Jaclyn Anku, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: On today's episode of In the Know, we'll be exploring the exciting launch of Intuit Accountant 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 Carla, who will give an overview of Intuit Accountant Suite. Carla, welcome!
Carla, director of Product Management: Thank you so much, Jaclyn. My name is Carla, and I'm delighted to be with you today. I am the director of Product Management for Accountant Strategy at Intuit, and I spend most of my time thinking about how to create amazing products for accountants. It is an absolute pleasure for me to introduce a brand new experience that is live now.
Before we jump into the product, I want to give you a little bit of context on what I do and what my team does. We have a very, very important mission that we're extremely excited about, and personally, just honored to be a part of, which is being the number one trusted partner for the accountant community. Our responsibility as product leaders is to deliver a platform for accountants that leverages the best of our AI-powered products and services so that we can be in service to your growth and help you succeed in your industry.
We do this by focusing on problems that help you beyond just bookkeeping into new business and new areas of work that you're trying to get into. We do this by streamlining complexities and reducing costs in operations. And of course, most importantly, we are always in pursuit of ways to deepen our partnership so that we can get much better delivering for you and achieving the success we want you to have.
So let's talk a little bit about what motivated us to launch this brand new product that I'm about to show you today: Intuit Accountant Suite.
There's a few things that we've heard from you over the years. One is that you're scattered throughout many different workflows in order to get your jobs done. The second is that you are spread in multiple QuickBooks Online Accountant realms, and you don't have one centralized place where you see all of your team and all your clients. You have a very complex tech stack and tool overload. There's so many different apps for so many different things. It becomes a full-time job just to manage the technology that you do your business in. And the last one is it's actually hard to get visibility into what's going on in the business and what's going on with clients. It requires a lot of those tools. It requires a lot of analysis and a lot of time, and that is difficult to accomplish for any size firm.
And so we are partnered with you to help navigate this evolving industry, to go from a place where there is workforce decline and bottlenecks of growth, to a system that scales and can help you move very productively through efficient use of technology.
We want you to go from a disconnected tech stack where you have a whole bunch of different apps that do different things and don't talk to each other, to a centralized hub where all of these things do connect, and the data can come together to provide you the insights you're looking for.
And we want you to stop struggling to keep pace with technology. We want to be that partner that leans in with you and helps you embrace AI and the tech advances that are going to make your job easier. That is a motivation for what we have as a brand new offering to show you, Intuit Accountant Suite.
Who is this for? It is for any accountant who is currently on QuickBooks Online Accountant.
The way to get into the Intuit Accountant Suite is two ways. You can log in as your primary admin in QuickBooks Online Accountant and see the invitation at the top of the page to opt in. Or you can go to your settings Subscription and Billing section, and you can opt in from there.
When you see these options, you will have a choice to make. You can be on the Core free offering, or you can be on the Accelerate product, which will have advanced functionality and currently at no cost to try it out. It will have a cost in the future. We will be communicating with an ample amount of time before that. Right now, you can try all of the new innovations that we have at no cost.
It is broadly available in the US and the International rollouts are coming as we speak. So very shortly, all of the international rollouts will have happened as well.
So let's go into the product so I can show you what we've been working on.
Okay, here I am in product. I have moved my account from QuickBooks Online Accountant to the Intuit Accountant Suite, and I can see my brand new, refreshed homepage that is much more closely connected to the look and feel of the new QuickBooks experience: apps based really trying to give you the most important information up front.
When you log into this, you will see our very first version of the Home Hub, which will have different kinds of data that will be fully customizable depending on what you want to see. So if you are an executive of the company and want high-level data about your business or your team, you can arrange these apps to show you the data you care about. If you are much more focused on your clients and you want to see things such as broken bank connections, anomalies, or things that really require your attention immediately, you can do that. There will also be modules that help you see things like the status of your ProAdvisor program, and the status of the certification and training from your team.
The vision here is that we are the place that you want to start your morning with, and can get the right amount of the right data you are looking for in order to kick off your work.
Intuit Accountant Suite allows you to do all of the great things that you could do before in QuickBooks Online Accountant … and then some.
If you are logging in for the first time, you will notice, whether you are in Core or Accelerate, that we now have a lot of the CRM features available that didn't exist in QuickBooks Online Accountant before now. So not only are you going to be able to do a much better version of the work that you were doing before; you are now going to come into this experience that has a lot more functionality and a lot more performance.
The goal that we have for the Intuit Accountant Suite is that it is a firm-based solution.
I'm going to jump in to show you a couple of the most exciting innovations that we have available on the Intuit Accountant Suite.
The first one is the client insights console. This is a view of your client's data centralized into one place so that you can get the answers to the questions you have, find areas of opportunity to help your clients, and in general, have a centralized view of what's important to you.
You can create a dashboard from scratch, or you can use predetermined templates that will help you get started.
I'm going to go into my dashboard here.
This is a view of my most important clients in the last quarter. I can also select custom fields, as well as geography, industry, and the type of work that I do for them. I can also dive into different values I want to filter by. I can also look at what products they have and sort that way in order of importance.
In the customization, you can not only select which clients you want to see, but also what order you want to see them in and what data you want to be showing up on the grid.
The most important thing about this, beyond just being able to see all of your clients in one place and seeing all the data in one place, is also to have a proactive view of what the data is telling you. So in addition to the data, you will also see things that are powered by AI or explanations on areas that you might want to pay attention to.
So for example, here, I'm going to look at this expense trend that's going up. I'm going to be able to access a root cause analysis, and, in general, be more aware of what the data is trying to tell me based on the views that I have selected here.
So the vision for this is that it will show you, again, whatever you want to see. If you are a tax accountant on ProConnect Tax, in the very near future, you will also be able to see all of your tax clients in this place as well.
We also will have payment clients and payroll clients, and in the very near future, third-party data as well.
Again, we are creating a data hub where you can centralize all of your views and not have to spend so much time taking data out of QuickBooks or looking at data one by one in each client file in order to see the important data that you’re looking to see.
That's client insights. I'm now going to jump into another exciting experience that we have, which is the ability to do books close at scale in Intuit Accountant Suite without having to leave the Suite.
Some of the tools for reviewing books are available in each client file, but for those of you that serve large portfolios of clients, it's not efficient to go file by file, and you really look for ways in which you can streamline the month end’s close process.
So we've brought some of that functionality into Intuit Accountant Suite, and we've added more to help you, again, streamline and put the close process on autopilot. So the first thing you'll see here is your dashboard with the assignees and the due dates, and you can drill down into any of your clients that you offer books services to, and really have the entire flow from within the suite.
So I can see here tasks, reconciliation, transaction review, and other areas. If there is missing data and I need to connect with a client, I can, from the context of the area where I need information, send a request, and the client can get back to me with the information they are missing.
All of this is again streamlined, templatized, and I can close the entire books process without having to leave the Suite.
Now this is one of the many experiences of these smart workflows that we are creating. In the near future, you will also be able to run something like this with ProConnect clients. So again, for the tax experts who have clients on ProConnect, you'll be able to prepare, e-file, and track the return in a very similar, easy-to-use process, all within the Accountant Suite without having to leave.
So as you can see, a lot of the benefit of the Accountant Suite comes from being this one central place where you can manage your clients, your team, and your firm. And if you are scattered on many different QuickBooks Online Accountants, the best thing to consider is going through this experience called transfer clients here in your settings, and you can aggregate and consolidate your team into one place. By doing that, you'll be able to have more value from these tools that we're creating to work within the Accountant Suite.
That's a very quick overview of what you can expect in the Intuit Accountant Suite. I hope you'll give it a try and let us know if you have any feedback or any other things that you'd like to see us build in the future.
Jaclyn Anku: Thank you so much for that demo, Carla.
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