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Arti Patel Martinez, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: On today's episode of In the Know, we'll be demoing the newest latest updates to Intuit Accountant Suite (IAS).
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 Zenubia Madhani, who will show us more about the new Resolution Center and playbooks in Intuit Accountant Suite.
Hey Zenubia, welcome to the stage!
Zenubia Madhani: I am Zenubia Madhani. I'm a product manager in our small business group in California, working on Intuit Accountant Suite, and I'm really excited to share one of the new features we launched a couple weeks ago. Let's chat about a new feature that we launched at the beginning of this month.
But first, what did we hear? When talking to firms of all sizes, what was consistent across the board is that onboarding clients is a very manual process and takes a lot of work. The information to onboard them to QuickBooks or even to your services is across tools, documents, spreadsheets, and inside people's heads, which makes it really hard to standardize setting up a client and doing it in a way that's efficient.
So, what we did in response to that is launch Playbook and IAS Accelerate as a beta a couple weeks ago. This brings together settings and templates all in one place so that you can mass create this playbook and apply it to clients, creating repeatable workflows that standardize how clients are set up and how your team is set up, and push it to clients with a single button.
Let's see the magic actually in action. I will share a demo now. Playbooks can be found in the Firm Hub section of IAS. They can be created from scratch, saved as a draft while you work on them, and then published when you're ready to add clients to that playbook. I'm going to walk us through the experience of creating and publishing a playbook for the first time. When I click Create, I can add a name and description for a playbook. Playbooks can be organized by vertical, service line, or however you organize your clients today.
For this example, I'm creating a restaurant playbook for my food and beverage clients and clicking Create to get started. Once the playbook draft is created, I can see the elements within the playbook. There are three that allow me to customize my clients' QuickBooks files, one where I can onboard them to books close for service delivery and IAS, and two firm settings: one for access for my team members to clients on this playbook, and another for using client custom fields to segment these clients in the future. Each of these elements can be turned off or back on, even in the future, after I've published this playbook, so I can always come back and add more to it or edit. Within each of these elements, I can choose an existing template if relevant, or create a new one.
For the chart of accounts, I'm choosing an existing restaurant chart of accounts template that I've created. For something like company settings, I can choose exactly what settings I want to configure, so I can turn them on here, and change the settings to push to all the clients at once. This means I don't have to go into each client's books to change these settings individually, one client at a time. For the sake of time, I'm going to go ahead with the rest of these and choose existing templates within policies. I already had a restaurant policy that was created for books close. I'm choosing the standard books close template for user groups or client access. I'm choosing an existing restaurant user group that I've created, and I can validate the users and their level of access that I'm providing via this playbook.
And lastly, for client custom fields. I can choose to add a restaurant industry custom field and mark that these are also tax clients. Once each of these elements has been configured, I'm ready to publish it. I can choose to publish it to up to 1,000 clients. Here, I'm seeing all my clients that aren't currently already on another playbook, which means they're available to be added here. I'm choosing three clients that I want on this playbook to publish immediately, but I could also publish without any clients and choose to add clients in the future once I've published this playbook. Once I click done, this playbook is now available in my playbook section, and I can see that it's currently publishing. I can view the playbook's details at any time or edit them. Once published from the playbooks home, I can see how many clients are on a playbook.
Without having to go into the playbook, I can manage the clients who are already on that playbook, remove them if I don't want them to receive future updates, or add new clients to that playbook. let's go ahead and confirm that the playbook applied correctly. In the playbook for client setup, I included a custom chart of account template, a policy, and company settings. Let's double check the company settings applied correctly. When I go to the advanced tab here. I can see that the changes I made in the playbook are reflected in the client. In the first month of fiscal year, the account number is being enabled as well as automations. Now let's check that the firm settings also applied correctly within IAS. The first thing we'll check in IAS is custom fields. On the client list, I can see that both the industry and the tax custom fields were correctly applied to the three clients I added to the playbook.
Next, I'll check the user group. For my restaurant user group, I can view the clients that were added to this group and see that it includes the three that I had added via playbook. The last thing I want to show you is how to assign a playbook to a newly created client. I can go to the Add Client flow and create that client. I'm creating Wesley's Wine Bar and choosing the QuickBooks products I want for them. At the very end of the flow, I can choose a playbook to apply to Wesley's Wine Bar. Here, I'm choosing the restaurant playbook we just published to apply all six of those elements to the client. Once again, we can double check that the playbook applied correctly. Here we see the custom fields for industry and tax applied. When I go back to playbooks, I can now see that there are four clients on the restaurant playbook, including Wesley's Wine Bar.
All right, I'm happy to take questions on this. This did launch just a couple weeks ago, so I'm really excited to see how you all will be using Playbooks and what we can do to expand it and make it even better.
Arti Patel Martinez: Amazing! Thank you so much. Very, very cool. I'm going to go with at least one question: Is there any setup required, or is Playbooks ready to go out of the box?
Zenubia Madhani: That's a really good question. So, of the six pieces that we saw, five of them are ready to play with inside playbooks already. Like you saw, you can create the templates in house within the playbook, or if you had already created them outside of the playbook, you can apply them in there. Books Close is the only exception where you have to opt into Books Close; it's free right now, but because it onboards clients into that service, we want to make sure that you've opted into Books Close.
Arti Patel Martinez: Amazing! Thank you so much, Zenubia, for that walkthrough. And with that, 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.*
*This information is intended to outline our general product direction, but represents no obligation and should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. Additional terms, conditions and fees may apply with certain features and functionality. Eligibility criteria may apply. Product offers, features, functionality are subject to change without notice. Product screen images simulated. Video sequences shortened.
