Live From QuickBooks Connect 2019 - Day One

The day everyone has been waiting for finally rolled upon us, the opening of QuickBooks Connect 2019.

Ariege Misherghi

Today was 'Accountant Day' and the first Main Stage event was the presentation by Ariege Misherghi, Accountant Leader for Intuit QuickBooks.  She is a customer-focused, creative leader who is committed to the customer experience and has a passion for solving the tough and unique challenges accountants face. Her team serves the more than 700,000 accountants globally that use QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA) to help grow their firms and better manage their practices, allowing them to focus on being strategic advisors to their clients.

Ariege discussed the importance of the accountant, bookkeeping and ProAdvisor Program to the QuickBooks Ecosystem, including the relationship of Intuit's Find-a-ProAdvisor option built into QuickBooks to help link businesses with advisors. Ariege also touched upon 'QuickBooks Live' and the role that ProAdvisors could play in that offering giving one example of how a ProAdvisor had significantly expanded her own practice and expertise by becoming one of the 'QuickBooks Live' advisors.

Ariege Ariege introduced several new features within the goal of 'Combining software and human expertise to help small businesses prosper.' These new 'major' features are either just being released or on their way to QuickBooks that will help to automate tasks for accounting professionals, the Optimization Center, Bookkeeping Review and Business Performance Overview. All three of these features will allow QuickBooks to give accountants, bookkeepers and ProAdvisors increased automated and in-depth information concerning their clients’ businesses.

Optimization Center (summary)

The Optimization Center shows efficiency scores for your clients. This is used to identify how efficient the client's data is and gives you an estimate of  the amount of time you must invest in your client, how accurately their information is processed or reconciled and more. The Optimization Center has major sections for Banking, Expense and Income with numerous other and sub-sections to help you pinpoint irregularities and anomalies in the client's data.

For example, the Optimization Center's 'Banking' section reflects the efficiency of how bank data has been processed, how bank reconciliations have been performed, illustrates outstanding activity, whether 'bank rules' were followed during transaction processing and much more. This gives you an indicator of whether you will need to work with clients on specific issues, develop transactional rules (or import rules), or if you have substantial historical work that must be accomplished.

The Optimization Center also has an 'Expense' section reflecting the same type of information but  for your expenses, and allows you to evaluate how the recently implemented 'Receipt Capture' feature is working (etc.) in the client's file.  It was at this point that Ariege 'let the cat out of the bag', soon the 'Receipt Capture' feature will work on more than just receipts, it will also work on Vendor Bills (as shown below).

The Optimization Center is currently being phased into QuickBooks Online Accountant.

Bookkeeping Review (summary)

Another feature presented during the keynote was the Bookkeeping Review which is designed to track inconsistencies within client files in even further detail. If there are errors or discrepancies that need addressing, the Bookkeeping Review will draw attention to them.

The feature is designed to saving you time and keeping you organized, that's why it is set-up on a step-by-step process starting with 'Collecting the client's data'. This step is designed to assure and confirm that all of the essential aspects of the client's books have been captured properly. The process moves on to to look at common issues that might be present that neither you, nor the client, are even aware of. Automation quickly identifies these issues and presents you with several lists to resolve such issues (like the possible miscategorized transactions shown in the example above). Of course, QuickBooks gives you the ability to fix each problem individually, or in 'batch fashion' as you deem appropriate.

Another step in this process is review of reconciliations, and again something new is 'on the way'... 'Bank Statement Import', the ability to actually import/attach actual bank statements as part of the bank reconciliation process from downloaded transactions. Timing of this feature will depend upon a number of factors including the associated financial institutions, but a number of larger banks within the United States are already in the process of working toward participation.

Bookkeeping Review is presently available under 'early access' to some QuickBooks Online Accountant users, we will have more about this later in this article.

Business Performance Overview (summary)

Ariege also introduced the Business Performance Overview feature which has the potential to be a real 'game changer' for those professionals with a niche practice. 

This feature not only gives you a deeper understanding of your client’s business but compares them to other similar businesses. The overview begins with 'Key Metrics' (as shown above). Metrics give way to 'Trends' for Gross profit margin, Net profit margin, A/P days, A/R days, as well as business analytics like the 'Current Ratio' and 'Quick Ratio'.

But that's not all folks, this automation not only gives you a comparison of different trends for your client’s industry but with the flip of the toggle it  even compares your client to other comparable businesses based upon Intuit's aggregation of QuickBooks metadata.

Like Bookkeeping Review, Business Performance Overview is presently only available under 'early access' to some QuickBooks Online Accountant users. But now for the good news, you can 'apply' to become one of the 'early access' users of these new QBO-Accountant features. To apply for early access go to INTUIT.ME/QB-EARLYACCESS

[Note: This offer is limited to QuickBooks Online Accountant users only, not all individuals requesting early access will necessarily be granted early access to these features as the number of early access positions is limited. Certain terms and conditions may apply and are the exclusive authority of Intuit.]

Michael McQueen

The second half of the keynote was by Michael McQueen, who tied it all together really well. Michael is a multi-award winning speaker, trend forecaster and bestselling author of eight books. With clients including KPMG, Pepsi and Cisco, he has helped some of the world’s most successful brands navigate disruption and maintain momentum.

Michael is a regular commentator on TV and radio and his work has featured in publications ranging from the UK Daily Mail to Medium.com and the Huffington Post. In addition, Michael is a familiar face on the international conference circuit having shared the stage with the likes of Bill Gates, Dr. John Maxwell and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Michael said as a small business advisor, we must learn how to foster healthy paranoia. That we are never done learning and changing. Technology and society are changing at a more rapid pace every day, and accountants being one of the professions at the forefront of these changes, have to be willing to always evolve.

Michael used an example from the Facebook handbook, “If we don’t create what kills Facebook – someone else will.”  He said that we must learn to embrace these changes and use them to evolve, or we will absolutely be left behind. 

Based upon the audience reaction, his message was not only clearly understood, but warmly received.