May 2025 QuickBooks Online Updates

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Alicia Katz Pollock: In this episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, it's time for now you know, our monthly recap of Intuit's In the Know webinar and firm of the future articles where Intuit lets us know what's happening in product development. In May, it was on May 15th, and In the Know is hosted by Jacqueline Anku, who was one of [00:00:30] the ProAdvisor leaders in charge of education and the In the Know. This month featured bulletin board announcements with some upcoming events, as well as recaps of some of the new product innovations. And what I really like about in the Know is that it's not just a talking head. You actually get to meet the developers. They invite on the team of people who are developing each of the modules and have them talk about the work. So let's go through and talk about what's new. [00:01:00] The first. Their bulletin board announcements are basically upcoming webinars, but I wanted to share those with you. Uh, on May 29th, there's a webinar called The Future of Accounting, AI and Automation in Action, where you get to discover how cutting edge AI is transforming the accounting landscape, how it's eliminating our jobs as manual data entry. Wait wait wait. I need to rephrase that. It's not eliminating our jobs. It's eliminating our tasks [00:01:30] of manual data entry so that we can import the data into QuickBooks online and enhance the accuracy and the advisory of it. So our jobs are transforming.

Alicia Katz Pollock: This webinar is on May 29th at 11 a.m. Pacific Time or 2 p.m. Eastern Time, and you can go to firm of the future to register for it. And it's called the Future of Accounting, AI and Automation in Action. Then on [00:02:00] June 5th, there is a. It looks to me almost like a vendor demo with an app called approval Max, where approval Max is an app that does multi-step approvals for AR and AP. And this particular webinar is all about how to use approval max with construction companies. So if you do need multiple people to approve your bills and your invoices and you're in the construction company. Although honestly, I'm not clear that [00:02:30] approval Max is only for construction because I've seen it before in other contexts. But there is a webinar about it on June 5th at 11 a.m. Pacific Time, and you can head to firm of the future to sign up for it. Keep an eye out for a webinar called Smarter Approvals for Construction Simplify QuickBooks Online Workflows with approval Max. Now, today is the 22nd and there are two more webinars. But they are happening today. So if you are listening to this first thing in [00:03:00] the morning, you can still jump in on them. Otherwise, snooze you lose. The first one is another partner or vendor integration presentation at 11 a.m., and it's with big time. And what they're focusing on is how to lower a KPI called days sales outstanding or DSO, and how you can integrate big times time tracking and billing with QuickBooks.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So again, firm of the future. Com to sign up for that one. And [00:03:30] then also today also at 11:00 there is also a CPE eligible webinar to learn how to use Intuit Enterprise Suite. And you know, we talk about that a lot on the program. And the more you can find out about it, the better. So two events happening at 11:00 today. I also want to remind people that it is recertification season. Margie and I just did an episode a couple weeks ago about the recertification process. And as a reminder, you have [00:04:00] until June 30th in order to get recertified so that you don't have to start over again and take the full, full certification tests again. So head back and listen to episode 89 for more information about the recertification process. Now let's get into the new developer announcements. In previous episodes, we've discussed how you can add online bill pay to your clients as you create their subscriptions. And what's nice about that is you get [00:04:30] the flexibility of choosing which level is correct for them, and splitting the billing so that they can pay for their own online bill pay, and it doesn't hit your pocket at all. Here are some new things that are happening in the app. First is that they're now doing same day scheduling and faster speeds.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And what that basically means is that when you initiate a bill payment through online bill pay, you can now start same day payments and you don't have to schedule it for the future. And [00:05:00] for quote unquote selected customers, the time it's going to take to process that payment is going to get faster as well. I don't know if that means that elite people have it faster than the free people. I don't know if that means it's your credit rating and your history, but some you will hopefully start seeing some faster speeds on those payments being processed. One thing that I'm really happy to hear about is that the check payments can now be viewed in Qbo. [00:05:30] In other words, if you use the online bill pay and you send a paper check, you're going to be able to see that check, including an actual screen capture of it, including the signature. And you can view your voided checks as well. You're going to be able to see the front and the back of it, so that these mysterious checks are not just in a black hole being sent. You can see the checks themselves. One thing that they emphasized is that [00:06:00] you can request personalized limits, that when you first sign up for Qbo bill pay, you have, there's a limit for how much you can process in a month, and there's a limit for how much you can process in a day.

Alicia Katz Pollock: They have, first of all, removed the daily limits completely so you can now do your big check runs all in one shot, and not have to parse them out over several days. And if the limit that you had is insufficient, there's now [00:06:30] a button right in the interface where if you go to account settings and then to expenses, there's now a bill pay section in the accountant settings in the expenses tab, and there's a button in there that says request a new limit. And you click that button and you tell them what you want that new limit to be. And it will go through underwriting. They will respond. You will get an email saying that they've seen your request and then they'll get back to you in probably about two days [00:07:00] with your new approval, hopefully on that new limit, so that you can send even more, bigger bills. That way. They are working on the review process to make it even more streamlined, seamless and faster. But for now, that's what it is. It's two days. It's also nice because if you have an issue with your limits, like your last payment of the day goes over your limit, you'll get an alert that even has that button. So you can request the new limit on the fly. Now, [00:07:30] when you do sign your clients up for online bill pay, and especially if you're using the split billing, make sure your client knows to go check their email and look for the email from Intuit.

Alicia Katz Pollock: They need to respond to that email and they need to complete the application process on their side. One of the problems that I've seen people have is we go ahead and we create this, this new account for them or this new workflow for them. But then the customer doesn't see the [00:08:00] email or doesn't respond to it and it just goes stagnant. So make sure when you're signing your clients up for online bill pay that you tell them to go finish the signup process. Another announcement that they made is that international payments are coming soon. That's pretty exciting and helpful for a lot of people. Then they shifted gears and there were some news for Proconnect tax users. And specifically they have a new AI client briefing. This launched in May. You do have to be a [00:08:30] proconnect tax user in order to see it. But basically what it does is it's a tool that empowers you by pulling and summarizing over 60 different data points from past tax returns and using advanced generative AI technology to look at your current stats so that you can see the trends and see how your clients are doing. And it puts the analysis in language that you can use and makes it easy for you to communicate. [00:09:00]

Alicia Katz Pollock: And so you'll get. For example, I'm looking at a screenshot right now of the summary of the tax filings for 2023. And so it goes through and it lists the amount of net income, the total assets at the beginning of the year and the end of the year, the liabilities and capital at the beginning and the end of the year, the number of K-1s issued, the filing types. And it basically creates this whole summary so that you don't have to go through and pore through and glean it all yourself. And then once it's generated [00:09:30] that you can copy it to the clipboard and save it, share it, whatever you need to do with that information. So it's nice that that's a great use of AI to save us the time of having to scour through documents in order to create summaries. So thank you for that. The next announcement that they made was for Intuit Enterprise Suite, and they have enhanced their consolidated reporting tools. The there's a multi entity dashboard now. [00:10:00] And it's right in the left navigation bar. You just look at look for multi entity. And what it does is it brings up that dashboard with all of the graphs in it that we're used to seeing in our regular versions of QuickBooks online. But what the call to fame for this one is that it starts with all of the companies and all of the graphs that you see, and all of the charts that you see are across all of the entities that you have connected to into an enterprise suite. [00:10:30]

Alicia Katz Pollock: And then you can use the drop down and pick just one of the entities, or check off 3 or 4 of the entities and see consolidated stats and charts for all of them. So it's the same bar charts and donut charts that we're used to seeing. They're there for the profit and loss and income and expenses. Even AR and AP and each of the little graphs has its own date range selector, so you can specify what date range you want to see on [00:11:00] each one. Then there's also a section for consolidated reports. Right now there's only for profit and loss balance sheet, cash flow statement and trial balance. But they are planning to add AP and are aging summaries. Vendor transaction detail, drill downs and also new widgets. And the ability to create custom KPIs is on the roadmap. So all of that is coming. Now I love this because when [00:11:30] you have, for instance, a holding company with several subsidiary companies underneath, you used to have to go to a third party app to generate all of these charts and all of these reports. And we're still in the infancy of Intuit Enterprise Suite, but this is a serious step forward in being able to manage multiple companies all under one umbrella.

Alicia Katz Pollock: One last change is that when you run the consolidated reports, like the PNL, for example, it actually now defaults to a summary of [00:12:00] the entire enterprise. And then if you want, you can break it out into columns for each of the entities, or pick and choose which entities you want before the default was that it would show you the report with columns for all of the entities, and then you would have to collapse it. Now it starts collapsed and you can expand it. They've also announced a new tool inside your QuickBooks online for accountants. If you look in the upper right hand corner, there is a megaphone. [00:12:30] And that megaphone is now all the latest product updates and resources for accountants and in Qbo. And so look at it. You have it right now and it takes you to a what's new screen where it talks about the firm of the future, what's in the know and a lot of the different product announcements. And that is a great thing that you should work into your routine every week to go look at that megaphone and keep tabs on what is new. [00:13:00] So thank you for that big insight. I mean, I love doing these episodes, but you shouldn't need me in order to get your what's new news. The last segment in maize in the know was a new feature called ProAdvisor Spotlight, where they're going to start shining the light on different proadvisors who are out there in the world and what we are doing featuring the QuickBooks ecosystem.

Alicia Katz Pollock: The first spotlight features Proadvisors, Dan Luthy and Brittany Brown, and they are working with Utah Valley University's Small Business [00:13:30] Accounting course that they wanted to make sure that people who come out of these accounting courses actually have the tangible skills that they need to succeed in the workplace, because, as we know, in traditional accounting education, you don't actually learn any software and everything is really high level. And so Dan and Brittany took this as an opportunity to help solve the crisis by creating a new course at UVU with Professor David Waite, where it [00:14:00] actually gave the students real hands on technical skills. And so what they're doing is they're working with the Intuit education portal, which has a lot of free resources that you can use in your classrooms. And paired that with ProAdvisor Academy's training for certification so that the students can get the best of both worlds, they can actually learn the QuickBooks ecosystem and the skills that they need to do real cast, practice bookkeeping out in the world and earn [00:14:30] their certification tests as they go. So congratulations to Dan and Brittany for taking this approach and working with colleges in order to help the students succeed. So thanks guys. All right. So that was all the announcements in the in the know.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Now what I want to do is I want to turn over to firm of the future. And they always have articles about new features and developments that I want to make sure [00:15:00] that you knew. And there's a lot of things in here that we have already been talking about. But here's a couple last things that were not in the in the know. The first one is that QuickBooks ledger now has the ability to bill annually. So instead of paying ten bucks a month, you can now pay $120 a year and just get it over with. Another announcement was made that Intuit Connect Registration is opening. Mark your calendars for May [00:15:30] 28th, and make sure you have it on your calendar with a time early in the morning, because once they open registration, there's only a limited number of tickets available. And last year it sold out in like one day. So make sure that you get registered for Intuit Connect. It's going to be October 27th to 29th. Um, returning to the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, and they do now also have group enrollments as well. [00:16:00] And so you can actually save a few hundred dollars per ticket if you are enrolling several people, but I believe they all have to be from the same firm. Another announcement that they made, we've talked about recurring invoices. When Dan and I did that episode about the brand new invoices and all of the features.

Alicia Katz Pollock: One of the new features that they've made is Recurring Payments, where you can now set up the ability for your client to put in their payment information to auto pay invoices as [00:16:30] they come out. It's kind of a replacement for the sales receipts, but the difference is that if you're making a recurring sales receipt to get your billing, you had to have the customer's payment information in your hands so that you could enter it. And that's where PCI compliance gets risky because QuickBooks payments is PCI compliant. But how did you get the information? Did they tell it to you on the phone? Did they fill out a form? Do you have it stored somewhere? So in order to avoid any kind of risk, that's where moving [00:17:00] over to recurring payments and invoices comes into play. So what they've done here, the recurring payments have been available for a while, but what's different now is that they're making it a little easier to get started, where if you have a recurring invoice that already exists, you can now send that recurring invoice to them as a payment request. And once they get it in their email and they put in their payment information and approve it, [00:17:30] then the invoices will convert to recurring payments instead of recurring invoices. Now, in the meantime, if the client hasn't accepted it, your recurring invoices will continue to run. But you can now start turning those recurring invoices into recurring payments so that you don't have any.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Are just the invoice runs, the payment is made. You're completely good to go. So that is a welcome workflow enhancement. Another [00:18:00] change that they're making is third party app management. Up until now, generally if you had to manage a third party app, it had to be managed by the person who made the connection. So for example, if you were a bookkeeper but your client had done the connection, you might have had to log in as your client in order to do the management work that you've needed to do. And I have that experience myself. I actually have some of my clients logins for their apps in my one password, [00:18:30] because I need to get in there to, to do mappings or to do troubleshooting or to do new connections, whatever. And so now they have made it so that all admin users of QuickBooks online account can now manage all of the third party app integrations, not just the user who originally set it up. And thank you, thank you, thank you. Hallelujah! Because that means I can go in and manage my clients. A to integrations [00:19:00] or their payroll integrations without having to, uh, to log in as them. So that is fantastic news. All right. So that is our recap of what Intuit wants you to know from their in the know and from of the futures in our segment called Now you Know.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And so let's go ahead and wrap it up. Now just this past week I retaught my QuickBooks checking [00:19:30] class, which is looking at QuickBooks checking and also at Cashflow Tools so that you can see how to manage your cash flow in Qbo. Now, QuickBooks checking is the built in, baked in QuickBooks checking account inside QuickBooks online, and you might have had clients sign up for it accidentally. Or maybe it was Intentional, but it definitely has some things that you need to know as the accountant user and as the bookkeeper for people using QuickBooks checking. So I go into all [00:20:00] the best practices, all of the gotchas, because there are some things that you have to watch out for, but also all of the benefits and the cool things that it does, like have envelopes that get 3% interest so that you can use your QuickBooks like a profit first engine. So the class has been recorded, we'll have the link in the show notes, and you can go in and watch those recordings anytime. I also highlight the cashflow management tools and the cash flow graphs and show how those [00:20:30] work as well. So join us over at the Royal Wise Owls. So thank you for listening to this month's now you know, this is Alicia Pollock at Royal Wise Comm, and I will see you in the next one.