At the seventh annual QuickBooks® Connect, Intuit® unveiled new innovations across the QuickBooks ecosystem to help accountants better serve their small business clients, grow their practices, and scale their impact. Introduced by Accountant Segment Leader Ted Callahan, these accountant-specific innovations include a new Revenue Share Program, Books Review and Transaction Collaboration, the launch of a new QuickBooks Online (QBO) Windows app, Payroll certification, ProAdvisor® support, and more.

New “Revenue Share” program

Allowing accountants to grow revenue through work they’re already doing, the new program will expand ProAdvisor Preferred Pricing through the launch of Revenue Share. Instead of adding a client through QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA) and paying for their QBO account, Callahan outlined how this new program will soon let accountants get out of managing billing, provide clients with a discount, and compensate accountants for bringing clients on to the QBO platform.

Through QBOA, whenever an accountant starts a new QBO or QBO Payroll subscription, they’ll choose revenue share as the billing option. Clients pay Intuit each month, while the accountant receives 30% of the billed price for the next 12 months.

This option means accountants spend less time managing client billing, giving them more time to serve as strategic advisors to clients. Of course, should an accountant prefer to continue receiving the ongoing discount by paying for a client’s QBO account directly, the ProAdvisor Preferred Pricing program will continue to support that.

Intuit is preparing to open the Revenue Share feature up to accounting professionals. Anyone interested in being an early adopter of this program can sign up at this link.

Books Review and Transaction Collaboration

Introduced last year, Month-End Review is the first-ever end-to-end workflow that’s built inside accounting software specifically to deliver the books each month, breaking the bookkeeping flow into three steps: transaction review, account reconciliation, and final review.

Month-End Review – Intuit’s fastest adopted accounting feature ever – is being adapted so that it can be applied to more processes and further help accountants deliver client books, even outside of the monthly window. Now called Books Review, new capabilities have been added to the workflow, including Bookkeeping Setup and Bookkeeping Wrap-up, with Transaction Collaboration coming soon.

• Bookkeeping setup: Until now, there was no industry standard for how to correctly set up books, even though this is a crucial first step in delivering accurate, high quality books. This new feature makes it easier to not only make adjustments to the opening balance, but also sort out issues such as disconnected bank accounts and redundant accounts on the chart of accounts, all in one place – preventing annoying rework.
• Bookkeeping wrap-up: Helping clients understand the behind-the-scenes work, Wrap-up allows accountants to prepare a set of tailored reports that provide insight into a client’s business and serves as a tangible work deliverable of accountants’ value. Accountants can edit, customize, and then send these tailored report packages to clients, all from within QBOA, positioning them to advise and guide clients in strategic decisions that will power business success.
• Transaction Collaboration: Coming soon, this feature addresses one of accountants’ biggest challenges each month: getting missing information from clients. Within the QBOA workflow, accountants will be able to request information. Clients will get a notification and also see transaction collaboration requests in the My Accountant tab, when they log in to their QBO account. They can open the request and provide the information for review, all without leaving QuickBooks.

QuickBooks Online Advanced App for Windows

Earlier this year, Intuit unlocked QBO Advanced for accountants for free. Now, going a step further, accountants will have access to the QBO Advanced app for Windows – all completely free for their practice.

The free app is available for download and designed to help all QBOA users manage their QBO clients, no matter what version of QBO they are using. To get the app, go to the QBO Advanced Books via QBOA, click on the gear icon, look for the link for the app to download it, and log in. Accountants will be able to access their full client list and even have multiple accounts open simultaneously, enabling bookkeepers to navigate quickly without having to constantly switch back and forth between clients. Additionally, because this is installed software – not a web browser – sessions can be longer, making it easier for accountants to get work done without getting interrupted to sign back in. 

Now available in a ProAdvisor’s portal is the new QuickBooks Online Payroll Certification. This payroll training will help accountants with live and on-demand product and compliance training, plus a certification prep course and the qualifying exam. Providing a huge growth opportunity for accountants, the training and certification allows accounting professionals to not only develop knowledge, but also confidence about Payroll.   

ProAdvisor Support

Finally, updates on ProAdvisor support were outlined, including bringing it back to the United States. Four focus areas for improving ProAdvisor support include:

1. Decreasing wait times
2. Connecting ProAdvisors to knowledgeable agents
3. Routing calls to the right agents
4. Hiring more U.S.-based agents

Already, 100% of ProAdvisor support for Elite and Platinum ProAdvisors are in the United States. All Gold ProAdvisors will experience U.S.-based support by December, and Silver members by early next year.

For more information on the innovations announced at QuickBooks Connect and to check out on-demand and timely webinars throughout the year, please visit the QuickBooks Connect website.