Now You Know: In the Know October 2026 Recap

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Alicia Katz Pollock: Hey everybody. In this week's episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, it's time for the monthly in the know so that now you know, I'm Alicia Katz Pollak from Royal wyze.com. And my special guest today is Mr. Matthew Fulton, otherwise known as spot from Cloud Apps, Inc.. How are you doing spot, Alicia.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I'm doing phenomenal. And yourself.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I'm doing great. [00:00:30]

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You were just mentioning it's 50 degrees outside where you're at. I won't tell you how nice and sunny and warm it is where we are. So.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, I feel bad for the people who it's like plummeted degrees. So I feel I'm lucky that it's kind of maritime around here. All right. So, um, for those of you who aren't familiar with it in the know is Intuit's monthly webinar. That's always on the third Thursday of the month at 11 a.m. Pacific Time, where they talk about [00:01:00] the new features that are coming out in QuickBooks online and the things that they need to make sure that, you know, and so it's an excellent webinar that everybody should watch. In these recaps, we focus on summarizing what they told us and also give our colorful commentary about the different features.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah, this is a great recap of all of what I like to call the Intuit Sphere, because they touch base on some of the tax software. They touch base on payroll, everything that kind of circles all around QuickBooks online as [00:01:30] well.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So there's always something for everybody. The link to the recording and to the handouts are in our show notes. And if you're watching this on YouTube, we're going to actually show the PowerPoint slides that go along with it. So don't forget that we do have a YouTube channel in the links to that are also in the show notes, or you can just go to YouTube and search for the unofficial Qbo podcast and you will find us. All right. You ready to dive in?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Let's [00:02:00] do it. This was a, you know, good month of information.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right, let me go ahead and share my screen. All right. So in the know the Intuit ProAdvisor in the know it is hosted by our team. Martinez, who's the principal program manager for ProAdvisor training, specifically out of San Diego. And in the agenda there is first, they always start with community news and different webinars and training opportunities available to you. Then there's [00:02:30] going to be three different product innovations. The first one is going to be the newest updates to document uploads for QuickBooks payroll. The new additions to Intuit Tax Advisory called Books to Advice, and then some new features in Intuit Accountant Suite. And then they always end with what's around the corner. So things to look forward to. I'm going to go ahead and skip over all the housekeeping And let's go into ProAdvisor [00:03:00] community news. So their first announcement was that they were live streaming into a connect all of the main stage speakers. Now, that was already this week, but I bet if you go look around online, you will be able to find recordings. There is Lupita Nyong'o, who the Academy Award winning actress producer in New York Times best selling author. Also speaking was Angela Duckworth, the author of grit, Jon [00:03:30] Dorenbos, who is a magician and an NFL Pro Bowler.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Ooh.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Jefferson Fisher, the host of the Jefferson Podcast, and Carla Hall, who has been the emcee for many years now. She's a chef. Um, and on the Food Channel.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: We also have empower 2026, a virtual conference that's going to be on November 10th coming up pretty soon. And this whole conference is going to be focused on what firms actually need. Heading into 2027, some of the topics that we'll be covering is [00:04:00] going to be, you know, how to cut through all the AI overwhelm, you know, a practical work, workflow guidance and your product of choice. Latest tax law updates and what it takes to keep your firms data safe. Nowadays, the goal is that you'll walk away with a real framework for cutting through all the noise, as we said, all these different details. So you're going to want to sign up early for it. You can earn up to five CPE credits and five CP and two CE credits for free for this event on November [00:04:30] 10th.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Excellent. All right. Their next announcement was actually a reminder that Pro Partner Accountants is launching in early 2027. It's the new, updated and improved ProAdvisor program with expanded benefits, more education, and more community. Now, in order to get ready for it, you do need to transition over to Intuit Accountant Suite, and it's free. You just go up to the gear and move over to Accountant Suite. [00:05:00] And don't be afraid to do it. It really is just updating the interface, which makes it look more like your clients interface instead of the black bar down the left hand side. So this is the time to make that transition over. Now, one of the things that is really important is that your firm does have to have at least one actively certified team member in order to participate in all of the benefits. And one of the things that I just discovered is that if you don't have a certification [00:05:30] and one client and you're just at the basic member level, you actually don't get advanced QuickBooks anymore. They're going to be moving that down to ledger. So if you needed an incentive to make sure that you are certified, this is your insert incentive.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And I just wrote an article about it on firm of thefuture.com, where I go into what the transition really means for you in terms of your points and the [00:06:00] before and after. So definitely, definitely go check out that article at firm of thefuture.com. And also don't be afraid to get that certification test. If you're already an experienced Qbo user, then don't even bother taking all the all the trainings that are there. Just go sit for the test and you can test out and you get three tries to do it. It is open book. So what I like to do is I like to have the exam open in an incognito window. And then my qbo, my Intuit [00:06:30] accountant suite and my clients open in another browser window. And then I just go look up all the answers so that I know what they are. And so you don't have to worry about having to study for eight hours in order to take the test. If you're already experienced, just go ahead and sit down and take it. You're gonna do fine, I promise.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. The certification wasn't that difficult, especially if you've done it for, you know, in the past. So like you're saying, definitely jump towards it. I want to add one thing on there. Alicia. Yeah. The Intuit account. Sweet. So if I remember correctly, QBO [00:07:00] A QuickBooks online accountant is going away December 31st, right? It's switching over. So truly, right now is the time to make the change instead of being forced to at the beginning of the year when you're going to be busy with tax season and everything else. So you want to jump into it. Now while you've got a little bit of breathing room to get a little more comfortable with it, it won't take long to learn it, but you should do it right away.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And it's seamless and painless. It's not like you're gonna have to go spend hours of time. Yeah. All right. Ready for the next one? Okay. [00:07:30] Um, the next one. I'm really kind of excited about that. They have, they're in the process of completely renovating the entire payroll experience. They're renaming it to workforce. So whenever you see workforce, they are talking about payroll and time. One of the things that they're doing is they're moving minerals HR Resource Center, which used to just be in premium and elite. It is moving down to what was called core payroll, which is just now called payroll. But you're going to have different [00:08:00] levels of access to the materials. And so what everybody is now going to have access to or best practices on topics like hiring, setting policies and following HR laws, case studies, data sheets, and other information to help clients make informed decisions about what version of payroll or, um or HR topics are right for them. And proactive compliance notifications. When you move up in tiers to premium [00:08:30] and elite, then you get phone and online access to minerals certified HR advisors, especially at the elite level. And you can also customize employee handbooks, which are part of premium and elite, or you can just upgrade just to get the handbooks. And that's actually how I made my employee handbooks. And what's really cool is that you can send them out electronically for signature, and your employees can sign that they have read their handbooks.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I've helped a couple different clients doing, you know, basically do that. And [00:09:00] the only thing I was able to help them with the handbook is because of something like this, right? It, it really is important to have it for your company.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So I'm really happy that they're expanding the HR portal down to all levels of workforce. That's pretty cool.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now the next thing they were informing us about is it's already time to start nominating your favorite accountants for next year's insightful accounts. Top ProAdvisor award. So we've got a QR code that's on the screen. It's also in the handout that you'll want [00:09:30] to go visit. And you can start the nomination process to to get your favorite people on the list.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I really like that. They gave a shout out on the slide to Jeff Siegel as the top ProAdvisor for 2026. We had him on the show back in episode 108 back in September 2025, when we were talking about QuickBooks solutions providers, and he really had a lot of great insight about what it is to be a QuickBooks reseller. And so you can definitely go check out that episode. Next. [00:10:00] They announced two different webinar series for quote unquote, helping accountants streamline and scale. So there's one series specifically on Intuit Enterprise Suite with session dates on November 3rd, sixth, and ninth, focusing on finding the story in the numbers, manufacturing and inventory, because they are putting in all kinds of cool inventory tools, including units of measure and [00:10:30] construction as well. So being able to do whip right inside your QuickBooks. And then there's another series on the QB ecosystem with. On November 5th, 17th, and 18th, which is kind of about how payroll tax and time work together, how you can delegate your onboarding, and then getting ready for year end with W-2s and 1099.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I think that's going to be a great series for sure.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I want to do both of them. [00:11:00] And so there's links and QR codes in the handouts in the show notes.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Then they have better together presents AI for financial storytelling. Uh, this is going to be on November 5th at 11 a.m. Pacific time. And this is again, it's their, um, AI for financial storytelling. So they're going to go through helping to uncover the business story and kind of, excuse me, demonstrate a live end to end AI demonstration, [00:11:30] but they'll also give you a take home repeatable framework, uh, that you'll be able to use within your own practice pretty easily. So this is one you'll want to register. Again, it's going to be November 5th at 11 a.m. Pacific.

Alicia Katz Pollock: The speakers are going to be Alicia Eastvold and Nigel Carter Gray. So always a good time. And there's even a follow up session on December 3rd where you can come back in and ask more questions. And personally, I'm looking forward to this one because I [00:12:00] really think I'm guessing that what their focus is, is on Intuit Intelligence and how to actually use the new AI tools inside QBO to do your research and analysis. All right. That leads us to product innovations. So the first one is called Intuit Tax Advisory with a new tool called books two advice. And the speaker was Ramesh Raman, who is the project manager for the professional tax group, specifically around [00:12:30] Proconnect, Proconnect and lessert. And what Intuit Tax Advisor is, is the ability to import your books into your tax software plan for entity type changes. Look at live events happening in your clients lives, and then find strategies and deductions for the following year. And so they started with a poll, as they always do. And I love actually reporting on these polls. And so the question was, [00:13:00] when a QBO client has a big financial event, a sale, a big income year, or a new entity, what do you do? Select all that apply. And about 8% said nothing yet I wait for them to bring it up. 27% said, if relevant to the business, handle it in QuickBooks and flag for tax season. 31% said jump into a planning conversation right away. That was the majority of them. 15% said, refer them to a tax specialist. [00:13:30] I'm assuming that those are bookkeepers and not tax providers. And 18.5% said, I do their taxes.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I'm already on it. So the most popular ones were handle it in QuickBooks and flag for tax season and jump into planning right away, which is I think, what they were hoping to hear. Um, and so the, uh, in the, the, what they heard was that getting to tax year projections for the following [00:14:00] year meant going into the data in three different places. You pull a PNL from QuickBooks, you export it to a spreadsheet and kind of work the numbers, and then you enter that into your tax planning tool, which is a whole lot of manual process. You can get errors in between each stage and then each time, that's a lot of work that you're not actually spending giving the advice. So if you have schedule C and pass through clients, those are the best candidates for it. So people who [00:14:30] you are running their ten 40s and maybe not even doing the business taxes. And so it, um, the mapping has always been clean, but the workflow was what the quote unquote, killing the opportunity. So what they did was built this books to advice tool, which is part of Proconnect and Losert. And what it does is it looks in Qbo and it looks at your income, your expenses, and it forecasts [00:15:00] it to the year end and feeds it straight into tax, into a tax projection. So there's no exports, there's no spreadsheets, there's no manual entry. And then all of that maps straight to the return. So you can go into your meetings with projections already built and save yourself 45 minutes to 90 minutes of data entry every single time.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: So this is basically they're continuing to build out the relationship between their tax programs and QuickBooks online, [00:15:30] right? That we're getting little drips of the as this evolves month after month after month and becomes stronger and stronger.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right. So if you're not using Proconnect or you're not going to be able to use this tool, but they actually recommended you go ahead and make a free trial just to test it out and, and see it is available right now. And when you're in your proconnect or lesser tax, there's a menu for Intuit Tax Advisor, and then you create or start a plan, import the data and start planning. [00:16:00] He actually did a live demo or I think it was a recorded video of a demo. But what you basically see in the slides is that you can see the previous year's actuals, your current year's current data, and then there's a projected column so that you can extrapolate where they're at right now to where they're going to be at the end of the year. And then that moves as the baseline for next year's taxes. So it all just [00:16:30] kind of flows.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, I wish that I or maybe I should say, I hope that they expand this in the future. I don't. I don't offer tax services myself, but I would still like to be able to do some of this forecasting for our clients to give them somewhat of a heads up, or when they're asking questions, get them set up to be able to talk to their tax professionals still, but have I'd like to have the information to be able to talk to them about it as well.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And it might be worth taking a look at these [00:17:00] tools. And as per partners, you also get discounts on Proconnect at least as far as the filings go. And so if you don't provide taxes, it might be worth taking a look at Proconnect just to kind of expand your world and see what the tax implications are of the work that we're doing in QuickBooks throughout the year. One thing that he did say that I really like is figuring out what your quarterly estimated payments are going to be, which that would be huge.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's a key part that's really kind of a key thing [00:17:30] for me is we're still working with everybody on just that part of it. So, um, you know, I guess it's right now it's all about building the relationship with their tax professional, which is always a valuable thing to do, of course.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So yeah. All right. And you know, the people on these calls are a mix of of bookkeepers and tax preparers. And so, you know, it's, it's nice to be able to see the, the whole end to end process. So the next topic that [00:18:00] came up was document upload for payroll. And Venky was the, was the presenter. He's a senior project manager out of Mountain View. And he didn't quite run the poll so that we could see the, the answers. But he was trying to get at like, you know, what parts of running payroll are manual and what could use automation. And the options were entering hours, assigning classes, projects [00:18:30] and dimensions, Editing deductions and garnishments mapping ours to the correct pay types and other. And the second one was the most popular assigning classes, projects, and dimensions which this solution doesn't actually help with, but it helps with moving. Moving the data. Yeah.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You think they can automate the ability to have employees remember to clock in and clock out correctly, and to choose the appropriate job on projects.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I don't know about choosing the appropriate job on projects, but you can set default [00:19:00] hours for your employees so that if they space out and don't actually clock their hours, they still have at least their basic hours in. Okay. So, um, what they heard with payroll was that if you were using third party time tracking software, getting your hours into qbo was manual and error prone. You basically had to put it in spreadsheets and upload it in. And, you know, I always use SaaS. And for that, it wasn't even part of QuickBooks [00:19:30] Live. Um, and, um, it's always kind of a struggle. So what they're doing is allowing you to upload spreadsheets, either Excel or CSV files from your third party software to import that data into payroll. And it works with ours and as, as well as dollar based pay types. So it includes reimbursements, commissions, and tips. And then it allows you to review the data before adding it to [00:20:00] the payroll grid. So this is available to customers who are using payroll premium and elite. It's not part of the core workforce payroll. You have to be on one of the versions. That includes the time management, and it is already live in the US. And so basically you go to payroll overview and run payroll. And then there's an option there for add from file. And so when you click add from file it asks you to upload your spreadsheet. [00:20:30]

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now, if I remember correctly, one of the key things about what really makes this fancy is it's not making you go through and map the different columns of information they've been building in, you know, their artificial intelligence, their system in the background to extract and pull stuff in, which is why you still get to review it in case it doesn't grab something correctly. Um, but the goal of that is to open it up to so many different broad options. There's so many different softwares out there for time tracking that could then be used to import [00:21:00] from.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Exactly. Yeah. So the way it basically works is you up the Intuit Intelligence panel on the right hand side, that's where you upload your spreadsheet. And then it goes through all of its processes and it asks you some questions, and then you can see what the data is going to look like. And then it gives you the option of either replacing any data that you already had in Qbo payroll, or [00:21:30] appending this data and adding this new data to the the information that is already in payroll. So you're actually looking at the payroll grid with all of the hours and all of the columns, and then into an intelligence goes ahead and adds it so that you can see what it looks like and then you can approve it.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That makes sense. So one thing I don't think anybody asked or talked about, is there a limit to the number of employees you can import or time activities. Right.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So I can't imagine there would be. Yeah. Because [00:22:00] if you're already have those employees working in your payroll, then it's just a spreadsheet doing the mapping.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Yeah. So if you have to add new employees, I assume you have to obviously new employees all add it in and all that kind of stuff first and so forth.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Which you would be doing in both the QuickBooks side for payroll and also in your time tracking software. Now, right now, as I mentioned, it's just Excel and CSV files, but they are working on being able to import PDF and images as well. Jpegs. So that's something to look [00:22:30] forward to.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And I believe you mentioned classes, projects, dimensions not available yet, but plan to be coming soon.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So that's when it's going to truly get useful because having to break payroll up into classes and projects is huge. And so once they get that nailed in, then it's going to mean that you can use literally any time tracking software you want and still keep it in, in the project center, inside QBO.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Nice.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. All right. Their [00:23:00] third topic was updates to Intuit Accountant Suite. And the presenter was Karan Shah who is a staff project manager out of Mountain View. And he started with a poll on have you tried Intuit Accountant Suite. And I have been having fun with over month statistics on this that in the beginning of the year when we started, I had not heard of. It was the majority. And now I had not heard of. It was down to 3%. [00:23:30] So that's a big.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Jump from last month, right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: So yes, so month by month by month, that number is plummeting. And the haven't tried it yet though was still hovering at 47%, which still surprised me. But it's a lot lower than it was when it was 80%, 70%, 60%. So that means that about half the people on the call still haven't made the leap. Just go up to that gear and click the button already. You do have [00:24:00] to be a primary user or a company admin in order to to make the change. But note that it does change your whole firm at once.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: It's worth noting that out of everybody that was on here, only it was less than 5% said they tried it and went back to QBO A, which means the majority of people that are actually, you know, using it, um, they don't go back. They don't have a need to. So.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm. Now, if it wasn't a good experience, that number would be much, much, much higher. And I am [00:24:30] wondering what the went back to using QBO A was. And I actually have a theory which is directly addressed in the announcement. So um, the, the, so let's see, do I, do I give the, the theory or do I.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Give the theory.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Give the theory. Okay. All right. So here's my theory. So when you were in your QBO A and you were looking at your client list, the columns allowed you to see when your [00:25:00] next payroll run was and the banking feed status. If the banking feed had been kept up to date. And when you move over to Intuit Accountant Suite, those features were moved to the accelerate the paid program, which is free right now. It's in beta and so you can try it out. But that one thing was not in core. Literally everything else that we were used to is in Intuit Accountant Suite [00:25:30] and a whole lot more. But that, I think, was the one deal breaker for some people.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I also think, not to mention in QBO A your client list and be able to click on the link to get to your different company files was smack dab in your face all the time, right? You had to choose to go over towards like company books or other information where here you have to go. You still have your drop down, easy to get to different clients, but to see your full client list, you'd actually go to the side, click into client list, have it pulled up to to then go through everything. [00:26:00]

Alicia Katz Pollock: So you really think that the default landing page being the dashboard and having to make one click over to clients was a deal breaker for people?

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I don't think it's a deal breaker, but I think it makes him uncomfortable and not, you know, not because now it's new sidebars of different things that it took me a quick, hot second to learn where the things were. It wasn't difficult, but when you just want what's comfortable and normal, you're. You're going to prefer one or the other? Yeah. Um, it still drives me [00:26:30] nuts. It's a silly little thing, but I would always, if I was in a client file, I would go click the Intuit QuickBooks at the top left corner and just go back to that list real fast. Instead of having to go click the drop down, go back to, you know, practice and then go find it. And it just, every time I click it now, it says, uh, oh, there's a problem because it's not supposed to do that anymore. It's just habit, I guess.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. All right. So the announcements for what they are working on is the is [00:27:00] console consolidation and making the changes to the client list. And so the, what we, what we heard was you need more visibility into your clients without opening each one. You need to see your clients, uh, see where your clients stand at a glance. And the other thing was that consolidating firms was hard to do, that your clients, the documents, your reports and your team members got left behind, and then you had to reset all of those things up. And then large [00:27:30] firms had to run many batches in order to get all of their clients over. So the what we did is in the client list, they added new columns for lead accountant, primary admin tax status, and the connection health to the client list so that you can actually see the client health is what they mean by, I believe the bank feeds. And so I was really, really, really happy to see that in [00:28:00] the demo. I almost didn't believe them that that was now available because that was, I think, what they were trying to use as the incentive to get people to move over, to accelerate. But just being able to see your bank feed status on the clients all in one dashboard is not enough to charge $159 for if that's the $149. If that's the only feature that you needed in accelerate. So I'm really happy that [00:28:30] they, um, listened on this one.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I didn't even, I guess I was sleeping on this part of it. The fact that they're taking that part away and putting it into the accelerate is a little disappointing to me.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, that's that's how it was when they made the transition. And literally that was the only thing that was not available. Everything else that we were used to was there except that one dashboard. And so it sounds like the button, that one back.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Good.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And [00:29:00] then they're going to be doing more on that screen and adding more columns for books, clothes status, payroll status, and then also adding some filtering and sorting, sorting. So those are some new things that will be coming. And then the other part was with the consolidations and moving the data over, they. You can now do it in batches of 500 clients at a time. Yeah. So for some people, that's everybody. And for some people, that's still [00:29:30] a couple, a couple passes, but that's a large number of clients. But even more importantly, if you had documents attached to the clients that those now move, if you had custom reports and management reports, those now move. And your team members who are the preparers, the reviewers and the approvers, all of that now moves over as well. And even if your clients are inactive, you can also move them. So they're really trying to make it much easier to consolidate. [00:30:00] Now, we didn't actually talk about why you would need to consolidate, but the reason why you would want to consolidate is because the Pro partner program points are based on the number of clients that you have and the level of QBO that that you have. And so if your firm has multiple consoles with different firm members, all having different sets of clients, that is reducing your ProAdvisor level. [00:30:30] But if you bring everybody together under one, one login, then everybody gets the benefits of the collective number of clients. And so with this consolidation, you can take all of the clients in all of different logins and put them all in one login.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Nice. I think that's where the client grouping that's going to be coming up in the future will be beneficial as well. Right. So you can, if you have different teams for like, well, I think their example was restaurants versus, um, you know, construction [00:31:00] or something like that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I mean, if you're managing more than 500 clients, being able to define which ones do I want to look at now will be really helpful. And so when they get to that point that you can group them, you'll be able to group them by, these are my sole proprietors and these are my S Corp's or these are my restaurants and these are my construction, or these are the ones in Washington, and these are the ones in Oregon, and these are the ones in California and different kinds of groups like that. Um, [00:31:30] it wasn't part of all of this, but that ability is actually already there for managing your team. So you can take all of your staff and make as many different groups of team members as you want, which is really cool. This is part of accelerate. This is in the paid tier, but it's really cool because then you can make a group of like, you know, if you have a group of three people who always work together for, um, for doing the work and reviewing and, and.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Maybe a clean up team versus a month end team versus a [00:32:00] whatever type of situation.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right? And so you can assign entire teams to a client, or you can assign a whole set of clients to a team. And so that's one of the things that accelerate brings to the table.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: It's also a good time to call back to playbooks, right? This you know what we're talking about. Some of that stuff, the playbooks could start to come into play where you're starting to create the standard operating procedures for different groups of client types and such.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So yeah, the, the, we're not going to go into playbooks in today's episode. We do talk [00:32:30] about them in one of the other episodes, but the playbooks are really, really cool for onboarding your clients because you can take a chart of accounts, a set of account and settings, your AI policies for the banking, feed your team members and assign them all to a client, all with one click. Yeah. So a little bit of setup time is going to save you hours and hours of onboarding and deployment.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Now, Alicia, I want to ask you kind of a question that I don't know if you'll have the answer on, but as I was kind of hearing you talk through [00:33:00] some of this stuff you mentioned about how now all the documents, all the customer reports, all that stuff will be coming over as they're doing this consolidation, right? Mhm. Does that mean that for people that have done this in the past, like especially the documents and attachments, they did not come over.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That was news to me, but that's what it sounded like.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Um, I'd love to hear, you know, if that has happened. Um, was there a fix that helped people on that? Because like, are we [00:33:30] talking about just documents shared with an accountant or are we talking we're not talking attachments, I would hope inside of a file, but I don't know.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. They didn't go into any detail on it. And so I don't have any information. Um, I'm actually one of those people that I'm actually looking at a consolidation is I have my own qbo in one account and my clients all in another account, along with all my test files. And I'm kind of itching to move my real clients under one so that I can manage my, my whole bookkeeping incubator [00:34:00] team all in my real books, and then save my, my, um, test files in a whole different, whole different one. So I haven't made the jump to do this consolidation yet. And you know, I'm kind of waiting. This is one of those where I'm not going to be an early adopter. I'm going to be a late adopter.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: I had to do this before, like I did a consolidation before this came out. And so I had to do it the hard way from my old firm over to my new firm, bringing things in. And it was a very manual process, [00:34:30] bringing things one company to file, you know, different invite this person, take this person away, all that stuff. And it was it was frustrating. So I wish I had this ability to, to, to have been able to do that before, you know?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And now they're really saying that it happens in a couple clicks. Yeah. So that's, that's really, really good development work. Very, very useful. Um, in the slide deck, there are three different links with a console consolidation, explainer, video walkthrough, video and a guide. [00:35:00] And so if you open up the handouts, it's got direct live links. So you can go to those pages on their website. All right. Um, another incentive, by the way, for actually attending the in the know live is that they do give you an opportunity at the very end in one of the polls that if you want to hear more about the Intuit tax advisory books to advice or the document upload or the changes to Intuit Accountant suite, they give you an opportunity [00:35:30] to pick one of those. And then somebody actually gives you a phone call to walk you through.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: It's also a great way that if you've been using it in a sense, and you maybe have some feedback that you want to have a chance to kind of share directly, you could also click it to have that conversation get started. And, uh, a good way to give some positive feedback or suggestions of things that would be beneficial to you if you saw it in the future.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm. So then it [00:36:00] is time for their what's around the corner and the closing. And as always, they talk about on the books, which is the Intuit podcast with Jessica McCracken. And I listen to it every week. So an upcoming episode is what's new for the Accounting Futures program. That's the where they're preparing pro partners with schools around the country so that real people in the industry can act as mentors to upcoming students.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Alicia, aren't you part of that?

Alicia Katz Pollock: I am part of that. Mhm.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: Very [00:36:30] cool.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And I got my first inquiry as well. All right. So that brings us to the end of now. You know, our recap of in the Know and spot what's going on in your world.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know I'm excited. I'm actually going out to reframe this year out in Florida. It's Hector Garcia and Carlos Garcia's conference. Um, that's going to be the first well, basically the first week of November, right? So heading out beforehand to go visit with a good friend, Linda. Then we'll drive across Florida to go to the conference [00:37:00] and drive back and then fly back. So that's going to be a fun time. We get to see everybody, which I haven't seen in a long time. How about you? What do you got going on.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well I will be at reframe as well. So I'm looking forward to that. Um, and what I have going on right now is actually well as always too much. But the first super cool thing is that that interactive QBO training portal that I've been talking about is live and taking people. [00:37:30] And so what that is, is taking the textbook that I have been writing for five years and keeping up to date with all the QuickBooks changes is no longer just available to instructors through school bookstores. You can now actually just go to the website and it's a consultants QUESTIVA consultants.com. And there that we've now turned the book into an interactive click by click training portal that [00:38:00] an independent learner can basically say, it'll say like, click the new transactions button. So you go to Craig's Landscaping, you click the button, and then you cross it off the list and you literally go through step by step by step how to do things. And then you export your results to Excel and upload it. And it tells you if you did it right.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's impressive.

Alicia Katz Pollock: It's really, really cool. And it has a really advanced trainer or teacher dashboard as well. So if you're teaching a class, whether it's at an academic institution or whether [00:38:30] you're just teaching a class at an Sbdc, you can make your own classes and manage your own students and see how they're doing, how far they've gotten, what they're getting right and wrong. And there's quizzes and fill in the blanks and exams. And I'm super, super excited about it. And so huge shout outs to Tom Slater and Doug Slater for stepping up and helping invent this brand new innovation.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: That's really neat. I mean, there have [00:39:00] been so many times I've had the opportunity to go teach courses quickly, you know, a couple times at a college on QuickBooks. And it's always coming up with the content and do these different things. And that wasn't even like a actual class, like multiple week thing. It was a one time pop in. So having, you know, these kind of resources would be phenomenal. So the end user could take it to learn it and a teacher could be using it to teach classes from is what I heard, right?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And if you're just doing like a short class, like a one [00:39:30] day seminar, it's only 39, I'm sorry, 34.95 per user for a month. And so for 35 bucks, you can have everybody in your class in the portal. And then you can just teach the class using the portal.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: And it would take me more money just to build it myself. Yeah. So that's yeah. Yeah, definitely. Congrats.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's awesome. Yeah. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Um, and then my other announcement is that, uh, starting in just a couple days, I'm doing the accounting life [00:40:00] cycle course with Mariette Martinez. You know, Roy Wise is known for its deep QuickBooks training, but in 2027, we are branching out into bookkeeper training. So it's not just what buttons to click, but it's actually like, why? What your job is supposed to be. And so it's a nine session class on Tuesdays and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 11, 9 to 11. So two hours each session. And we're going to be doing a, um, well, so I'll be doing the Tuesday sessions [00:40:30] and then Mariette will be doing the Saturday implement hands on implementation sessions. And so we're team teaching it together. So that's on November 10th. Um, you can go to Roy's dot com and go to the bookkeeper classes there. Or you can hit the link in the show notes.

Matthew "Spot" Fulton: You know, you brought it up on the last show and I actually talked to, um, a couple different people about sending some of their employees, their new employees. Otherwise I call them the boots on the ground people. Um, to that session. So, [00:41:00] um, thank you for the reminder. I need to follow back up with them and see.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh, thank you very much for sending them our way. Yeah. All right. So I think that covers it for this week. So thanks everybody for listening. If you want to get CPE for listening to today's episode, head over to earmark.me and please also support our sponsors. If you heard any of our sponsors addressing one of the pain points in your practice, use our promo link when you go check them out, because that lets them know [00:41:30] that you're listening and helps us keep this podcast going on. We're three years in and going strong, so thanks everybody for listening. This is Alicia Katz Pollack from Royal Wise.

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

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