Evolving Experience in QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Online Accountant
QuickBooks works to address the needs of both accounting professionals and small business owners. With this in mind, Intuit is unveiling new features within QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Online Accountant, including:
- Business View and Accountant View1: “Business View” is designed to help small business owners who are new to QuickBooks get up-and-running quickly and get more work done. It reduces complexity by providing additional guidance on key workflows, simplifying accounting jargon that may be confusing or unfamiliar to business owners, and puts cash flow front and center, as this is often the most important information to a small business owner. Evidenced primarily in the +New (create) menu, Business View uses different terminology and a slightly different presentation from the original view that accounting professionals are used to seeing, now called “Accountant View.” Accountant View will always be available for all users and will remain the default for accounting professionals who access their clients’ books through QuickBooks Online Accountant. Accounting professionals who want to switch from Business View to Accountant View (and vice versa) can easily do so by going to Account and Settings → Advanced → User View, toggling to the view they prefer, and pressing save. Business View is currently available to a small group of QuickBooks Online users, and the experience will continue to evolve as Intuit gains new information from users on these experiences.
- Tagging2: Currently in a limited beta, tagging is a new experience that enables users in all versions of QBO to “tag” and track their front-of-house data in a flexible way. With tags, QuickBooks users can cut, search for, and report on their transactions in a way that makes sense to them, without having to use the chart of accounts. They are similar in concept to classes, but rather than being a single list, tags can be put into groups. Users can then assign tags from multiple groups to their transactions and create reports group by group. Tagging will be available in both the Business and Accountant View, first just on expense and invoice forms, with more transaction forms to follow.
For small businesses, these enhancements mean more intuitive workflows and terminology to help complete key tasks accurately. It also keeps business owners out of the hairy accounting entries that they routinely call out as obstacles and improves the reliability and accuracy of their data, which will save accountants both time and effort.
QuickBooks Online Advanced Enhancements
Since launching in the fall of 2018, QuickBooks Online Advanced has been helping growing businesses scale, as well as the accountants who serve them. Recent enhancements to QuickBooks Online Advanced include:
- Online Back-up and Restore3: Formerly known as ChronoBooks, QuickBooks Online Advanced’s online back-up and restore feature allows users to sync and back-up company data, restore data to any historical point-in-time and track changes, including a log of saved versions over time. This feature is now available for all Advanced users completely free of charge. More information on this enhancement is available here.
- Batch Transactions: New capabilities have been added to QuickBooks Online Advanced’s suite of batch transactions. This includes batch create checks as well as batch create bills, both of which are faster ways to create checks and bills, improving efficiency. Additionally, QuickBooks Online Advanced will soon introduce even more batch transactions specifically requested by accountants. This includes batch invoice copy and paste, which will allow users to copy and paste from Excel or Google Docs to the batch transactions screen. Batch invoice payment enabled is also coming soon, enabling online payments in batch invoicing and is similar to a single invoice.
- Enhanced Custom Fields: Advanced’s enhanced custom fields feature is poised to increase the number of options from the current 10 to a total of 36, allowing accounting professionals to track more granular data than ever across sales reports, purchase orders, customer profiles, and more. This expansion will include 12 customer custom fields, 12 sales custom fields, and 12 purchase order custom fields.
Intuit is focused on providing meaningful updates to its QuickBooks ecosystem of products and services for small businesses and accounting professionals to help them save time and put more money in their pockets. These updates, new features and experiences to QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Online Accountant, as well as the new enhancements to QuickBooks Online Advanced clearly express Intuit's dedication to that commitment.
Footnotes:
1 - Insightful Accountant's own Contributing QBO Editor Liz Scott wrote about the QBO 'Toggle' between Business View and Accountant View in a QBO Monday Minute feature on October 7, 2019.
2 - Insightful Accountant's own Liz Scott will have more on 'tagging' in an upcoming feature of QBO Monday Minute.
3 - Insightful Accountant broke both the news to our readers that ChronoBooks had first been acquired by Intuit for use with QuickBooks Online Advanced (on November 18, 2019), and then on January 16 (2020) that it would become exclusively limited to a backup solution for QBO-Advanced.