post and then it opens up with this little window that asks you if you want to do this. What? Really? This is good because it's a warning, but I would like to see it go further. And I actually put this into the feedback through the county platform, which maybe we'll touch on a little bit to see if they could put some stronger guardrails in there. Kind of like with the Close the books feature, where [00:19:00] you can actually have it set up for a firmer guardrail than what we have here, but this is at least a start. They've got it going. They got it going here. So in this case, you can either click to post anywhere which would override that. But these are seeing it. But I'm just going to cancel out of it because normally I don't like to post anything without any any from to or P.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Same. And I was really, really happy to get that warning message because it's definitely a best practice to have something [00:19:30] in there, even if, you know, I don't add every single restaurant that by name that I eat at because I travel a lot, but I do have a generic restaurants and parking lots. Same deal. And so even if you're don't want to put a vendor in your system, put something in there, and it's really kind of a side benefit because now when I go to restaurants as a vendor, I have a list of all of my meals in one place. So there's some side benefits to that best practice as well.

Kathy Grosskurth: I do the same thing. I [00:20:00] use generic vendors and pays for just about everything where there are multiple numbers of, I have customers that go to different places to get their fuel. I go to that, go to different places to eat. They may travel out of town, they may have some unique restaurants. So you don't want to list thousands of different restaurants in there where you can just actually have a generic pay. And I believe you can also run reports on those generic pay names too. And that makes it as long as you're consistent [00:20:30] with the usage, then it can create some good reports for you.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And the under the baby gear. One of the other options that's there is to show the full bank detail and also to put the. What? Where is it? Copy full bank description to memo. And that takes the actual restaurant name or parking lot name that came in from the banking feed and still attaches it to the transaction so that you have that information. You're not losing the information, [00:21:00] you're just not cluttering your vendor list.

Kathy Grosskurth: Right? Right. And I usually turn those on if they're not turned on by default, I usually make sure that they're turned on and not only my file, but in my client's file as well. And so going down the list here, you used to be limited to how many transactions per page. But now Intuit has allowed us to be able to change how many transactions we have on the page. We can have as many as 300 appear on [00:21:30] a page. Now, if we want to. Where I find this helpful is if you're doing a large cleanup or having to catch up after a long absence or something of that nature, you can actually click on this and then use it with the group and sort by column to make the elephant more bite size when you're working with those transactions.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And I like that group and sort by column because I would rather do all of my Amazons all at one time or all of my electrical utility. If I'm doing a full [00:22:00] year of data entry all at once. I can pick all of PGE and make it all electricity and do 12 of them all at once instead of 12 times.

Kathy Grosskurth: Right. And you don't have to limit it to just the, uh, whatever. I mean, you can do it on whichever column. Like right now I have it on the date column. And then when you collapse all groupings, see how much easier it is to kind of see. And then you can just open up whatever month or whatever grouping that you use to work on that particular area [00:22:30] before, so it's much easier to work that way for some people than seeing lots and lots of transactions come through, because it can be overwhelming. So that's what I like about that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And so what Kathy is demonstrating in the visual is that you can click on the different column headers, like you can group it by description. Or if you click on the date column header, it'll group it by date and then you can collapse it. So if you're somebody who gets visually overwhelmed and you just want to focus on the one thing that you want to see, then [00:23:00] you can just expand out that one section and just focus on that one section, one at a time.

Kathy Grosskurth: Yeah. Like here's the match categorized one where you can actually see and it's just kind of, you know, based on what, what categorization is in there. And then at the top, it's got even no categorization in there. So, you know, like I said, it should help if you've got a lot of transactions to work with, and [00:23:30] you get overwhelmed by seeing a lot of stuff in there.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Okay, great. Um, now can I take the lead on another one that I just discovered? Okay. Absolutely. Go ahead and change it from the review tab to the Post-it tab.

Kathy Grosskurth: Okay. Let's do that real quick.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay, so from pending, which I called it review, it's now called pending. But then there's another, there's pending Post-It and excluded. So Post-It is where everything is that is already in the system. [00:24:00] And when you're in this view and you click on the grid gear, click on that baby gear for me. Sure. The menu here actually changes. And so there's fewer columns. And the thing here that I really like is the automatic matching. So with QuickBooks payments, merchant services and payroll, the automatic matching. So when all the paychecks clear, it automatically [00:24:30] does the match and moves them to Post-It so that you don't have to. And the same thing with QuickBooks payments for not so much the deposits, but the fees will automatically get entered for you so that you don't have to manually do every single fee. But for some people, they want 100% complete control. And if you would like to see those fees and you would like to see the paychecks in your banking feed, you can turn off the automatic matching and then manually [00:25:00] confirm them yourself. Now, personally, I have very, very rarely ever had any issue with any of those automatic matches, so I personally want to leave it on. But if you're a control freak, this is there for you.

Kathy Grosskurth: I agree, I think that I am so trusting of it because I've been using QuickBooks payments for years and years, and you don't even have to think about it. It, it automatically takes everything out of the the banking center and takes care of all that for you, including [00:25:30] the merchant fees and and all of that. It just it just lovely. But there's some people that like to have that kind of control and you have the option of, uh, turning it off if, if you want that kind of control yourself.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm. Okay. Thanks for letting me throw that in there.

Kathy Grosskurth: Sure, sure.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. What do you have next on your list of favorite new tools?

Kathy Grosskurth: Well, one of the things that is not necessarily bank feed specific, but it's one [00:26:00] of the things that I find really helpful because they've added so many different keyboard shortcuts that you can actually access. Now, if you hold down the control alt and question mark symbol, you can get your keyboard shortcuts and they have them organized in various groups. And up until I guess recently, I don't know how recent it was. You can actually create a printed version of the entire list [00:26:30] where you can actually print this list off and have it just to refer to.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh that's nice. You can make your own little cheat sheet because yeah, these are hard to remember, but being able to just put it on the bulletin board next to your desk is super handy.

Kathy Grosskurth: Absolutely. And you know, for keyboard users or keyboard shortcut users, this, this is a dream come true, I would think.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Now I have a new favorite keyboard shortcut that's definitely helpful in the banking feed, but is helpful absolutely everywhere. And that [00:27:00] is command period or control period. And go ahead and demonstrate that one. This one to me has been just like the swan song. What it does is it hides the top menu and the left navigation bar and just focuses on what you're working on. And then you can just hit it again. So control period or command period, back and forth and. Yeah.

Kathy Grosskurth: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I love that.

Kathy Grosskurth: Yeah. Command period is if you're using a Mac and the control [00:27:30] period is if you're using a IBM compatible machine, the same function is here over here with this little, I don't know what you would call that little square thing over here above where it says link account. You can do the same thing with that. That's basically the same function. Only you're using that and not not the keyboard.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So the, the icon that Kathy is referring to is a little square that has four little corners. So there is a button that you can click on that does the same thing as the command period or [00:28:00] control period. But you know, I love, love, love that keyboard command.

Kathy Grosskurth: And one of the other things going down through here, when you're looking at the transaction or the different cards here for like the different accounts, and I have like several accounts that I have attached to this, this is a play, a sandbox file that I use when I'm doing teaching and stuff like that. One of the things I really like is that it shows you when these were [00:28:30] last updated. And so when you click on the update button, because the, the old or. And you can actually switch back to the previous version, which I wouldn't want to do at this point.

Alicia Katz Pollock: But don't say that out loud. Yeah, certainly. Certainly.

Kathy Grosskurth: Yeah, certainly. But um, the previous version would not have that information in there. But you can see it in the new. And then when you update, when you click to update, it generally doesn't take us long to update as it used to in the in the previous [00:29:00] version. So they've speeded everything up on the back end so that the transactions are loading much, much quicker now much, much quicker.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. There's a lot of activity happening on the back end. Like when you classify something, it even as you keep going, it's still working on the classifications on the back side when you enter add transactions.

Kathy Grosskurth: One of the other things I like to do is when you go over here to where the where it says Fidelity Rewards Visa, which is the account that we're [00:29:30] in now, I like to click on this because you can actually search by account name, so you can actually start typing the account name, and it'll pop up on the short list and let me see if it has. Yeah, here we go. So if you wanted to go really quickly to the Amazon card here, you can actually do that. And where I find this helpful is if you are working with like credit cards that have several sub cards, and you don't have to scroll through this list to try to find the sub card that you're looking for, you can actually start typing in [00:30:00] the name of the sub card. It'll, it'll show you the, the, the cards, and you can just click on the one to get to get into it. And it should take you straight to the card like it did here.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So what Kathy is referring to is, and people don't even notice that it's here or realize that it's a feature. But in addition to the cards across the the squares across the top of the banking fee. But above it it tells you what account you're in right now. And that is actually a tool that's not just telling you [00:30:30] what account you're in. There's a little drop down arrow next to it, and if you have never clicked on that little drop down arrow, go do that right now. It gives you an easy, easy switcher. So like Cathy said, if you have a corporate sub card and you've got like, you know, a, it's anywhere from 2 to 20 employees with their own sub cards. Having to scroll through that list is really, really hard. But just picking it off the drop down or searching for the account number and popping it right up is really, really helpful. It [00:31:00] also has another feature that I like. Cathy, can you drop that menu down again?

Kathy Grosskurth: I sure will.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I think you know where I'm going with this one. Yeah. Account reorder accounts.

Speaker 3: Yes.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's gold. Yeah. Um, I just talked about this in my customizing QBO QBO class. I just taught it on September 30th, and it's a class on how to trick out your QBO to put everything exactly where you want it to go. And this was one of the features that you just [00:31:30] because your primary bank might have a checking account and a savings account, if your savings account doesn't have any activity happening in it, you don't want it to be the second card that's always on the screen. You want to shunt that all the way off to the side so that you can look at it as needed. So the ability to reorder your banking accounts by order of priority or order of activity means that you can have your most active used accounts right on your default screen and not have to go [00:32:00] get them all the time. So this reordering is extremely, extremely useful.

Kathy Grosskurth: Yeah. And I'm going ahead and doing that right now. I moved the LG savings account to the very last one and moved up the Amazon card up to third place. And the way that I like to do this because for me, I use my credit card a lot more than I use even my checking account. So I want the. For me, it works to have the, the bank account or the credit card account with the most activity first. So that way when I'm working from [00:32:30] left to right, I'm knocking out all the the volume stuff first before I go on to the next thing. It's just kind of a mental thing, you know, thinking I got that checked off and then it not as much work for the rest of it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I, I do it mostly the same way, but here's a little, a little tip, a little hot tip there that when you're working with an operating account and let's say you have profit first and you have a lot of different subaccounts with it or transfers moving in and out. [00:33:00] I actually like to clear my smaller accounts first before going to my big account, because the smaller ones are generally, you know, transfers in from the operating checking account or smaller things that interrelate. And so when I clear those out, that gives me less to do in the main checking account. And it's more obvious because if my main checking account transfers money profit first style to five different checking accounts, I got to sort through mentally which one is going where. [00:33:30] But if I start with the destination account, then it's obvious that it can only have come from the main operating account, and so it's just cleaner and faster to do your minor accounts first before you do your your most trafficked account.

Kathy Grosskurth: That's a good point. Alicia and I used to do it that way, but with the new version of the banking center here, the, the matching and the the transfers have gotten much, much better. [00:34:00]

Alicia Katz Pollock: You're right. Those pairs, the fact that the pairs automatically match up is so cool. I really like that. Go back to your pending tab. All right. And we can probably find find some of those on there, right?

Kathy Grosskurth: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And so, um, what we're talking about on that one is if you have money out of one account and money in to another account for the same dollar amount on the same day, it will pair the two, it'll say, hey, these two are paired. And if [00:34:30] you accept one half of the pair, it takes it off of both registers.

Kathy Grosskurth: Yes. Yes. And I know I have some down here. There, there. Yeah. And and the more you use this, the more it's going to remember. And I found it over the last few months of using it with this file. Plus with working with my client files, it's pretty darn accurate, especially if you have odd amounts. So you're going to know right away whether or not it's it's going to work or not. But you know, as Alicia said, if you feel like you want to be absolutely sure, [00:35:00] you may want to go to those lesser transactions accounts and, and just check what's on the other side, but has gotten pretty accurate and I haven't had to worry about it. I would say probably in about 99.9% of the cases here. It's done a very good job.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, agreed. Especially since if you have the same dollar amount, then it doesn't pair them. It moves them into match and gives you the two options. So the pairs have been really pretty dead on accurate. All right. [00:35:30] Now for to to bring it all home I want to share one of the newest things that I have found that I am really, really excited about. And that is policy reviews inside the banking feed that you actually now have the ability to train your AI. And when you click on one of the transactions, you now have a details tab and then a Policy Reviews tab. And you know, Kathy and I are finding that this hasn't been rolled [00:36:00] out everywhere yet. So keep an eye out on this. But look at this. It actually is explaining why it gave this transaction the orange exclamation point, Why? It's not sure about it. Then under Policy Reviews, it says it's held for review because it's missing a payee. It's missing the class. It's missing the location. It's got a low confidence prediction for the category. It needs two similar past transactions, but it only found zero. And so you can see [00:36:30] how it came up with the the signal the whether it's the green check mark, the blue I, the blue I or the orange exclamation point. And then it has a separate section for ready to post, which is the part of it where it is, um, thinks that it knows what to do. And so as you go through the different transactions, you'll see different, uh, different policies, um, happening [00:37:00] on the screen. So that's one part of the AI that I really like. And then you also get to set those policies that when you go up to Settings and Account and Settings. So go into your account settings, there's a brand new tab called accounting. And when you click on the accounting tab, you now have the ability to control your bank feed AI policies. Have you seen this yet, Kathy?

Kathy Grosskurth: I've seen it in a couple [00:37:30] of client files, but it hasn't rolled out to every single one of them yet.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Now, I absolutely love this that you can set which fields are required is your from to always required? Are classes and locations always required. And you can say yes, I always require them. No, they're never required. Or you can set it based on categorization history which will look at the the past vendors and see if you need those classes and locations on these transactions [00:38:00] or not. And so I love being able to specify, yes, yes, yes, I want these to be required in order for you to give it a green check mark. You can also set a threshold for the transactions requiring review. And really what this is, is feeding is the ready to post that pops up sometimes from the AI when it's saying, hey, I've got the confidence on these. So this is really kind of your confidence controls. And so if the transaction is over your [00:38:30] specific threshold and it defaults to $2,500, which is kind of your standard safe harbor. But if you want more control, you can say, all right, any transactions over 1000, I do not want you to auto post or make it ready to post. I want to watch out for those so you can set what that dollar amount is. And depending on the size of your company, that might be, you know, $100 or it might be $10,000. You can also set the history settings. How [00:39:00] far back can it do you want the AI to populate it? Do you want it to just be more recent because your company has changed how you've done things, or do you want it to go back over the whole history of those vendors? Then there's a transaction posting notes and this one, all I can do is assume on this one, but I have in here as an experiment, leave Amazon Uncategorized, where I think what this is, is your prompt training for the bank feed AI [00:39:30] that if you have notes about how your company handles things, you can put those notes in and it will take it into consideration when it decides its confidence levels and the ready to post.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You can also set asset and expense policy, your fixed asset thresholds, $2,500 or something different, your prepaid expenses thresholds, you know, at what point do you want to spread those out over the year as opposed to recognizing an annual expense? [00:40:00] And so it's super, super nice that they are actually giving us control over setting up the AI on these. This screen also has the Intuit Expert Services. Now this is a whole different topic and I don't necessarily want to veer. But, um, the Intuit experts now is doing bank feed reviews on Qbo and plus and advanced. And if a client file has no accountant [00:40:30] attached to it, it's on by default. If there is an accountant user attached to it, it defaults to off. And so that way you have full control over whether that feature is available to your clients. Now we've talked about the Intuit experts in a couple previous episodes. So take a look for those. There's a big conversation that I had with Dan and Matthew about Intuit experts. And so we'll put that link in the show notes for easy access in this. Cool. Kathy.

Kathy Grosskurth: Oh, wow. That is really [00:41:00] something that they're allowing us to be able to have so many controls over these things, and I'm glad that they're trusting us enough to allow us to make those decisions where we feel like that we need you to help us do things quicker and, and, and easier in the same time.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, a little bit of trust and a little bit of empowerment going on there with those.

Kathy Grosskurth: Absolutely.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. Well, Kathy, thank [00:41:30] you so much for, uh, for giving us a tour of the new, of the, of all the new features. Um, what's going on in your world? What would you like our listeners to know about you? How can they reach out to you?

Kathy Grosskurth: Well, they can actually go to my website, uh, bookkeeping, clean and simple. And I have a myriad of ways for folks to reach out to me. Uh, primarily they can click on the telephone button on my website to get in touch with me. [00:42:00] Uh, but as far as what's going on in my world. This is kind of a slow time of year for me. I start really getting into planning for 2027, and one thing I will say is that I am going to be attending reframe. This will be my third reframe and I am so excited about it. So it's going to be at the beginning of November right after the elections. So I'm excited about that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And I'll get to see you there.

Kathy Grosskurth: Yes, absolutely. I'm looking [00:42:30] forward to it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I'm looking forward to making the trek all the way across the country for that one.

Kathy Grosskurth: How about you, Alicia? What's going on with you and and everything that you're doing?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, in the immediate I'm going to Intuit connect and I'm actually a sponsor this year. So we have Booth 60 in the exhibit hall, and we're going to be showing off the brand new e-book. My textbook is now publicly available in a click by click, step by step platform that anybody can access. [00:43:00] You don't have to be in college anymore to use my textbooks. So I'm super excited about that. And if you're not going to connect, you can just go to consultants.com so that you can see that new book and we'll be showing it off at connect. We'll be also enrolling people into our training program. And so you can come and talk to myself and my husband, Jamie, my business partner, Jamie is going to be there also. And it's an opportunity to meet with us and to talk about what kinds of training you [00:43:30] need for your firm or for your practice, whether the training is for you or for your team or for your clients. All of our courses scale, and so you can meet with us and check out our program, and we can dial in your training for your company. So again, it's Booth 60 at Intuit Connect.

Kathy Grosskurth: Sounds exciting.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, super looking forward to it. Okay. Um, well, thank you everybody for listening. If this tour of the bank feeds was helpful for you, please share it with other people, [00:44:00] share it to the rest of your team so that they can learn what's new and feel just that much better about taking control of the banking feeds in addition to liking and sharing. Go check out the video on YouTube where we're demonstrating all of the stuff. You can email us at unofficial QuickBooks podcast@gmail.com if you have any questions or comments, and we might share them on the air. You can get CPE for today's episode by going to earmark.me and [00:44:30] answering a few questions about what you heard, and you'll get CPE for listening. All right. I think that takes care of it. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Alicia Pollock from royal.com.

Kathy Grosskurth: And I'm Cathy Gross with bookkeeping clean and simple.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And we will see you in the next one.

Kathy Grosskurth: One.