July's Enhancements to QBO, QBO-Advanced & QBO-Accountant

Focusing on providing meaningful updates to its QuickBooks ecosystem of products and services for small businesses and accounting professionals that help them save time and put more money in their pockets, Intuit is announcing the following updates in features and experiences within QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Online Advanced and QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA) for the month of July, 2020.

Industry Benchmarks 

The latest addition to QBOA’s Business Performance Dashboard, Industry Benchmarks allow accounting professionals to quickly access industry comparisons and trends for their clients’ businesses. Using the power of aggregated, anonymized QuickBooks data, users can compare their clients’ business performance to that of similar businesses within their industry, in the same location, and with similar revenue. 

To help ensure accuracy, the data used to generate benchmarks is pulled only from QuickBooks Online accounts that are attached to an accountant and where the books are regularly reconciled.

This feature saves accountants time and allows them to expand their role as trusted advisors to their clients. Industry Benchmarks give accountants and bookkeepers instant access to the expert-level insights required to identify problems and opportunities and provide informed recommendations based on actionable data.  For more details about this feature, please read Insightful Accountant's QBO Monday Minute: QBO Industry Benchmarking.

Month-end Review

Month-end Review is a simple, powerful platform that enables accountants to standardize and automate their review process to help deliver accurate books in less time and with more confidence. Accessible within the Accountant Tools tab of QBOA, this accountant-only feature uses the power of QuickBooks to identify and inform accountants of common client issues and hard-to-find anomalies. Users can easily review and prioritize required tasks with automated, organized, and customizable lists and workflows. 

The Month-end Review process is broken down into three steps:

  • Transaction Review - QuickBooks identifies and flags any uncategorized or incomplete data fields.
  • Account Reconciliation - A dedicated tab for quick and easy identification of accounts that need reconciliation. Outstanding transactions are flagged and categorized for a complete picture of work required for each account. 
  • Final Review - An automated list that provides quick access to financial reports that should be monitored for accuracy on a monthly basis. 

This tool allows firms to create a standardized review process and makes it easier to track progress, increasing confidence that clients’ books are accurate and freeing up more time to focus on advisory services. Pinpointing common problems and difficult-to-spot issues allow firms to bring clients impactful solutions that were previously overlooked or identified too late. 

Month-end Review is currently available to all QBOA users in the United States as an “open beta.” Intuit will continue to evolve the experience over the coming weeks, including rolling out additional enhancements and functionality to help accounting professionals save time and better serve their clients. 

QuickBooks Online Advanced

Available now are two new significant features that will simplify business processes for QuickBooks Online Advanced customers: Invoice Approvals within Workflow Automation and Task Manager within Tasks.

  • Invoice Approvals (accessed via “Workflows”): A highly-anticipated control tool that allows users to create invoice approval rules and designate invoice approval personnel within a few clicks. Once these rules are set up, the company can process large volumes of invoices while maintaining the confidence that the invoices meet the company's approval rules, improving the efficiency and accuracy of the invoicing process. 
  • Task Manager (accessed via “Tasks”): Automates task delegation and unlocks a critical collaboration capability for mid-sized businesses. Users can create reminders for themselves or delegate tasks to other users. Upon login, team members can respond to the tasks accordingly. 

Both free-up valuable time for QuickBooks Online Advanced users, allowing them more opportunity to manage and grow their businesses. Insightful Accountant will have more about these features during our upcoming QB Talks in which we discuss cover our QBO Quarterly update.

Bank Statement Auto-Import

New to QBO Plus and Advanced, connected bank accounts will now have bank statements automatically imported and available for reconciliation. Intuit currently supports this feature for over 1,500 banks and credit unions, and is working to expand this list in order to make this feature even more widely available.

Accountants can now save the time and energy required to collect statements from clients, and can more easily reconcile multiple statements or accounts at a time.  For more information about this feature please read Insightful Accountant's QBO Monday Minute: QBO Bank Statement Fetch.

Custom Email for Receipt Forwarding

QuickBooks Online users can now create custom email addresses for email forwarding of receipts and bills. This simplifies operations for accountants with access to multiple companies, allowing them to send important documents to all of their QuickBooks Online clients. This feature is currently live to 10% of US, UK, AU companies and will continue to rollout further during the coming weeks.