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Arti Patel Martinez, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: On today's episode of In the Know, we'll be demoing the latest updates to industry solutions in QuickBooks Advanced.
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 Nithya, who will show us more about industry solutions in QuickBooks Advanced.
Nithya, welcome to the stage!
Nithya Rathinam: Hey everyone, I'm Nithya Ratnam. I'm a principal product manager here on the Mid-Market Verticals team, focused on construction. With the August release, we've embedded a lot of capabilities that lend themselves to industries, specifically to construction. I want to go over two features that really help construction businesses and adjacent industries do tasks easier. So, really quickly going into the two features here.
The first one is the phases and AIA style progress invoicing. Essentially, what we've heard is that commercial contractors running projects—long-term projects—need to size, scale it down, and scope it down to phases. There's no way to do that in QuickBooks today, so budgets, estimates, and invoices didn't really reflect how work was getting done on the field in construction, and getting paid for that progress was hard.
What we've done is we've brought face-based structure into projects, so a job can be tracked and built the way it actually gets constructed in the field, and this kind of tracks through the entire workflow. I'll share a demo toward the end of my presentation of how this pans out in the product today.
The second feature I'll talk about today is change orders. What we've heard from customers on change orders is that the scope on a job rarely stays exactly the same as it gets bid; work gets added, cut along the way, and change orders today live outside. You're kind of manually dealing with change orders outside of QuickBooks.
We've figured out a way to kind of bring that into QuickBooks and allow you to do both positive and negative change orders as scope gets added or removed. We're baking in a whole lot of automation around here, so it's really easy, and you don't have to dig through a number of documents to figure out what your change orders look like. With that, I want to jump into a quick demo here.
Today, I'm going to show you how to set up phases and carry them through an entire construction workflow, from the contract all the way to a progress invoice. It's built for construction as an AIA-style face billing, but the same idea holds anywhere work gets built in stages. Every project starts with a signed contract. Here, you drop Abigail's kitchen remodel contract straight into PM Agent and let PM Agent take it from there. While it works, watch what's happening. It set a profit margin goal of 45% based on prior data. It's pulling customer name, contact info, service address, and project dates straight off your contract. A few seconds later, you'll see every field is filled in and highlighted, so you can see exactly what came from the document before you save anything. The PM Agent doesn't stop at the basics. From that same contract, it's pulled all your phases to demolition, roughing, cabinetry, laid out before you've even touched a thing. That's how you actually get paid in a remodel job in phases.
Now you can move on to your budgets. Upload your estimator spreadsheet, and the PM Agent reads it line by line. Site work, plumbing, materials, each with a cost and a cost type already tagged. From there, it's a quick call for you to assign each line to its phase, so your budget and your phases are talking to each other. That's it. With a few simple inputs, you have your entire project and budget set up. One click from there converts your budget into an estimate grouped by phase, so you understand the scope for each line. This, in a sense, is your schedule of values. A homeowner or a lender expects to see this before work starts, and you get billed automatically by these phases. Review it and send it. Abigail gets a clear breakdown of what each phase costs, not just one number for the whole project. Weeks later, once you've made some progress on the job, you can create a new invoice, and the estimate is tied to this project, showing up on its own. No digging for it. You can decide how to bill, the full estimate, a flat percentage, or exactly what's done here, you're billing 50% on phases actually in progress, and nothing yet for final inspection. For example, turn on however you want to get paid, review it, and send. That's your whole path.
Essentially, what I walk through here is that with a few documents that get uploaded. All of your workflow can be in phases, and your estimate as well as your invoicing can all be in phases. And you can hit send with a few clicks and kind of track your entire job in phases. Ultimately, when you create an invoice, like it's showing on the screen now, you essentially are able to attach, pull up the estimate and figure out how much percentage progress you want to charge on the bill, and apply that to every phase, and be able to build an invoice in phases and progress, attach a progress, and then ship that off.
Let me show you how change orders, including negative change orders, close through QuickBooks Advance. Say Abigail calls partway into her remodel. She's decided to cut back on windows. I opened a change order in her project, and it already knows which estimate this ties to. Everything from the original quote is right here. I can add or remove scope. I don't have to dig it up. Windows is what's changing, so that's the line I bring in. Since she's removing scope, I enter it as a negative three fewer windows. The change order comes out to negative $300, and the estimate drops with it. No manual recalculation. Save it, send it. The reduced scope is in writing, not just a verbal agreement. Back in transactions, the change order is sitting there, ready for approval, ready to be booked with a full audit trail of what changed and when. There you have it: one change, fully tracked, start to finish. Change orders don't have to mean chasing paperwork; they can be as fast as the conversation that led to them.
That's everything that we wanted to share for the two features that's embedded with Advanced. Love to take some live questions now.
Arti Patel Martinez: All right. Okay. So let's see. I know there's tons of stuff coming in. What about … can I edit phases after the project is created?
Nithya Rathinam: Yeah, absolutely. We've heard this from many customers that once you've set up your project and once you've set up your phases, changes happen. Project phases get added or removed or edited. You might want to name them differently. So baked into the workflow is being able to manipulate your phases. You know, even after you've set up your project, you can do that right through the project details page, and go in there, edit, name, or add or remove phases as you need.
Arti Patel Martinez: Amazing! Thank you so much, Nithya, for that update. If you find this update interesting or helpful, go ahead and like, comment and subscribe. That's all we have for now.
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