QuickBooks Connect 2020 Hosts Thousands Virtually

On Wednesday November 18th Intuit opened its sixth annual QuickBooks Connect conference online, welcoming more than 39,000 small businesses and accounting professionals virtually to learn about the power of the QuickBooks platform and how it can help them grow and prosper.

The event, which debuted in 2014 in San Jose, is designed to inspire, educate and connect attendees through engaging content and activities. During this year’s conference, QuickBooks leaders showcased how as the leading fintech platform for small businesses, QuickBooks can help businesses succeed, despite the challenges they may currently face.

Key product innovations and services detailed during the show include:

QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Online Advanced

The QuickBooks Online platform strives to be the source of truth for small business owners who need every advantage to adapt and survive. Customers benefit from an intelligent system that uses the latest machine-learning technology to help them manage their business. Additionally, customers can access AI-driven insights and recommendations and get advice from on-demand experts who provide guidance and peace of mind about their business. Recent QuickBooks Online innovations highlighted at QuickBooks Connect include: 

Automated Sales Tax Center

The new Automated Sales Tax Center automatically calculates the sales tax on invoices and receipts for easy review and accurate filings. QuickBooks also lets small businesses know when their tax payment is due to help ensure taxes are filed on time, and the new Automated Sales Tax Center supports all of the sales tax jurisdictions in the U.S., with a team of QuickBooks sales tax experts reviewing and updating the rates every month to ensure their accuracy. 

Tags

Tags allow a small business to label and track how they are spending their money. By tagging transactions inside QuickBooks, small businesses can create reports on any money-in and money-out transaction they want, from invoices to expenses to bills.

In addition to the above, QuickBooks Online Advanced is designed for larger, growing companies who need to simplify their business with robust custom tools, including: advanced reporting capabilities with AI insights, deep integrations with their business applications, and customization capabilities, all at a new level of performance and scalability. Knowing this, QuickBooks Online Advanced customers have access to several Advanced-only features designed to meet their unique needs, including:

Performance Center

Newly available, Performance Center within QuickBooks Online Advanced uses AI-driven learning models to give customers a top-line view of how their business is performing through custom dashboard widgets with key performance indicators. This includes detecting trends and anomalies across revenue, expenses and profit.

Deep integrations with third-party applications

Also newly available, QuickBooks  Online Advanced offers its customers deep third-party app integrations to help manage their business end-to-end as many growing companies rely heavily on different apps to manage their larger, more complex businesses. With deep integrations and customizable workflows with key apps like Salesforce, Hubspot, Bill.com and Lean Law, QuickBooks Online Advanced can truly be the single source of truth for mid-market small businesses. 

Accountants

Our vision for accountants is to help them grow their practice and scale their impact so they can help their small business clients succeed. Ways QuickBooks is helping do this include:

Month-end Review and Reports

One way accounting professionals can share information about the health of their client’s businesses is through the generation of reports. Small businesses often have questions about or don’t understand the reports provided by their accountant. Similarly, accountants often spend extra time exporting QuickBooks data into spreadsheets to create visualizations of a report’s content to help clients understand the content. Now, through QuickBooks Online Accountant and its accountant-only Month-end Review feature, accountants can create highly visual reports directly inside QuickBooks to help owners better understand a report's content and take the mystery out of a report’s numbers. Accountants can also add comments on the reports to help describe the report’s information and customize a report’s look with the accountant’s and small business’s logos.

Looking ahead, QuickBooks is looking to add more capabilities within Month-end Review to help accountants efficiently and effectively close their client’s books at the end of each month. One idea brought forward by accountants using QuickBooks Online Accountant is the ability to ask clients questions directly inside their QuickBooks file when more information, like a copy of a receipt, is needed to categorize a transaction.

This and other ideas will continue to be researched based on customer feedback to help accountants better serve their clients, grow their practices and scale their impact.   

QuickBooks Commerce and QuickBooks Payroll

The newly-announced QuickBooks Commerce and QuickBooks Payroll teams also showcased the availability of solutions that help small businesses grow and thrive, including:

QuickBooks Commerce

Launched in September, this new product is a way to help product-based businesses grow. With QuickBooks Commerce, small businesses can manage multiple online and in-store sales channels, better maintain inventory, and know which channels perform best – all from one central hub.

QuickBooks Payroll

In addition to being fully integrated into QuickBooks, QuickBooks Payroll is also available as a stand-alone, full service solution that can be used on its own. QuickBooks Payroll automates a small business’s payroll as well as reduces the work, mistakes and stress small business owners often experience with administering payroll. This is accomplished in several ways, including:

  • The integration of Tsheets, which helps ensure the accuracy of time-tracking
  • Access to the Payroll Tax Center through QuickBooks Online Payroll Elite, which reduces risk, increases confidence and eliminates work by having QuickBooks payroll experts calculate, file and pay your payroll taxes
  • Access to additional small business benefits such as 401(k) and human resources, all from inside QuickBooks Payroll. 

Wednesday's events were not the end of QuickBooks Connect 2020, registered participants will still be able to access the event platform on both November 19 and 20 to connect. This year's offering of 'Braindates' give participants an easy way to schedule an on-line meet-up with other attendees and experts to exchange insights and experiences.

For more information on QuickBooks Connect 2020, please visit https://quickbooksconnect.com/.