Latest / Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast / QuickBooks February 2026 Releases: Bank Feeds, AI Deductions, and IES Construction Tools

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QuickBooks February 2026 Releases: Bank Feeds, AI Deductions, and IES Construction Tools · Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast

• There may be errors in spelling, grammar, and accuracy in this machine-generated transcript. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:00:07] In this episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, we are going to do our Now You Know segment, which is our recap of Intuit's ProAdvisor in the know. I'm your host, Alicia Pollock of Royal Xyz.com. Now, if you haven't been going to in the know, this is one of my must must attend webinars that I make sure I attend every single month. It's always on the third Thursday of the month at 11 a.m. Pacific, and generally they have three segments where they break down what is new and being released in the software so that you, as a ProAdvisor, can have some awareness of the changes that are happening in the software. And it's my opportunity to experience my moments of delight and get some questions answered as well. The February 19th event was hosted by Aarti Patel Martinez, who's the principal program manager for ProAdvisor training out of San Diego. And so this is the second one, I think, that she is hosted. I think that means that Jacqueline Ankou is now on other projects. Um, miss Jacqueline. Hi, Jacqueline. Um, but Artie is doing a great job. So on the agenda for yesterday was ProAdvisor Community news product innovations featuring Intuit Enterprise Suite, Intuit Intelligence, and Intuit Accountant Suites user groups. The first big announcement is that there is a new ProAdvisor certification. Intuit Enterprise Suite has a live training and certification test in the ProAdvisor Academy, so you get there by when you're logged into your QuickBooks online for accountants. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:01:50] Oh wait, I can't call it that anymore. That's right, it's the Intuit Accountant Suite, or IAS. But when you're in there, there's a section to go to the ProAdvisor Academy, and in there you'll find 4.5 hours of training, including deep dives into multi entity management. The new project center features and business intelligence. And when you do the training you get CPE credit. And when you pass the certification test you can earn 200 points towards your ProAdvisor level. While we're talking about the ProAdvisor Academy, they do now have some updates to manage training. So if you are part of a firm, then you actually now have the ability to assign courses, certifications, learning plans and pathways to one or more team members all at the same time. You can give them due dates so that they know when you're expecting them to actually get this done. Uh, you can also flag unmet prerequisites. You can track their progress, view their CPE credit, see how much time they spent and keep track of everybody's completion status all under one roof. If you are an accountant user that is on a team, what you see is your science training displayed prominently in my hub. Clear visibility into the due dates and your employers expectations. And it also gives you in app notifications in Intuit Accountant Suite and inside ProAdvisor Academy. The next thing they announced are two Intuit Partner webinars, and these are webinars where they're introducing third party apps that dovetail really nicely with QuickBooks. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:03:32] And there's two of them coming up in the next couple of weeks, one for double and one for method. I'm excited. I use both of these. By attending these, you get to really see what's possible with QuickBooks and extend its abilities, including real world use cases. The double event is today, February 26th, so you'll want to tune in for that. And then method is on March 12th to enroll. For both of those you can go to Intuit Webinars and I'll put that link in the show notes. Now their next announcement kind of made my eyebrows rise, and they didn't really say anything about it. It wasn't included as a segment. It was just a hey, here it is. And what they are introducing is what they're calling BNP, which is an acronym that nobody's ever going to remember. And it's the new feature is affirm, buy now, pay later. So this is a new pay over time option that's offered from a company called affirm. And it's going to show up on your invoices that you send through QuickBooks online. The rollout starts in March. And basically what it says in the screenshot that they have is the way that you send an invoice and it shows up in their email box and says your invoice is ready and here's the amount. And then there's a little. So the demo that they have says okay here's your invoice for $483.75. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:05:01] And then right below it there's a little line that says as low as $44 a month or zero Apr with a firm get started. So apparently this firm notice is going to automatically appear as a payment option on your invoice, and a firm will manage the payment process with the customers so that you get paid in full at the time. But then your customers are going to pay a firm over time, and then they'll get flexible installment payments. Um, they say that there's no late fees, there's no hidden fees, and there's no risk to the clients. And the part that a lot of people have been asking for is that the client pays the 2.99% credit card processing fee. So if you've been looking for a way to pass those fees on to your clients. This is one way of doing it. Now, what's got me kind of puzzled is it does say no setup required. A firm will automatically appear as a payment option on invoices. But that's got me wondering, like is it an opt in? Is it an opt out? Do we not have a choice? Is it part of QuickBooks payments? Inquiring minds want to know. I do not have any answers to these questions, but know that there's going to be a new payment option coming. It's going to allow your clients to make partial payments and pay over time, which is actually kind of standard in retail. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:06:28] You see that a lot with with purchases on Amazon or purchases on different websites. So the concept is out there and popular. Just because you have never done it doesn't mean that people aren't looking for it. So if it helps people get you paid, then great. But as a way of finally answering our calls to pass the fees onto the clients. If this is the method that they realized that they had to do, then at least we have that other option. So stay tuned. We'll see how that plays out. Then they made an announcement that Insightful accountants top advisor awards. The deadlines are coming up. The deadline to nominate is in February, and then you have to fill in your application in March. So don't be shy about self nominating yourself. If you think you do a pretty good job out there, you don't need someone else to nominate you. You can nominate yourself. There are several different awards the top 100 Pro Advisors, the top 25 up and coming pro advisors, which you don't even have to be up and coming. I've seen some people who I've known for years on that list, and top 50 international pro advisors and a top 25 tax advisors, so they're introducing tax into it as well. So definitely get yourself some your own pat on the back and it can be you who pat yourself on the back. All right, now it's time to go into the product innovations. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:07:56] The first section was on Intuit Enterprise Suite and all of the new releases. The speaker was Jed McLaughlin, who's the group manager in marketing on the mid-market team. Mid-market is there Intuit Enterprise Suite IES has February releases include improvements to areas like approvals, dimensions and business intelligence. They are releasing an actual industry edition. It's now going to be called Intuit Enterprise Suite Construction Edition. That's in beta, and they made some improvements to the inventory features for product based businesses. All of the things I'm about to tell you are already live as of February 11th, and you can learn about them by when you're in Intuit Enterprise Suite, by going up to the gear icon and choosing what's new. Let's start by talking about I. S construction tools. So this is in beta but it is in the process of being released. They're introducing project phases, cost groups, enhanced project budgets proposals, negative change orders and AI style invoicing. The project phases is designed to help you stay on top of your cash flow, your profitability and effective project management by keeping them all in one place. It allows you to plan and track your budget and progress against the different project phases, all inside IIs. Basically, what it does is you can define the phases of your project and then help use them to help organize your budgets and your estimates. For example, some phases that you might have are demolition and site prep and then foundation and concrete and then rough in and then finishing and then completion and inspection. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:09:43] And then underneath each one of those is where you can specify all your different tasks and your budgets. The Project Management AI will recommend project phases when you're creating a project, and make suggestions based on your client communications documents and the notes that you upload. The next feature specifically in the construction edition is Cost Groups. Cost groups are a way that you can plan and track your project costs for better job costing and project profitability. And what it allows you to do is within your list of products and services, you can designate industry standard cost groups such as labor, materials, equipment, subcontractors and miscellaneous. And then you can track these cost groups across your budgets, your expenses, your purchase orders and your bills. For example, you can filter key reports by your cost groups to compare estimated versus actual costs, and that will help you identify cost overruns at the level of detail that you need. Another enhancement is to the project budgets. So because construction teams need to proactively control costs and keep the projects on track. Instead of setting up budgets in QBO and then working in spreadsheets, this allows you to kind of do it all in one place. So the project budgets allow project managers to track their budgets and variances by phase, get real time insights on budget overruns right on the Project Summary dashboard. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:11:15] You can export and print the budgets, and you can compare the budget versions across all project cost reports. If you are upgrading to Ise from QuickBooks Advanced or Desktop, your project budgets are automatically imported, so you can use them as a starting point. One of the features that I talked about in our recaps of Intuit Connect were proposals and the new proposals allow you to submit bids on a project that really look fabulous and that will help you win more bids. There's a document builder where you can put in your own custom branding. You get rich text formatting, images and integrated e-signatures. You can create a proposal off of an estimate, or create an estimate from a proposal, and it gives you a client portal so your clients can sign documents, make deposits, and review their project scope and approved costs. Now, one of the problems that they've solved recently is with the change orders. Ies has change orders, which a lot of people have been asking for in general in QuickBooks, because right now, if you have a change order, generally what you do is either edit your estimate or create a new estimate. But sometimes a change order isn't adding to a project. Sometimes it's reducing the scope of a project. So they have now added negative change orders. This allows you to add or remove products or services from a project estimate within the change order, and that prevents your project estimates from going below $0. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:12:50] These negative change orders allow you to better account for price adjustments and scope reductions, so the enhancement allows you to remove products or services from a project estimate from inside the change order. Adjust project estimate income by subtracting amounts specified in accepted negative change orders. So basically what this is allowing you to do is make sure that your profitability is accurate. Because up until now, if you couldn't reduce the scope of the project, then it looked like you were coming in under budget or that you had made too much profit. So now the change orders allow you to adjust the expected profit on the job. The next innovation in Intuit Enterprise Suite for construction is AI style invoicing. This is the invoicing used for the American Institute of Architects, and it's a standardized cost controls for large construction so that it's not just inside your own company, across all different phases and contractors within a project. So not only can you keep track of what's been invoiced to date and the invoice amount and the remaining balance at the end of the phase level, but each new invoice builds on the last one and carries forward the invoice to date and balances. And even better, these invoices and estimates are now available in the client portal and on the invoice PDFs. All right. So that summarizes the changes in the new Intuit Enterprise Suite for Construction Edition. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:14:29] Now let's talk about some other features in IIs. Some changes to the inventory and order management. There's three item receipts moving cost, average valuations, and sales order enhancements. Now the item receipts is something that people have been asking for for a long time. In QuickBooks desktop, if you had a purchase order, you had the ability to accept the purchase order to bring the goods in without creating a bill. But in QuickBooks online, you could go from purchase order straight to bill in order to accept your inventory. But if you weren't ready for billing, you didn't really have that that middle level anymore. So they have introduced item receipts. So basically when you have a Po and the goods arrive, you can update the quantity on hand so that it shows that you brought them into stock. And you can do full shipments or partial shipments. But then it separates out the billing series. So your inventory is way more accurate. Your AP and cost of goods are more accurate. And you do have that phase that a lot of people need. Now, one thing I want to say about that, though, is in my members meeting yesterday, one of my members found the ability to turn on item receipts not in enterprise suite, just in her QuickBooks plus. But I thought that this is just supposed to be for ease. So we decided not to turn it on, but in one of my sample files, I did try it, and basically it put up a new button that gave you a choice in the purchase order to go with the item receipt or to create a bill, so it gives you the choice. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:16:10] But what was interesting is that the pop up, the warning when we tried to when we tried to turn it on, said that once you turn it on, you go automatically from Po to item receipt and you didn't get a choice. But I also don't know why it was in her plus at all. So I think they're kind of in rollout. So you might see item receipt. I don't recommend turning it on quite yet and being an early adopter of this one, unless you're in Intuit Enterprise Suite, because in the sample company, when we did turn it on and we tried it, we would click item receipt and we got a blank screen. So I think this is in really, really the early stages and will it'll be fully functional a little bit down the line. Another change is that historically QuickBooks online has been Fifo for inventory. Fifo means first in, first out. I really like Fifo because the order that you sell your goods, it's actually giving you dead on accurate cost of goods moving from inventory to cost of goods, because it is actually able to track the actual price that you paid for each of your items that you're selling. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:17:24] And even if you bought five of them at $5 and five of them at $6, and then you sell seven of them. It would calculate five at $5 and two at $6, and move that exact amount from inventory to cost of goods. So I'm definitely a fan of Fifo, but desktop uses moving average cost calculations, basically where it looks at all the purchases that you have made of those goods and divides it by the number that you are selling, and then that is the cost that it uses. So moving average cost is useful if you have merchandise that fluctuates frequently in value, so that you're basically selling it at whatever the current value is, as opposed to the cost that you actually bought something for when you are moving from desktop to QBO. Now, if you have inventory turned on, it's giving you a choice of which one do you want? Do you want to continue using the moving cost average that was part of desktop that you're used to? Or do you want to switch to Fifo? Now, do keep in mind that for large companies that have millions of dollars of inventory, if you are changing this valuation, you do have to put in a change with the IRS to let them know that you're changing your valuations. And for those of you doing conversions, this is one of those things. When you compare your befores and afters, you know when you're doing a conversion, you look at your PNL and your balance sheet for all dates, accrual based in both the desktop and online to compare them. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:18:58] But this is one reason why the inventory and the cost of goods have always varied just a little bit on an inventory migration. And so as long as you can justify it and go, oh, okay, this $5,000 change was because of this, then you were absolutely fine to move forward. But now, if Fifo is not useful for you, you do have a choice. The next change to the inventory module is that they are enhancing the sales orders. Sales orders are kind of like the item receipts that we were just talking about with inventory. But therefore your sales for your income desktop has sales orders. Qbo doesn't in QBO. If you had a sales order, essentially what you would do is just make an estimate out of it. But now you can actually record a future order so that you can allocate your inventory and not oversell these sales orders. Now connect to your purchase orders as well as your estimates and your invoices. You can generate an open sales order by item, and your customer reports will include more information such as due date, quantity invoiced, and quantity Backordered. You can customize your sales orders with more details such as shipping information, classes and accounting fields, and not have to keep spreadsheets to keep track of all of that. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:20:21] You can even edit the column names in the sales order transaction form. You can attach support documents directly to the sales orders if you need more context. You can track sales order changes with more detailed audit logs. And if you sell in multiple companies, it will show your foreign totals with automatic home currency conversion. So that wraps up the inventory changes. Now there's a big change to workflow automation. The three changes are parallel approvals, detailed audit trails and dimensions on workflow automation. So the first one is the parallel approvals. If you have an invoice that you need to send to a customer, or a bill that you need to pay, the workflows that are available in Qbo Advanced and Enterprise suite have allowed you to route the transactions across people who need to approve it. But some people were finding bottlenecks because if the first person didn't see it or wasn't available to do the approval, then they couldn't move forward with the order. So what they're doing now is that in enterprise Suite, you can do parallel approvals. So you can add up to five approvers at each step and specify a required minimum number of approvals, like do you need one, any one of these five or any two of these five. And then once those two people out of the five approve it, it goes on to the next stage of another up to five approvers with another specified required number of approvals. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:21:56] So basically you can combine sequential steps and parallel approvals and and not have it blocked. And so you can have groups of people that are authorized to do the approvals. And that will eliminate your bottlenecks. And all of that manual following up you have to do the next demo was business intelligence. And now this is being presented to us as part of Intuit Enterprise Suite, but it's actually in all versions of QuickBooks, not just enterprise. So the business intelligence is they talked about modern reports, calculated fields, management reports, additional app integrations and KPIs and dashboards. Now, I'm really excited about the Intuit Intelligence announcements. And the person who presented in the in the Know was Rudabaugh. Who's the Staff Customer Experience Pro and part of the global group. Now, this is directly related to into its recent announcement of their partnership with ChatGPT. And so when I saw this happening, I was like, oh, I recognize ChatGPT in this. So basically what they are doing is allowing you to ask questions about your data right inside QuickBooks. It's available to all admin users. So primary admins and company admins in all the versions of QuickBooks, it has already gone live. And the way that you find it is if you look up in the upper right hand corner, there's kind of a blue circle like a blue snowflake with a little dot on it. And that is the intelligence. Right now it's only available in the US. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:23:45] Now, I played with this yesterday in my membership meeting and we kind of liked what we saw. Basically what it allows you to do is surface intelligence about your data without having to go through and run a whole bunch of reports. So, for example, you can ask questions about your customer sales for the month or what your biggest expenses were. You can even ask it for recommendations on how you can improve your operations And in order to get those questions, I would have to run like five different reports and kind of think about them and bring it together in order to make those recommendations. So I'm really looking forward to using this in my advisory with my clients. Each Intuit Intelligence subscription for the month gives you 25 chat prompts, and then once you use all 25, the chat stops until your next billing cycle starts and then all of the prompts reset. But if you want more than 25, you can buy 100 additional prompts as an add on for $10. So basically, you're subscribing to the Intuit Intelligence for $10 a month, and then you have 125 prompts that you can use. And, you know, basically this works in the same way that you would add on online bill pay. You get your for free, and if you need more, you've got a couple different tiers. So it's an add on. If you don't use it, if you don't need it, you don't have to use it. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:25:12] But I really encourage you to go up to that little blue snowflake and and try it out and see what you think. All right. Now we're going to shift gears a little bit. Long time listeners know that I am a bank feeds geek. I love the bank feeds. And I'm actually kind of excited because the way that they actually said it is, they use the words bank feeds. And in QuickBooks, in the software it says bank transactions. And I've been kind of like, come on guys. Nobody calls it the bank transactions. The bank transactions, we all call it the bank feed or the banking feed. So I was kind of happy to see that they used that language. The presenter is Eric Foster, who's the staff product manager in the core accounting team in Mountain View. And I've had the pleasure of working with Eric. I give a lot of feedback about the bank feed, and so I'm kind of happy to see that my, my, my fingerprint is on these changes. So all the things I'm about to tell you are already live as of February 2026. Now, if you haven't already started using the new bank feeds, it's kind of time. They're going to become standard on May 7th, so as of May 7th everybody's going to move over to them. So I would recommend right now would be the time to go ahead and adopt it so that if you want to be able to put in feedback, if there's anything else you want them to change about it, this is when they are listening to your voice and there is a canny for it. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:26:45] I did an episode with Margie Remmers Davis called The Canny Can Can a couple a couple weeks ago, and canny is a feedback forum outside of QuickBooks. So, you know, we do want you to still put in feedback inside QuickBooks, but you can go to the canny boards and put in specific, actionable feedback, and they will actually have a conversation with you. So this is where a lot of their development has been coming, coming from. So the first one, do you have trouble with your customers putting in transactions from the banking feed and then leaving the payee blank? I know that I do, and a long time ago it used to say payee optional, which we made them take out because as far as Alicia is concerned, payees are not optional ever. You always want to have a payee in there, but you know you can do a generic payees. In some cases, you don't have to have the name of every parking lot you've ever parked at. You can just have a generic parking lot, but you should never leave the payee blank if you do something generic, like parking lot. Hey, the benefit is that you now have a list of all of the parking that you have ever paid for in one vendor. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:27:57] One of the reasons why I feel so strongly about Payees is because if you're running 1099, you need to know who you actually paid. And I can't tell you how many checks that I've had to chase down where they put in the check and what it's for, and they said subcontractors, but they didn't say who. So I don't feel payees are optional. So now when you are looking at your banking feed, if you go to the little gear in the upper right just above the grid, so not the big gear and settings gear, but the grid gear down next to the bank feed itself, there is an option to pop up a warning if the payee is blank. So if they try and categorize a transaction and they don't put anything in from two, it will ask are they sure? So yes, this is really, really going to help. The next change is going to be really helpful if you have a lot of bank accounts, or maybe you have a corporate credit card where all of your employees have 30 different Amex cards, I'm sure you know that you can use the slider like it only shows four accounts at a time, and you can scroll left and right, but some people have never actually clicked on the name of the credit card up above the four tiles. It'll say, you know what the what the full bank name is, but that is actually a drop down menu where you can move between the different accounts so you don't have to scroll, scroll scroll scroll scroll. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:29:25] You can drop down and pick it off of a list, but the change that they made is now you can search that list. There's now a search box up at the top, and so if you do have 30 Amex cards, you don't have to go scrolling up and down looking for them. You can just type in the last four digits of the card or the person's name or, you know, whatever naming convention you used for those cards. So definitely look for the drop down in the in the left and try out that search field. Now the next one I covered in a look what I found actually some time ago. This is not brand new, but so many people have no idea that it's there that we're highlighting it still as something that is new, and that is that you have the ability to drag and drop attachments directly into the banking feed. You can take any document and just drop it on top of the row itself, and then it will attach. Or if you've clicked on it and you can see the drawer drop down with all of the fields, you can drag and drop your attachment right onto that drawer and it will automatically attach. So what that means is you don't have to click on it and open it and click the attached link and then go navigate to it. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:30:37] You've got drag and drop super slick, super easy. Now. For quite a while now, the banking feed has had the ability to show you check images for banks that provide Intuit with check images so it doesn't work with all banks. And I'm always grateful when I can actually see the check images in line. But if you can't see them, it's not until it's fault, it's the bank's fault. But here's the cool part the check images. If you click on it, you'll look at it. And if you categorize the check, then that attachment has stayed with the transaction so that you can automatically open that attachment whenever you need to. But the problem was that if the transaction was already in QuickBooks, when you saw the attachment in the banking feed, it was not when you matched the transaction, the attachment was not getting added. But now it is. So if you already have the check entered, when you see the check image in the banking feed, it will now automatically add the attachment when you do a match. So thank you guys! That is definitely a good enhancement. Now this next one I am so happy about. And I know that this is specifically because Alicia has been vociferously pounding them and harassing them about this. So they finally solved it. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:32:06] The solved. The problem is that the first couple columns in the banking feed are the ones that come in from the statement. So the date, the bank description, and the dollar amount are all coming in from the feed. So they felt it was really important to keep those three first and then after. That is where you do your editing the from two column the match and matching and categorizing where you enter in the categories. So their philosophy was you put the import on the left and you put your data on the right. But I work with a lot of people who have to scroll around a lot or the from to get so tiny. It was only a couple letters large. Personally, for my workflow, I want my editable fields on the left and I want my reference information over on the right. So fast forward it's probably been about a year, almost a year from when I really started giving them that feedback. And now, lo and behold, when you click on the grid gear for the banking feed options, again, the little gear just above the banking feed, you can now see the columns and you can drag them in any order you want. So first thing that I did is I moved my from two. So it's right after the date. So now I personally have date and then the from two and then the categorize and then the bank description and then the amount. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:33:38] And so that allows me to just do my work on the left hand side and cross reference on the right when I have to go research that information. So this way you can make it any way you want. You can turn on and off the the attachments and the client requests if you don't need them. So they've really given you full ability to manage your display. You can also now resize the columns. So if the bank description needs to be lengthened so you can see the whole description, you can. And that tiny little from two that you can barely see a couple letters. You can now make it as big as you want. So that is fantastic. The other major problem that needed to be solved was that some people are on really small monitors, or have a really high resolution, and the action column on the far right where you match and post and actually accept the transactions for a lot of people was off screen. And every time you did a transaction, you had to scroll left, right, left, right, left, right to get to the post button. I've been asking them to put it over on the left hand side. They didn't do that for me, but what they did is the column is now frozen, so you can always see the match post action column whether you're scrolling, whether your screen's small, whether your screens big. It is always over on the right hand side, because I can't tell you how many people saw the match categorized slider and thought they were supposed to click on it to accept the transaction, and it wasn't happening. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:35:11] And so now, boom, you have that ability. There's even an option in the bank feed options gear to get rid of those match and categorize buttons. Now there's two different general workflows that people will use when they're using the bank feed. Some companies do all their transactions live as they're happening, and then use the banking feed in order to match and verify and confirm their work. But a lot of small businesses just live off of the banking feed, and they're using the banking feed in order to do their data entry. So in those cases, the match categorize button was not even necessary for them. And taking up a lot of real estate. So you now have the ability to turn off the match categorized slider. So if all you're doing is just categorizing from the banking feed and you don't have to go find a match somewhere, you can take that slider off to. The last thing you talked about were performance updates. They have been working really, really, really hard to make it so it's less sluggish. So the posting itself is faster than it was. But the big change that they made is that every time you would do a post, the page would freeze until that post was finished processing. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:36:28] And it didn't matter whether it was one transaction or ten transactions, but you couldn't move on until those were done. So they've now made it so that just the individual row that you are posting is frozen and you can still keep working. And if you're doing 10 or 12 all at one time, you no longer have to wait. You can go work on any of the other transactions besides those 12 while they post. So you are definitely going to be able to get your work done faster. Now, Eric ended the section with a poll and the the answer the questions. The question was, are you and your clients using the new banking feed? And the four answers were yes, we love it, yes, but we're still getting used to it now. We didn't like it, so we went back to the old version and no, we haven't tried it yet. And the answers that came out were 15% said yes, we love it and I'm in that boat. I really do like the new banking feed. 38%, yes, but we're still getting used to it. And those 38% are going to be really, really happy with the changes that I just discussed. 13% said no. We went back to the old version and this is the time, like I said, to go to the new version and get your feedback in. And then 33% said, no, we haven't tried it yet. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:37:48] And same deal for you guys too. So, you know, that sounds like there are about 60% adoption. And I do like the new banking feed. I like a lot of the efficiencies in it. So it is worth a try and it is ready for prime time. All right. We're going to switch gears again. The next topic is business tax AI and a new deduction maximizer. The presenter was Tricia Delgaudio who's the principal marketing manager on AI and AI. And Intuit is really kind of making sure that AI isn't the the be all and end all that the human intelligence is still really featured and fostered. So what they're doing is they're using AI to help your business owners maximize their deductions, because that is the question that everybody is always asking their accountant, how can I lower my taxes? So what they did is they're building an AI tool that suggests overlooked tax deductions based on the business type, making suggestions for transactions that maybe were paid in their personal accounts, and surfacing some data that the accountant might not have seen. So this is specifically for QuickBooks customers who are either sole proprietors, s corps or partnerships. And it's available to about 95% of eligible Qbo customers. They started rolling it out in January and it's almost completely out. Now, what's funny is that the place it is is probably a place that you have never looked. When you're in your qbo and you're looking at the all apps down at the bottom there's a section called Business Tax. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:39:30] And I'm guessing like maybe two of you have ever clicked on it. So go in right now, click on all apps, click on Business Tax and see what's there. There's several different sections, but the one that we're going to talk about is the Get tax ready checklist. I do want to note that this is just in the US right now, and it's also worth noting that this is while it's available in all versions of QuickBooks, the only people who can see it and use it are the primary admin and the company admins. When you go to all apps and click on Business Tax, there's three different sections. There's an overview, a tax summary, and year end filing. We're going to specifically talk about the about the deduction maximizer. And that is also found on the business feed. So when you're on your home screen up at the top there's the boxes up at the top that are using AI to surface insights for you. And one of the things that you will see there is the business Feed's missing deductions analysis. When you go to business tax and click on the overview screen, what it's going to do is give you your business tax at a glance. It starts with a chart of your taxable profit, with a bar for your total income and another bar for your total deductions, which is essentially your expenses. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:40:55] It has a little box that talks about your federal tax deadlines. So when are your annual taxes due? When are your Q1 and Q2 estimated taxes do? When is the extension, you know, dates like that. And then there's a section forget your taxes ready. So there's one section for reviewing your tax mapping for accuracy. I have not explored that one yet, so stay tuned and we'll come back around on that one. But then there's the new one for the missing deductions. When you click on it, it will tell you how much how many expenses are deductible so far for this year. And then what it's doing is it takes your industry. So the example that I'm looking at on my screen is commercial Photography, and then it's using its large language model to surface. What kinds of photography expenses might some people have forgotten to classify? Contest entry fees, continuing education? Professional association membership dues. If you're traveling for a photo shoot, are you capturing all of your tips for service providers, or do you need laundry and dry cleaning for the costuming that you're using in the trip? Now that one, I think we we could actually have a whole episode just debating on whether that is actually a deduction or not. So I'm kind of surprised to see that here. Um, and then making sure that you're capturing your depreciation on your camera and your lenses, bonus depreciation on computer equipment. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:42:33] You know, so it's highlighting some things here that your tax provider should be telling you about, but it gives you a list to take to your tax provider to make sure that they're covering all of their bases, making sure you're capturing all your legal and professional services like payments to photo retouchers and stylists and makeup artists and location scouting service fees, and your 50% deduction on related meals for your crew and assistants, and then advertising as well. Portfolio printing, client appreciation gifts. So basically, I'm reading off of this list now. This is a great list for you to take to your tax preparer and make sure that they have thought of everything. But one of the things that they highlighted during this is that they're trying to focus some of this on expenses that are typically paid in cash, like tips, or paid in accounts that might not be connected to QBO. You know, if you're paying your your makeup artist by Venmo, is that getting captured in your QuickBooks? Maybe you hadn't thought of it. So this definitely serves as a good tickler or a good reminder for making sure that you're capturing every deduction that you are eligible for. Now, as far as capturing business expenses that were paid from personal. One of the things that I teach in my classes is what I call quote unquote, Bank of Bob. Because anything that you have paid for personally is an owner investment in the company. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:44:09] And if you try to put something straight to the equity category owner investment, the only thing you can do in that register is enter a journal entry, which means that you lose the rest of QBO intelligence for how to manage expenses. So I like making real expenses for my real expenses. So what I do in order to make sure that I've got personal expenses and again, this has nothing to do with in the know. This is just Alicia teaching you something right now. But what I do is I make a checking account called Bank of Bob if I'm being funny, or personal funds used if I'm being serious. But if I'm doing Bank of Bob, I generally put in the owner's name. So it would be like Bank of Alicia, and then you pay for those expenses that were paid by personal out of Bank of Alicia or Bank of Bob. And then that way you can capture the vendor and the class and the tags and the details and everything, the, the locations, everything that you need about that transaction. And it shows up fully and appropriately in all of the reports. And then at the end of the month, I make a journal entry that transfers the balance of Bank of Bob to owner investment. So it's still an owner investment, but I get all of the details. So the reason why I bring that up here is so that when you look at this list of deductions that you might have missed and they were paid from personal, that's how I would approach getting them into your system. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:45:40] All right. So now we're turning our attention to Intuit Accountant Suite. Not to be confused with Intuit Enterprise Suite. It's Intuit Accountant Suite and Intuit Accountant Suite. I'm saying it a lot because I'm still tripping over it is the initials are IAS and this is the replacement for Qbo for accountants or QBO. It really is Qbo. So I know that they announced like they're getting rid of Qbo. It doesn't mean they're getting rid of the accountant module. It just means they're getting rid of the interface with the black bar down the side. So you've got this new thing that's rolling out. Go ahead and sign up for it now. Dan and I just did a whole deep dive into Intuit Accountant Suite just last week. So go listen to the previous episode. But what this announcement is, um, the guest was Chandrakant Nemoria, who's the staff project manager for the Small Business Group, and he started with a poll question about how we organize ourselves. How do we organize our team within our firm? Do we organize the staff by service line, by industry, by geography, or, you know, the choice for is we don't organize by team or pod because not everybody is on a team. There's a lot of people listening to this podcast who are solopreneurs, which is great, which is fine, but this feature is geared specifically for when you do have a team and you are managing multiple people on your staff, you have to manage their own access and their user permissions, and you also have to manage the clients that they are assigned to. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:47:20] And in Qbo, you had to go into each team member and set their permissions and then assign their clients one after another after another. And that was really time consuming to do it piecemeal as a one off process. So what they did in Intuit Accountant Suite, the new accelerate version, which is the paid one. So it's not there if you don't need it and you pay for it. If you do need it. You can manage your firm by creating user groups where you can make logical groupings of your team members and your clients so that you can manage their access at scale instead of one at a time. So it is a paid version, but it's paid because you don't need it if you're just solo. The beta is opening next month in March. And the way that you get to it is you go into your navigator to team and then user groups and you click Create New User Group and it is available in US, Canada, UK and Australia. So you could add groups by location like your Chicago branch and your New York branch and your San Francisco branch. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:48:33] Or you could do it by role that you have all of your juniors together, and all of your managers together, or all of the people doing the work, and then all of the approvers together so you can organize your team in any way that you want to organize them. And then you can also group your clients. You can group them by industry. You can group them by size. You can have all your LLCs together and all of your S Corp's together. However you want to do it, you do it. So you click Create New User Group and you name the group and you pick the the team members who are going to be in it. And then you assign them all the permissions levels that you want them to have. And then you can create another group and pick the from the same group of people. So people can be in more than one group. However, they do have to have the same user permissions across all the groups that they're in. So if you assign a user as Standard all access in one and then company admin in another. It will ask, well, which one do you want to use. So you're going to have to go with the higher the higher level if you want it to be functional. And then once you're done, it gives you a dashboard of groups with how many members are in each group and how many clients are in are assigned to that group. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:49:54] He ended with another poll, and the question was, how do you feel about the level of client access your firm uses? And 34% said confident, 21% said nervous. We use broad permissions, 2% said stressed. We audit constantly and 44% said not relevant. So that's showing us that 44% of accountant users right now are still solopreneurs, or only have a handful of people and don't need to create groups, whereas 55% or 56% are actually part of firms where they do have team management. Now, personally, my experience with user permissions still is not ideal and perfect. I frequently have one user who's an employee of the business who we need them to do this specific thing, but QBO has it locked down from one of the elements that they need, so I always start them with the tightest level, and then if it doesn't work, we open it up and open it up. The last time I tried, for example, project manager, they still couldn't create a new project because they couldn't create a new customer, so we had to give them full access. Okay, so those are a whole lot of innovation happening really rapidly. And I'm sure everybody here has heard at least one thing that has got them jazzed. And so hopefully you're finishing your dog walk and racing back to your computer to go and test it out and see what's what. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:51:26] So I'm going to end it by helping out with their announcements and what's around the corner until it does have a podcast called On the Books. And the hosts are Jessica McCracken and Ted Callahan. And there was a recent episode with an interview with Suzanne Goodarzi, who's the the CEO of Intuit. And there was also an episode with Jacqueline Anku and the team out at Utah Valley University. And they're talking about upskilling a million students. So Intuit is actually leaning now into college education and high school education and trying to boost the accounting industry by getting the kids while they're still exploring all of their options. So I'm really excited about the work that they're all doing now. They also announced another series called Intuit Connect On. Now, unfortunately, it did happen a couple days ago, so it's too late for this one. But I think this is the second one that I've seen, so it might be a series, but they are giving you CPE credit to hear from Intuit leaders and guest speakers. So keep an eye out for Intuit connect on now. They made a very vague announcement that I have no idea what they actually meant from it. Uh, it says automation where it counts human when it matters. This July, transform how you run your business. With a new team of Intuit AI agents and trusted experts, Intuit is introducing a new kind of AI to its platform. Intuit AI agents will complete work for you, handling the day to day tasks on your behalf, such as sending invoices, tracking payments, reconciling your books, and helping manage your customer leads. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:53:12] With real time help and insights and task automation. You can move faster, operate smarter, and unlock new levels of productivity and growth. So I don't know what that means. I have not heard about it from any of my contacts yet. So starting this July, something's coming. We will keep you posted as we learn about it. All right then the next in the Know is going to be on March 19th at 11 a.m., and you can go to firm of the future. Com to find their announcement and register. So thank you all very much for listening to this recap. Lots of really cool stuff happening in there. It looks like they're really solving a lot of our pain points and making a better product. So thank you into it. All right. Now I end every segment with a what's going on in your world. Now, the last two weeks I taught two of my hardest classes, both to teach and for advanced information, and they were tricky situations in QuickBooks online and Accrual accounting. The tricky situations is a class for how to do car loans and bounced checks and refunding vendor credits if they involve inventory and how to manage corporate credit cards properly. You know the things that you need to know in real life to use QuickBooks well. Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT: [00:54:37] So if any of those topics are interesting to you, go ahead and check out Tricky Situations and the link will be in the show notes. Or you can go to com and click on the calendar and navigate to it. When I teach these live they're recorded and then the recordings are made available. And you can get CPE credit even if you're watching the replay. Now this past week I just taught accrual accounting, which is, you know, I don't need to explain to all of you what accrual accounting is, but it's all of the complicated workflows that are based on the timing of your transactions. So we're going into prepaid expenses and revenue recognition. And the more complicated workflows that more advanced companies need. So that is a really interesting class for those of you who are experts to pick up a little some a few extra nuggets. And then in the next couple of weeks, I'm going into my QuickBooks Online Hacks class, where I show you how to game the system and use all my tips and tricks to do your work faster. And then ten Best Practices, which is kind of a beginner level class where I talk about the biggest mistakes that people make in QuickBooks and how to be proactive so that you don't make them too. So check us out at Royal Comm. We have a brand new website. Um, and I would love to see you all in class. So thank you all for listening to the deep dive of and Now you know, this is Alicia Pollock, and I will see you in the next one.