Jaclyn Anku, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: On today's episode of In the Know, we'll explore the latest updates to Intuit Enterprise Suite.
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 built them.
Let's jump right in with Daniel for a look at what's new with Intuit Enterprise Suite. Daniel, welcome.
Daniel: Thanks so much, Jaclyn. I’m really excited to be here, and even more excited to share all the great innovation we brought to market for the Intuit Enterprise Suite in our last release.
Let's jump into the Fast Facts. Before the demo, let's cover what we're going to be talking about:
- This is really meant for accountants who have clients with multiple entities. They have intercompany transactions; you prepare consolidated financial statements and ultimately need more granular reporting across those entities.
- Specifically, we're going to cover a centralized Chart of Accounts and Dimensions, intercompany sales automation, and enhanced multi-entity reporting.
- Everything we're covering now went live with our summer release back in July, and is only available in the US for now. Maybe one day, eventually, we will expand beyond the US. That is the plan.
All right. So the first thing we're going to cover is the shared Chart of Accounts and Dimensions.
When you log in and navigate to the regular Chart of Accounts page on any of the entities in the group, you will notice that it's a bit different in that you can no longer actually create accounts through that interface. Right? You can view, but you can't actually create or make any changes here. And you will also notice that this pop-up appears and then kind of gives you a bit of detail. So now that you've combined everything, you'll make edits and add new accounts through the shared Chart of Accounts. So there's a direct link there, and if you go to just above the regular Chart of Accounts, you will see a shared Chart of Accounts. So let's head over there.
Once you're here, you will notice a bit of a different interface than you're used to. Specifically, you now have a new column called companies using these accounts, right? So here you see my debit preference has one here. And let me show you an example of one that I know has a few assigned to it—a few companies—but I look for professional services. And so here I see parental services. I've got six companies that are using this account. If I click on here, I can edit it, and here I can see exactly which companies I have this account assigned to. I can also expand this and add it to my other two companies if I wanted to. Then I click Save, and then this account would be available in those two companies as well to be added. As you can see, I’m going to cancel that for now.
And so that's how you would do editing. And if you want to add a new account, you can do so. And off the bat, select which companies or entities you want this account to be available in.
One caveat I will call out here is that only the primary admin of the parent entity will have access to the shared Chart of Accounts in the current construct. In the next release, we will be expanding that to allow different users and custom permissions. So you'll be able to customize exactly who you want to have access to the shared Chart of Accounts. But from a compliance perspective, right now, we're limiting it to the primary admin of the parent company, but that will change in the next release.
All right, so that's the shared Chart of Accounts. Oh, sorry. One more caveat is that in order to actually use the shared Chart of Accounts, you first have to go through our onboarding process, where we have an agentic experience that will help you map your Chart of Accounts across all the different entities to one standard Chart of Accounts. Once you've done that, then you will be given access to control them from a shared list like you see here.
And to see where you access that agent, you see it on the business feed. It will show up as one of the tiles here. So, for a Chart of Accounts standardization, this is the cleanup tool. And if you're going to the shared Chart of Accounts page for the first time, it will also prompt you to run the cleanup agent first, and then you'll be able to manage your shared Chart of Accounts that way.
Next we're going to go over to Dimensions.
And so here you see a new element here underneath the title of the Dimension. So here we see customer type, and below you now see the company name that this Dimension belongs to or is available in. And so you keep going. And then we see, when there's more than one company, it will actually give you the number of companies that the Dimension is available in. So for example, in customer type, we look at edit share settings, and we see it's only available for Keystone Construction. And then if we wanted to expand that, we can actually select all other entities, or even just select all, and then it will all be cascaded down to those other companies.
We also have a warning up here that tells you, hey, we've actually noticed that you've got a Dimension with the exact same name as multiple companies, but they're not one Dimension. There's two Dimensions with the same name essentially at different companies. So here we see utilities. This one's available in two companies. This one's available only in Keystone Vault. And so the recommendation here is to combine them so that you have central control, and when you do your reporting, it will be aligned that way. Now we don't yet have a tool to auto-merge them, so it would be a bit of a manual effort. But we are working on a tool that will allow you to merge those so that it would be a seamless process to transfer all the historic data to the new Dimension. So that is coming.
Okay. And then, similarly, create a new Dimension, give it a name, and then you can select which entities you want them to show up in. Default is to all. If you only want it in some of the entities, you're able to do that as needed.
In terms of access to this, really, any user who has access, and even a standard all access, will be able to go in and create Dimensions for now, because we do know there's a lot of use cases where it's not necessarily the admin that you want doing this. In future releases, we are going to release granular permissions here, too, so you can control who has access to deploy new Dimensions, or reclassify, or rather edit, which companies various Dimensions are available in.
So that is coming in a future release.
All right. So that's the centralized or standardized lists. In this case, Chart of Accounts and Dimensions.
Now we're going to pivot to Intercompany Sales. This is something new we just launched, where you can actually go ahead and create an invoice to a related entity in this group, and they will now be available in the customer list. So you'll see in those entities that we actually pre-created those, or rather, automatically created those customers for you. And we've given them a special name where, after the name of the company, I see customer, which means intercompany customer.
So in this case, let's say I want to invoice Keystone Terra. You'll see that it now has an IC customer tag next to it, so I can select that. And then I fill this out. I'll give it a quantity of three. And let's say I do want taxes on it, and I'm happy with this. So essentially here I'm invoicing one of my related entities, right? So I click Save and Close.
Now the invoice is created. And now the system will actually automatically create the bill on the other entity side, so you don't have to manually create that. And they will be linked. And so you can actually see them if you go to multi-entity intercompany transactions. We now have a new intercompany transaction type, so it's no longer just allocations, it's also linked transactions, right? So these are Intercompany Sales.
So here you see I just posted this one, so the invoice side is posted, but the bill side needs review. And to access that, I have to switch to Keystone Terra. And so I'm going to go ahead and do that. All right, once I'm in Keystone Terra, I can then go to expenses bills, and then under the For Review section and now have a new section called Intercompany Bills. Now, anybody who has access to the bills list here will have access to review this and approve them.
So in this case, here we go, we open this up.
Once it's open, we then categorize this bill. Let's say, in this case, I'm just going to throw it to share professional fees. And once I'm happy with this, I click accept and close. So now we've posted that bill, and then when we go back to Keystone Construction—the parent company that initiated that transaction—there are a couple more things we can do. Okay, once we land back, we go to multi-entity intercompany transactions. And now we see that this intercompany transaction has been posted on both sides in both books. And now we'd see a new link here called Create the Elimination. So we actually pre-populate a manual elimination form for this transaction, since we do know all the details from the invoice and the bill side. And so we just populate it, reverse everything that needs to be reversed, and then we can click Save. And now this elimination actually gets posted.
Okay. And when I land back on Keystone Construction, I can then navigate back to my Intercompany Transactions. And then here I can see that now both the invoice and the bill have been posted. I can see a couple of these different transactions that I've had intercompany sales in. And I'm going to go ahead and click Create the Elimination for us. And so we will actually pre-populate the Manual Elimination Form with all the necessary reversals for the elimination related to that intercompany sale. So you can see AR, you can see the taxes, AP, and then the actual P&L accounts as well, all getting reversed. I'm happy with this. I click save. Transaction is saved. And there it is.
We post the intercompany sale and we handle that elimination for you, and now you can actually view the transaction journal related to this.
I'll also mention that on the bill side, we actually do automatically attach a PDF of the original invoice, as well as any memo details you've entered in that invoice to get transferred over. And so all that is available on the bill side, too, with the elimination automatically created and posted for you. So that is the Intercompany Sale. Now anybody who can post invoices will be able to do that.
I should also mention another caveat here; if you've already created customers or vendors before this went live, you will likely now see a duplicate. You'll see your original customer vendor being the intercompany related entity, and now you'll see that we created for you with the IC vendor and IC customer tag next to it. And so what you would want to do at this point is actually merge them. And the way you would merge them is you'd rename the old record that you created yourself to be the exact same name as the new one. And when you do that, the system will prompt you to merge them, and then you'll be able to actually merge the one you created into the one that we created for you. And it only works that way. You won't be able to merge the one we created into the one you created. So you have to use the one we automatically created for you, and then you know, it will be available both on the vendor side and the customer side on the transaction forms whenever you do your intercompany sales.
Okay, so that's Intercompany Sales. Next, let's pivot to Reports.
If we actually go to our reports hub, we will now notice a new section called Consolidated Reports. This is everything from AP detail, AP aging, and same for AR with the standard financials that we've always had. We now have a Transaction Report, which we'll talk about in a minute, and then we have a new Consolidated Expense by Vendor Report. Now, when we just did our intercompany sale, that is a regular business transaction, right? It's not a loan to one of the entities. It's a business transaction, meaning it automatically hits AR and AP.
And so now we've also enabled the ability to open up your AR report. And now we can actually go to our filters and filter for transaction origin, and you can filter internal or external. If you do external, this will only show you the ones that are with external parties, so not with related entities. It filters those out or you switch it to internal, and then you'll see only the balances related to my related entities. That is a new filter option we've added, since now we do have those transactions, those related party transactions, hitting AR and AP.
Next is that we can actually save reports. So if we actually do create filters or displays, but different displays by or groupings. You won't have to recreate them every time. You can actually save that customization and then reopen the saved report and not have to recreate all that filtering and grouping from scratch. In this case, I'm not going to save but if I wanted to, I could.
All right, next we're going to jump into our consolidated P&L. And here's a couple things that are new that we're going to talk about:
Number one is you can now actually display by dimensions, as well as transaction dates. So in this case, let's say I want to display by revenue source. And now I'm going to be looking at my consolidated P&L displayed by revenue source as the column headers across all managers. This is on a consolidated basis. So I can see this is the total for advertising, social media, and so on. I can also filter my company. So let's say I only care about maybe these two or maybe these three, and it will filter accordingly and show me the P&L by dimension for those three entities on a consolidated basis.
Next we're going to look at displaying by transaction date. So I can actually look at this by month for my current fiscal year, year date. There it is. I have my monthly breakdown on my consolidated PL across these three entities. I could also expand it to all the entities. And there it is.
Now the last thing we're going to talk about is Drill Downs. So now we actually created the ability for you to click into any of the values and drill down to the underlying transactions, or rather, the underlying detailed Transaction Report. So in this case, let's say I want to look at this $2 million here in June. Let's see what makes up that $2 million. And there it is: your consolidated Transaction Report. And so you can see all the different transactions. And also you'll notice there's now a company column here, and so you can see the companies that contributed that amount.
Now we can't yet drill down into the transaction itself. That is coming in a future release. So right now, you can't really click into anything, but at the very least, you can see which transactions make up that number. And then if you did want to get more detail, you'd have to navigate into that entity and open up that invoice, or whatever it might be, to get the actual transaction open.
In a future release we will allow you to actually open the transaction directly from this report, even if it's not from the entity you're currently in.
For example, if you want to open this $400 from Keystone Terra, you'd be able to click this. It will open that transaction form in a new tab, while still allowing you to maintain your position inside Keystone Construction, which is the parent company.
All right, so that is the Drill Down.
And then the last thing that we're going to talk about is our Vendor List, because, as you know, we do also have a cleanup experience for vendors. We don't have a standardized Vendor List and control over that across all the entities just yet. That is coming, but we do have a tool that lets you actually map and rename, and ultimately get all the vendors aligned for a point in time. And then you'll be able to run a Consolidated Expense by Vendor report. Here you can see all different vendors. And then you can actually add in display by and throw in a company here. Then you'll be able to see what the expenses are to all different vendors across your different entities.
So for example, here I see that electrical supply company, $8,000 with Keystone Construction, $32,000 with Keystone Terra, and so on.
That wraps up our overview of some of the really exciting releases that came out this past summer. I find them extremely exciting. I hope that you guys find it valuable as well, and am looking forward to showing you the next one.
Jaclyn Anku: Thank you so much for that demo, Daniel, and for being on the show. And thank you for watching. If you find this update interesting or helpful, go ahead and like, comment, and subscribe. That's all we have for now.
For more product updates and demos, check out our In the Know Hub. We'll catch you next time.
