Not too long ago, Intuit added a new feature to QBO Accountant that was designed to improve workflow within the users' accounting organization when assigning new projects or tasks to team members. For those accounting organizations still using email, the new notification feature allowed users to select the option to use emails for new assignments, due dates, assignees, and other details related to the assignments. QBOA users could even option for the use of Slack as well as their supported email.
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All of this sounds good and well because it's a way to keep the assignment workflow up-to-date and going where the assignments need to go... but what about where the assignments come from?
Even though a lot of people today think 'email' is on its way 'out' as a method of communications because it isn't 'instantaneous,' the reality is that email is still one of the major ways that people communicate 'from afar.' Just as when people used 'the mail' (aka: 'snail mail,' the Post Office, Pony Express, etc.) to send information, even after the advent of both the telephone and fax machine, a lot of important communications still comes our way 'via email'.
Most business people spend 12+ hours per week scouring their emails looking for key information, as well as 'deleting or junking' the emails they don't intent to keep. Then they spend even more time extracting that critical information from their valuable emails and turning it specific action items.
Perhaps an email contains a meeting invite with colleagues, or an email contains a request from one of your clients asking you to perform a new task like, "can you give me an analysis of my sales verses costs over the last 3 months contrasted against the same period for each of the past two years?"
working-on-it
Well soon, QuickBooks Online Accountant will provide advanced 'Email Integration.' Currently under development is a new feature that will help eliminate the need to manually 'create work' from data within your emails.
It should work something like this... if a QBOA users receives an email that contains work or a task that needs to get done, instead of manually going through the process of adding it to QBOA, the user can simply forward that email to QuickBooks. QuickBooks will capture the task (and task details) using artificial intelligence and then create the project or tasks within QBOA 'practice management.'
When available, this new functionality should work with any email client, including Gmail and Outlook.
This functionality may go through QuickBooks Labs 'trial' testing after it completes Beta before it goes 'fully live' in order to gain maximum user input permitting the development team 'tweaking' opportunities to ensure a feature that fits the needs of QBOA users. Insightful Accountant will let you know as soon as we have more information about this feature.