December 2024 QuickBooks Updates: Training, Tax Forms, and Task Management

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Hector Garcia: Welcome to the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast. I am joined by my good friend Alicia Cat Pollock, the original, the one and only Qbo Rockstar CEO and founder of Royal White Solutions.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And I have the privilege of collaborating with Hector Garcia, CPA, the founder of Right Tool for QuickBooks.

Alicia Katz Pollock: In this week's episode of the unofficial QuickBooks Accountants podcast, [00:00:30] I'm going to talk about the In the Know webinar from November 21st, 2024. In the know is when Intuit presents everything that's new and up and coming inside QuickBooks online. In this month's episode, they talked about three different topics the new ProAdvisor Academy, 1099 enhancements, and Projects and tasks lists in Qbo. Basically the Work center. Let's start with the ProAdvisor Academy. [00:01:00] Now this topic is near and dear to my heart because I used to be one of Intuit's National Training team. I was part of the road show going back to 2019 or so, where we would travel around the country and give QuickBooks trainings in a city near you. And so I've also been the voice of many of the webinars as well for ProAdvisor certification. So while I'm no longer part of the team, you know, life moves on. I'm not bitter. Although, [00:01:30] you know, hey, I'd love to still participate. So but the topic is near and dear to me, so I've been doing a lot of content about it. I wrote an article on Insightful Accountant about ProAdvisor Academy. I wrote a firm of the future article about the ProAdvisor Academy, and last week's unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast was also all about it in a deep dive.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So I'm just going to hit it on the surface here, reflecting what they talked about in In the Know. But you can go to our [00:02:00] episode, our previous episode to get all of the details where I really comb through it. So here's what they said in the in the know about the ProAdvisor Academy. They said that what they heard was that it was difficult to navigate and the content was unengaging hands off and dry. And it was also geared for solo practitioners. Now, just as an aside, I didn't write it. It wasn't my content that was unengaging and dry. Okay. But what [00:02:30] they did is they reimagined the content for the career spanning education that not only elevates your expertise, but also addresses the needs of firms. Now, ProAdvisor Academy is free to all ProAdvisor and you get there through your QuickBooks online for accountants login. And you go to the ProAdvisor tab and then you click on training. And all of this went live in October. So it's available now. Now it is US based training but it is available to [00:03:00] users in all different countries. The new ProAdvisor Academy can adds in a new bookkeeping certification that has 30 hours of self-paced trainings, and it was all developed with Helena Ratosh, who is a QuickBooks Online College professor. Now they added in the bookkeeping certification because as many of us know, learning how to use QuickBooks does not mean that you know anything about accounting.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So they felt it really important to give [00:03:30] new bookkeepers and people coming in from different learning tracks and different life walks. You know, people who are starting a second career or have been a stay at home mom or just need a change. This gives them an opportunity to learn the bookkeeping behind the scenes. They discussed that the regular level and the advanced certification levels were renamed to level one and level two, because calling level two advanced was confusing, [00:04:00] did they mean that it was advanced qbo training or that it was training on Qbo advanced? So they changed it to level one. Level two to get listed in the ProAdvisor comm directory. You need to pass the level one certification and reach gold level with your points. And those points can be earned either by getting additional certifications or by being added as an account user to your client's qbo subscriptions. So that's what they talked about in the first segment [00:04:30] of In the Know. The second segment of In the Know was about the new 1099 enhancements, and it was led by Tiffany Dolan, who's the project manager. So what they heard was that collecting and reviewing 1099 info was painful. So what they did is they developed new tools to prepare and file. And now Qbo will actually scan your books to determine who needs a 1099 and which payments to include, but you still have full editing control.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Any missing w-9s are flagged. You [00:05:00] can invite all the vendors at once to fill them in online, so you don't have to do it one at a time, at a time, and which I'm really excited about. Quickbooks online now participates in the combined federal and state filing program. Up until this year, it filed for federal. But you had to do the state separately. Now it will do state filing as well. These new 1099 tools are available in all of the different QuickBooks online SKUs. They call them SKUs. I [00:05:30] call them versions. But in all of the different versions of Qbo. At the moment in November and December, you can do your W-9 collection. That part's available now, but 1099 filing will not go live until January 1st, 2025. Where you find the tools are under the expenses center and then go to 1099 filings. What it's going to do now is it's going to scan your vendors for you, even if they weren't already flagged for 1099. [00:06:00] It will also notice large corporations and exclude them, for instance Home Depot. You can always override these suggestions to include somebody or to exclude somebody. As I mentioned, you can use it to create and send w-9 invites to all your contractors.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Now, when it's time to prepare your 1099, you have two options. One is to let QuickBooks do the prep for you, or you do the prep with QuickBooks help, which is what they also call the classic [00:06:30] experience. If you're doing the let Qbi prep for me option, it's actually $14.99 per form. However, if you are a subscriber to Qbo payroll or Qbo Contractors payments, it's totally free. It's also free for accountant users so that if you're using, you log into Qbo and you're using my books to do your own bookkeeping, it is free for you as well. And the reason why it's free for account users is so that you can try it out and get used to [00:07:00] it so that you can recommend it to your clients. I also mentioned that there's a second option I'll prep with QuickBooks help, and so if you're doing the DIY version, it's $5.99 per form. So different pricing structure, although of course still free with payroll and contractors payments. And for the accountant users, whichever version you choose, it will do the e-filing for both federal and state, and it will mail the copies to your recipients. So [00:07:30] next she did a demo and these are the steps that I saw. It starts by scanning your vendor and your contractors and looking at their payments. It filters out any transactions that were paid by your credit card.

Alicia Katz Pollock: It will sort out and exclude the corporations. It will map your accounts to the right boxes on the 1099 NEC and misc forms. Upon your approval, it will create and send the forms. You do have an opportunity [00:08:00] to review all of its recommendations, and you can even click on each transaction to see what's in it. And you can even exclude line items. For example, if you paid for materials or reimbursements, you don't want to include those on the 1099, so you could tell it to exclude them if you're stuck. There's an option to connect with an expert, and if you make any mistakes, corrections are free, so you can go back after the form has been filed and amend it. Now, I didn't talk at all about who gets [00:08:30] 1099, and that's a whole different topic. But in a nutshell, you send 1099 to vendors who provided services to you that are not major corporations or corporations at all. So sole proprietors and LLCs, where you pay them over $600, but not by a credit card. So that's all the filtering and sorting that the new tool is doing for you. There's also no limit to the number of vendors that you can send them to, and no limit to the w-9s. So [00:09:00] you can send W-9s to as many people as you want. You're only paying by the form that is filed.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Now, I do a 1099 class every single January, so keep an ear out for my course where I'm actually going to demo submitting your 1099 so that you can see how the tool works. And that will be@learn.com the first week in January. All right. Now the third section of the in the No webinar was about the new work center or what they called [00:09:30] the work tab. Inside your Kboa work is where you were able to go to look at projects and tasks and actually make to do lists right inside QuickBooks online. And I've actually been teaching how to use it for years in my Qbo for accountants class, but I didn't really see too many people using it. So I really think a lot of these enhancements are going to make a big difference for the functionality and adoption. So the project manager and [00:10:00] I'm sorry, I'm going to get your name wrong, but it's Caitlin Wilensky. And what they heard was that accountants need tools to track work without switching to outside apps, and that all the team members need help prioritizing no matter what their role is. And the QuickBooks online existing tools in the work center didn't provide the needed functionality. So what they did is they refreshed the work tab in Qbo to make it more functional. They added more options for sorting [00:10:30] and filtering to quickly find projects and tasks.

Alicia Katz Pollock: They added a spreadsheet layout to streamline task and project setup, and they introduced standalone tasks. One thing that I noticed during the demo is they got completely rid of that whole Kanban and calendaring views, so the whole new system is much more streamlined, and they got rid of a lot of the visual clutter. The new work tab is going live in January 2025 [00:11:00] for all countries. But if you have never used your work tab before, you never even looked at it or made a task or project. It's possible when you go there now that you already have it. When they roll it out in January to everybody, you're going to have a toggle where you can switch back and forth between the old experience and the new experience, because they don't want you hung up by having to learn something new. Just when you're getting busy for 1099, when you click on the work tab, you now have two [00:11:30] subareas the projects tab and the All Tasks tab. The projects list lists projects you know, something that you need to do that has multiple steps or multiple tasks inside it. And then you can click on any one of those projects to see the list of tasks that's inside it. These projects can be one time projects, or they can be recurring. You can give the recurring a start date and an end date, so maybe it only happens for a year.

Alicia Katz Pollock: There are even existing [00:12:00] templates so that you don't have to build all the task lists yourself. For instance, there's an onboarding task list or a monthly close task list. If you want to make changes to any of the projects, you can edit the entire series or just one instance of it. So as an example, if you're doing the bookkeeping for one client, that would be a project, and inside that project would be all the tasks specific to that client. And again you can make them one off or you can make that specific list [00:12:30] of tasks repeat. And you can even save it as a template and use it as a template for another client. In addition to the ready made projects and tasks, you can also now add standalone one off tasks. For instance, maybe you need to remember to make a phone call to the client when you're looking at the project list and the task list. You can sort them and filter them in a lot of different ways. She demonstrated a lot of different ways of filtering the project list by, you know, is it for you? Is it assigned to you [00:13:00] or to one of your team members? Is it for a certain date range? You can filter the projects list to just see the ones that you want to see.

Alicia Katz Pollock: When you click inside and look at the task list, you also have filters as their as well, and by default it's sorted by the due date, so your current priorities are up at the top. So why did they do this? The existing work tab hadn't been updated for a long time. It was a little cumbersome to use. It didn't have ad hoc tasks at all, [00:13:30] and the look and the feel needed to be updated to match the current experience. So I am very much looking forward to visiting the new experience when I get it in my file. And I'm also going to look forward to updating my Qbo course. So that's our recap of In the Know from November 2024 and I'm looking forward to checking out all of these new tools. As soon as they're released, we will do some deep dives in them and talk about what we like, what we [00:14:00] don't like. And of course, what our ideas are for improving them. Now for what's going on in my world. I am doing my QuickBooks online from Setup to Tax Time course in December. On December 17th, and I haven't taught this course for a whole year. It's my Qbo fundamentals class. I've also called it the Boot Camp in the past. It's a six hour class on December 17th, where I actually go through my book that I have on Amazon with the same name, QuickBooks online, from [00:14:30] setup to tax time.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And we go through literally every feature in Qbo from the basics. So it's good for beginning bookkeepers and it's good for your clients who are just getting their feet wet with QuickBooks online. And we'll talk about invoices and how to pay invoices and how to make deposits. And what's the difference between an invoice and a sales receipt. And, you know, all kinds of topics like that. So all of the basics. So I'm looking forward to putting that together. The big ask for that one is that over this last [00:15:00] year they've changed a lot of the appearance inside Qbo. And we've seen some big changes. But there's also been some little subtle ones as well. Just like the what the boxes look like on the screen. So I'm going to have to redo all of the screenshots in my 200 PowerPoint 200 slide PowerPoint. So there's some big changes. So if you're interested in seeing what's new, including the new invoices and new reports, and you are just getting your feet wet with using QuickBooks online, head over to learn [00:15:30] Royal Dotcom and look for the QuickBooks online from Setup to Tax Time course. And I'll also have the links in the show. Notes. This is Alicia Pollock missing Hector Garcia, and we will see you in the next one.