Jaclyn Anku, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: On today's episode of In the Know, we'll be exploring updates to Bank Feeds in QuickBooks Online. As you likely know, the Bank Feed is one of the most actively used pages in QuickBooks Online, but managing the Bank Feed can be tedious and manual.
With the bold new AI-powered innovations, you can now work more efficiently and effectively through a suite of time-saving features.
Hey, ProAdvisors, it's Jaclyn, and you're watching In the Know, where you get exclusive access to demos of Intuit product enhancements by the leaders who build them.
Let's jump right in with Joe and Sushma for a look at the Bank Feeds. Joe, Sushma, welcome.
Joe Black: Thanks. Jaclyn, I really appreciate you having me on, and I'd love to talk to you all about the new Bank Feed experience that we just launched.
So, I'm Joe. I'm joined a little bit later by my colleague, Sushma. We're both on the QuickBooks accounting automation team, and as you probably know, we recently launched a new version of the Bank Feed, or the bank transactions page as you may know it. We've received feedback from many, many accountants over the years that the process of managing the Bank Feed is very manual, inflexible, and outdated, and it gets in the way of accountants being able to provide additional services for clients or to grow their client base.
At Intuit Connect last October, we announced a new Bank Feed on the main stage and demonstrated it in our booth. Since then, over the last nine months, we've been in beta testing with up to 70,000 accountants and small businesses.
Based on this beta program, we've now launched a new version of the Bank Feed that is intended to help you become more efficient through a number of ways, including:
- You have the ability to edit transactions in line and post without having to click to open an overlay. We still have an overlay you can click into for each transaction if you want to, but our goal is for you to be able to do everything you need to post a transaction without having to take that extra click to go into the overlay.
- You have more accurate and personalized category and matching suggestions. On the old Bank Feed, we also made categorization suggestions, but they weren't very accurate. The suggestions are now more accurate because they're based on a more personalized model that leverages your transaction history. We also provide explanations to be completely transparent on how each suggestion was made.
- It’s now easier and more efficient to track and manage payees. And last but not least, we've maintained feature parity with the old experience, so features such as split, exclude, rules and transaction history are still easily accessible.
So, some quick Fast Facts before we get into the experience:
- The new Bank Feed is available for customers from QuickBooks Ledger all the way up through the Intuit Enterprise Suite.
- If you don't already have the new Bank Feed, you can enable it by clicking the try new banking Page button on the Bank Feed.
- It is live in the US, and it is in the process of rolling out outside the US.
So now I'm going to show you a few key parts of this experience. So before actually getting into the Bank Feed page, as you know, in order to make the Bank Feed usable, you actually have to have transactions on it. We've recently made it easier for you to import transactions if you don't already have a bank connection. This upload feature already existed, but what's new is you can now upload a PDF or an image copy of your bank statement directly to QuickBooks Online, and we will extract those transactions and present them back to you in an easy-to-use, side-by-side format, with the statement on the left and the extracted transactions on the right, so you can go through, verify them and import them without having to convert to a CSV first. Now, there are currently some limitations here. For example, we don't support non-English statements or multi-account statements at this point, yet, but I encourage you to at least give this a try and see how it works for your clients.
Okay, this is the new version of the Bank Feed, and on the following slides, I'll give you a quick tour of some of the key features. You can now hover over the bank description to see the full bank description details for each transaction. This saves you clicks, as well as allows you to not need to include the full bank description column in the default view of the table, although you certainly can continue to do so if you prefer. Another feature that was a delight for our beta customers is the ability to add vendors or payees directly in line without having to leave the Bank Feed. My colleague Sushma will show you this experience in more detail in a few moments, and you can continue to customize your bank table by adding or removing columns.
The main change here is that once those columns are added to the table, those fields can be edited in line for each transaction without having to click into the overlay. This applies to columns such as class and location, and projects as well. One feedback that we've heard since the launch is that some accountants weren't able to find some of the features that they used on the old Bank Feed.
Now, rest assured, we have not removed these features, and they can continue to be accessed. The way to access them is to click on the down arrow just to the right of the Action column, and then you'll be able to see those features you were looking for. We've also made a change to categorization history based on your feedback, increasing the look back from 12 months to 24 months. On the table you will notice a match and categorize toggle. If a match is detected for the transaction, the toggle will default to match. Otherwise, it will default to categorize. You can always toggle between the two if you think this default is incorrect.
Once you're ready to post or match the transaction, you can click on the post or match link. Now this one isn't a new feature, but we've seen that not everyone is aware of this, so I wanted to mention it here. You can continue to group transactions by any of the columns, and then take bulk actions such as post edit, and exclude or request more information. We found that this is a big timesaver for people who use it.
I will now hand it over to my colleague Sushma to do a deeper dive into how we're leveraging AI to make suggestions and explanations.
Sushma Rathnam: Thanks, Joe. I'm Sushma, and as Joe mentioned, I work alongside him in the accounting team within QuickBooks. I've been at Intuit for about 8+ years, and of the last five, I've been working in this group. And a fun fact is that for the last two years, I have actually been doing the bookkeeping for my husband's startup. So, I'd like to say I'm drinking my own champagne here every day as we're building this product.
I'm excited now to take you into how AI can assist you with your everyday task of bookkeeping. We heard that you had no clue whatsoever why a particular category suggestion was made on a transaction. From there, we've tried to use a new AI model that follows your mental process, and provide suggestions based on your client's historical choices for similar transactions. When those historical transactions are not available, we provide supporting information around the bank transaction that's come in to give you information to make the right choice or accept our suggestion. The explanation helps you do this. We have heard from our beta customers that it is very useful for them to either agree with the suggestion that QuickBooks is offering or disagree with it based on the information we provide. So, let's go dive into how we're working with Payee. I will play a short video here to bring this to life.
The new reconciled functionality is still in beta. A key feature here is the ability to upload your bank statement. On upload of the PDF, the agent proceeds to extract the information from it. Note this does take some time, but once done, the bank ending balance and ending data automatically populate. Starting the reconciliation kicks off a three-way match between the transactions in your PDF, Bank Feeds, and QuickBooks Online transactions. We clearly identify the transactions that need review, and give you a summary of the discrepancies found. All transactions that are paired are marked in green.
A delightful feature here shows you a single bank deposit recorded against a QuickBooks Online payment and an expense for bank fees. You can easily filter down to the transactions that need your review. This first one lets you know that you have an extra transaction posted in QuickBooks Online that you need to take care of, and you can edit the transaction right here. Here we detected a transaction that is still pending in the Bank Feed and has not yet been posted. Similarly, a transaction you might have excluded by mistake. A common occurrence is when transactions at the end of the period are not included in the bank statement. We indicate this and you can uncheck this transaction, which updates the discrepancy amount. With AI helping you find the needles in the haystack, you're still in control to correct the errors and complete your reconciliation. And hopefully, that video showed you how our payee suggestions are working.
We know payees are important, and this will hopefully save you time from having to look up obscure payees you don't know that your clients have interacted with.
Let's move on to categorization. In categorization, it's important, and like I mentioned earlier, we are looking at your transaction history. In this case, you will see a recurring payment from LinkedIn that you have marked as advertising cost. We call out that you've used this 17 out of 17 times. You've been very consistent with this categorization. It feels like a no-brainer to us to suggest advertising costs for you. And we also point out that there could be other categories you've used for the same transaction in the past, and with this, you're able to decide whether those past transactions were incorrectly coded or you have deliberately started to change the category going forward. Categorization history is not going away, and this is not a replacement for it, as Joe mentioned.
So, you can continue to access category history like you used to before. Here is an example where we didn't find an exact same vendor match in the history, but we look at similar vendors. And a category you used for Home Depot in the past is used for a new transaction that's come in for Fairfax Lumber, or a transaction that was categorized car and truck for a Marathon petrol gas station and used for Racetrack. You don't have to keep every single gas station you visit in your vendor list anymore, and we are able to provide the history and the relationship between similar vendors to predict your categories. When none of that works out from a historical perspective, we look at the transaction that's come through the bank, and we look at the vendor to determine what that vendor is about, as I talked about in the previous example. TBSP is a restaurant or bar, hence we recommend meals and entertainment as your category, and as always, you're in control to accept that or change it to meals with clients if you happen to know that this was a client meeting.
When we have multiple choices, we present that to you, as you saw in previous examples, and we give you an easy way to select that category from the explanation tray and it shows up in line. You can use the drop- down on the category in line to change it to anything else that you want, again, keeping you in the driver's seat at all times. Hopefully, these enhancements with categorization are going to make your process of posting a transaction with the right category a lot more efficient than it was before, and providing you with all of the supporting material you need to make a decision.
Let's move on to matching. You all know that we've provided matching with dollar amounts before. What we've done now with our enhanced AI matching is to be able to narrow down that match from multiple choices to the best choice based on the information we're able to pull out from the bank description. Here, you can see we have a customer called Best Association that has paid us. We are able to extract that and narrow it down from two choices to the right choice with an explanation.
When you have your clients working with customers that are overseas, you know, banks charge fees, and it can be quite cumbersome to find the right match, because the dollar amounts don't add up. They don't coincide. Here's a case where there is a payment from Switzerland, and the charges are very specifically mentioned in the bank description. We're able to extract that, extract the actual customer here, ABC Association, we call that out in our description, and we're able to let you pick the category for the fees right in line.
You can optionally select the payee and then match right from here without having to go through the cumbersome process of looking through a long list of transactions in the advanced match screen. Sometimes, your clients provide memo fields when they pay their client, and those invoice numbers are in the bank description. We're able to extract those invoice numbers and even provide you with a match suggestion that's a single payment associated with multiple invoices when we are able to pull out the reference information from the bank transaction.
Hopefully, these enhancements with Payee matching and categorization, again, are going to make you feel more confident when you're posting a transaction. However, we know that this is a big change. It's a big change to a page that you are constantly using and are in, day in and day out, and change is hard. We hear all of your feedback, and we continue to iterate to make the experience as well as our AI suggestions better.
In fact, we've already made a few suggestions based on your feedback. We're highlighting matches in green. We're in the process of rolling out the 300 transactions per page. We have moved all of the fields that are in line also in the overlay or tray to help you do the work where you're most comfortable doing within the screen.
We hope you'll continue to give us feedback and help us make this experience better, because we're listening to you all the time! Thank you.
Jaclyn Anku: Thank you both for that demo and thank you for watching.
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