Arti Patel Martinez, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: On today's episode of In the Know, we'll be learning more about the Books Close feature.
Hey ProAdvisors, it's Arti, 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 Hailey, who will demonstrate how to use the Books Close feature in Intuit Accountant Suite.
Hailey, welcome.
Hailey Garcia: Hi all, I'm Hailey. I'm a product manager working on Books Close in Intuit Accountant Suite. I'm really excited to have you all here with me today.
What we've heard and what you have told us is that monthly close is difficult, whether it's switching from your firm's context, your client's context, to third-party apps, or managing your team and tracking close progress. We listened, and Books Close allows you to track and work on month and close all within the Intuit Accountant Suite, so you don't have to move context.
We are going to focus today on some of the improvements we've made around standardizing your firm, having customization across your clients with templates, and improvements we've made to your Books Close workflow, such as Client Collaboration.
So, with that in mind, who is this for? Books Close is available on the Intuit Accountant Suite, and it's available for either Core, which is free, or Accelerate. And Accelerate is in Beta through July.
In addition, Books Close is an add on, and it is also in Beta through July. So feel free to test it out on a few client files. And, while it's free again, Books Close is available in the US and internationally.
Today, I want to focus most of our time on a live demo, so you can see some of the improvements we've been making. I'm going to set the stage.
Let's imagine our firm is focused on retail clients. We have a ton of clients that are bakeries or candy stores. So, we'll go in and we're going to set up and configure Books Close to match our firm's processes. We'll create a custom template to show how we can standardize our firm's processes, and all of the improvements we've made to the file review process to close your books faster.
So with that in mind, let's get into it. Now that we're in the Intuit Accountant Suite, our first step is going to be going to the All Apps > Books Close. So, if you haven't tried out Books Close yet, you'll see a screen to sign up. And again, we are in Beta, so feel free to try it out.
The first step you'll want to do once enabling Books Close is go into your Books Close settings. This is where we can have more standardization across our firm. As you can see, we have a brand new Preferences tab. You told us that the closed statuses we provided were too limiting for your firm, and that you needed language and statuses that reflect your firm's processes. So for example, for my firm, Garcia and Perez partners, we have a status called “Ready for review,” which flags when a manager should go review the closed file. Now I can add a new status and save it. You can also delete, reorder and rename statuses as you need. So, let's just save those changes.
As you can also see on this page, a huge update from our last In the Know session in December. Previously, you could only assign one user to a close, and we know that doesn't work for firms that have a team working on these closes, you now can have three assignees for each close in your books.
Close Preferences is where you can customize these assignees even more at my firm. Like I said, we use the “Ready for review” slide status to flag to our managers that they should check our closes. So we can update this approver assignee to be our manager. And you can also enable or disable assignees as you need. Let's go ahead and save these changes now.
Let me show you how these customizations allow you to have more standardization. We'll go into the Books Close template. Here we can make a copy of the standard template. Let's say this is for all of my retail clients. This will be my retail clients’ template, but as you can see, we have a brand new “Assign to” column, which allows you to select which assignee you want assigned to that task.
So, at my firm, let's say the manager always will do the “Send financials” task. I can update this on the Books Close template, and this will apply to my future closes. Let's save this template as a default. Now, let's put our template to use. Your first step in Books Close is onboarding your clients to Books Close.
Let's select my client, Candace’s Candies, my retail client. The template will automatically be selected, and now I'll select the assignees that will be working on my close. Let's assign Maggie to prepare and assign the other roles, and we'll go ahead and Save and Start Close to begin the close process. As you can see, we've onboarded our client to Books Close. Here is where we can manage and track our entire close workflow.
Now, you see the status drop-down, and we have our new custom statuses here. You also have all of your assignees in these assignee drop downs, but let's say Maggie's actually going on vacation this month. Well, you'd think you'd have to update these one by one, but no, we added the ability for you to update this in one click. We can update our assignee to Calvin, and you'll have the option to reassign all of his tasks, or all of Maggie's tasks to Calvin. Go ahead and say yes, and you can see that you updated all of the tasks associated with that user.
Now that we've talked a little bit about how we're helping you manage your close process better, I want to talk to you about how we've made some improvements to help you close your books faster. To get us started, I'm going to say we've heard that you guys love the ability to customize the date range for your transaction checks, but we know it's really cumbersome to have to do that for every single check. We've added a filter for the entire transaction review section so you can filter transactions in any way you need. Let's just change the date to the past few months, or this entire year, and it will bring up all the transactions recently.
We are also working on adding a new expense categorization inconsistency check, which will help you detect miscategorizations early. We're releasing it in the next couple of weeks to help you identify likely miscategorized transactions.
We've also added the new pay entity review section, and you can use the 1099 vendor management to proactively track and stay on top of 1099s throughout the year. You can maintain clean pay entity records with New Vendor and New Customer Review.
One other huge improvement to help you close the books is Client Collaboration. As you're working through your month and close you might have questions for your client. We know previously that it took a lot of energy to send those questions to your client. That back and forth is a lot of time wasted. So, we added Client Collaboration directly in your workflow. You can go to the request more info column and click the plus to ask a question on a specific transaction, and you can use these defaults such as “Ask for more info.” I'll add these requests to a list as I work through the close and once I'm ready to send one organized email to my client, I'll go into the Request Portal. I'll click on this Request button, and I'll see all of the transactions I've been asking questions on. I can then send these questions to my client, and they will get a link to respond in the Client Portal. There, I will get all of the responses directly back in my Books Close workflow.
These are just a few of the improvements that we've been making. I hope that you check out the Beta and please leave us feedback, because a lot of these changes are directly because of the feedback you submitted. Thank you!
Arti Patel Martinez: Hailey, it is really incredible to see all of the amazing updates and the feedback go into play from December till now. Really, really exciting stuff. Just maybe a couple minutes for questions. There was a lot of great information shared, and you may have covered this, but can you just remind us of what are some of the exciting updates coming to Books Close soon?
Hailey Garcia: Yeah, so a few things that I'll share. One, we're adding multi-tab functionalities, so you can keep your Books Close workflow and the client's QuickBooks Online open in different tabs at the same time, so no need to be switching back and forth as much. We're also bringing more customizations to the template, like allowing you to set inclusions and exclusions by default, and we're adding more checks and expense categorization, inconsistency is one of them. But we're also working on custom checks for you to customize your transaction review even more.
Arti Patel Martinez: Wow, so exciting. Lots of good stuff. I'm sure we'll see you back here again soon. And then one more question, I think you did cover this, but just a reminder. How do they get access to Books Close and is Books Close only available in Accelerate?
Hailey Garcia: Yes, so you can get access to Books Close if you're on QuickBooks Online Accountant, but you will have to get into Intuit Accountant Suite.
To get on into Intuit Accountant Suite:
- Go into QuickBooks Online Accountant
- Click your Gear icon
- Upgrade to Intuit Accountant Suite
Once you're on Intuit Accountant Suite, you will have two options for Books Close to be added, Core and Accelerate. So it is not just limited to Accelerate. Then, just to be clear, Core is a free tier and Accelerate is paid, but it is in Beta and completely free through July. And Books Close can be added on to either, so feel free to check it out while it's free!
Arti Patel Martinez: Love it! I am going to take just a second to shamelessly plug that we do have a couple new Intuit Accountant Suite courses available in ProAdvisor Academy. If you haven't made the switch yet, there are two new courses about making the switch from QuickBooks Online Accountant to Intuit Accountant Suite. Definitely go into ProAdvisor Academy and check it out.
Thanks so much for that walk through, Hailey!
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