Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast

In this episode Hector and Alicia discuss the latest updates to the QuickBooks ecosystem for June 2024. They cover new features like the QuickBooks Online desktop app, backdating paychecks, split billing for accountants, I-9 employment verification, and QuickBooks BillPay Elite. They also share their experiences from recent accounting conferences and tease upcoming episodes on QuickBooks price changes and desktop updates. Additionally, Alicia reveals she's writing a new book on converting from QuickBooks Desktop to Online.


  • (00:00) - Welcome to The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast
  • (01:58) - Recap of Scaling New Heights Conference
  • (03:04) - The Importance of Community in Conferences
  • (04:22) - Comparing Different Conferences
  • (08:00) - QuickBooks Online Desktop App Updates
  • (09:59) - Backdating Paychecks in QuickBooks Online Payroll
  • (15:56) - Introducing Split Billing in QuickBooks
  • (28:03) - I-9 Employment Verification via Workforce Portal
  • (30:07) - QuickBooks BillPay Elite for Accountants
  • (34:25) - Upcoming QuickBooks Updates and Price Changes
  • (35:46) - Final Thoughts and Upcoming Events

Send your Questions/Comments (we could read/answer them on air) ask@uqapodcast.com

Links/Apps Mentioned in this episode:

Creators & Guests

Host
Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT
Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT is the CEO at Royalwise Solutions, Inc.. As a Top 50 Women in Accounting, Top 10 ProAdvisor, and member of the Intuit Trainer/Writer Network, Alicia is a popular speaker at QuickBooks Connect and Scaling New Heights. She has a Master of Arts in Teaching, with several QuickBooks books on Amazon. Her Royalwise OWLS (On-Demand Web-based Learning Solutions) at learn.royalwise.com is a NASBA CPE-approved QBO and Apple training portal for accounting firms, bookkeepers, and business owners.
Host
Hector Garcia, CPA
Hector Garcia,CPA is the Principal Accountant Quick Bookkeeping & Accounting LLC, a globally-serving Technology-Accounting firm based in Miami, FL (USA), specializing in QuickBooks Consulting, but also providing traditional accounting services such as: Bookkeeping, Payroll Processing, Tax Return Preparation, and General Business Advisory. He has over 10 years of experience working with small business finance and accounting, along with 3 Post-graduate degrees from Florida International University (FIU) in Accounting, Finance and Taxation.

What is Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast?

Stay up-to-date on the latest QuickBooks news, tips, and updates with Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors Hector Garcia, CPA and Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT. Hector and Alicia break down need-to-know QuickBooks information in a fun and engaging format. Learn about new product features, accounting technology trends, integration how-tos, and best practices for getting the most out of QuickBooks all while earning NASBA-approved CPE.

There may be errors in spelling, grammar, and accuracy in this machine-generated transcript.

Welcome to the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast. I am joined by my good friend Alicia Katz Pollack, the original, the one and only Qbo Rockstar CEO and founder of Royal Way Solutions.

Speaker2: And I have the privilege of collaborating with Hector Garcia's CPA, the founder of Right Tool for QuickBooks.

Hector Garcia: In this episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, [00:00:30] we're going to be talking about the updates to QuickBooks, uh, actually the entire QuickBooks ecosystem for June of 2024. Hey, Alicia, how are you?

Speaker2: I am doing great. I just got back from scaling new heights and had the time of my life as always.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, scaling new Heights is a great conference, and we had a whole episode where we talked about all the conferences that we're going to and why we like some, and the differences between them and that sort of thing. Any key takeaways from scaling new Heights, something that you came home with [00:01:00] feeling excited about and energized about?

Speaker2: Well, I thought Heather Satterlee did a fantastic job selecting the breakout sessions that were never so many that I wanted to go to, all scheduled at the same time. And so the the sessions were absolutely top notch. They honored our vendor requests for the exhibit hall to stay open for longer hours. So it was a better experience for me as a sponsor. And it was it's always just so fantastic having actual [00:01:30] face time with the people that I see on social media all the time. The the people in our community are just as much my friends as the people here in Portland.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, absolutely. And I've I've heard from many, many people. Best one ever. Best one ever. Like it's a very common theme that we get. And I often think about when I think about like almost every conference, I walk out excited. I walk out energized. Like it's very difficult to walk out disappointed, especially from like the big ones QuickBooks Connect [00:02:00] or Intuit Connect. Uh, scaling new heights, uh, the, the conferences that have the community behind them. And one of the big questions I often ask is, is it the conference or is it the community? Is it, is it is it the main stage or is it the peers? You know, is it the the breakout sessions or the conversations after the breakout sessions? And the reality is, it's both because if the conference wasn't good, people wouldn't flock to it. I would [00:02:30] say most people when when they really walk out energized is because they made at least one deep connection, whether it was a deep connection with themselves and obviously more esoteric concept, but made a big connection with themselves because they heard something from a main stage or a breakout session that made them have a mindset shift, or they made a deep connection with someone else where they didn't realize that someone else could actually give them some value by simply just sharing a life [00:03:00] experience, you know, by running a firm. So it's a the conference or is it the the community?

Speaker2: Well, I'm going to say from my experiences this year that I my answer now is different than I might have answered a year ago, because this year I'm going to a lot of conferences that are outside the ProAdvisor space and more in the CPA space since we're leveling up royal wise into accounting firms. And so I've been to 3 or 4 conferences that I'd never, ever been to before. [00:03:30] And they were nice, but they weren't vibrant and exciting. The way that Intuit connect and scaling new heights are. So I think that there's a lot to it for the the production values of the conference really go a long way, and I think a lot of my experience wasn't nearly as enthusiastic because I didn't have my community there. I was an unknown quantity. It's actually very, very different going from scaling new [00:04:00] heights where like people were walking up to me asking me to sign their books, like where there's like a whole community and almost like a almost like a celebrity element for me, where I'm a known quantity versus going to the CPA conference where they think I'm a sales person behind my table. They don't realize that I do all these things out in the accounting space. So I'm going to say it's got to be 50 over 50.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, it is as a as a not just a conference [00:04:30] goer, but as a person that has a booth there that has, um, that is selling to people, I guess the big, the big not selling to people, but like, you know, explaining what you do. So in case someone that needs what you do, we'll buy it from you. I wonder whether it's better for us to go to a place where people already recognize us and get sort of, sort of confirmation bias that you're great, you're great, you're great, and they're already bought from us. Right. And then essentially we're just like, you know, going going to talk to our current customers or [00:05:00] to go to a place where nobody knows you and a bigger opportunity to sell to a brand new crowd. So that's that's an interesting thing, an interesting dichotomy to think about, right? Yeah.

Speaker2: I mean, I felt very much at these new conferences for me, the way I did at my first scaling and my first QuickBooks connect back in the day when I showed up literally not knowing anybody. And it took years of building. So I know that I have to. Have this experience of starting from scratch [00:05:30] in order to introduce what we do to a whole new audience that has never heard of us before. So I have to start somewhere. And so it's kind of it's kind of refreshing to be introduced to people, even during my breakout session at one of them, when I was listening to the other trainers in the space, and I mentioned Hector Garcia, and nobody had heard of you either. So it's definitely a whole different element of our of our profession. [00:06:00] I didn't realize how segmented the Proadvisors were versus CPAs until this year.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I went to a North Carolina CPA conference where, like, literally nobody knew who I was, and I was teaching an Excel and a QuickBooks class. And then one guy after came to me and says, hey, man, you know, you're really good at this. You should consider doing some YouTube videos. And I was like, no, take it, I'll start. I'll start doing that. Uh, anyway, so if you didn't. So if you didn't go [00:06:30] to scale new heights this year and you're getting FOMO from our conversation, go next year scaling new heights. Com we're not being paid or sponsored to say this. We both of us we love that conference. Orlando, June 2025. Check it out. Let's jump to what's new in the world of QuickBooks for June. So if you go to the in the no webinar recording, which you can see in the Intuit Accountants YouTube channel, or maybe you watch the live, or if you read the Firm of the future article for June, the first [00:07:00] thing to talk about is the QuickBooks desktop, the QuickBooks Online desktop app, or the desktop app for QuickBooks online, which we happen to have covered in a previous episode In Depth. Like we talked about it pretty deep, and it was completely serendipity that they had just released the new features. When we were talking about it, I actually didn't even know that I was working on, quote, the new version that was supposed to be announced in June.

Hector Garcia: So Alicia and I went through [00:07:30] what the QuickBooks desktop app without actually knowing that they had just added a couple of new things to it, and now they finally, you know, went out into the open and said, hey, we added a bunch of new things to it, so we don't need to talk about it. But one thing that Alicia and I mentioned to each other were like, huh? With multiple tabs in the QuickBooks Online desktop app or the desktop app for QuickBooks online with multiple tabs, you could have one company file and tab A, one company file, and tab B one company file. On [00:08:00] tab C, we said, hey, we wish there was color coding. So I know like you know, orange means one company, blue means one company, etc.. And we actually didn't realize what we were looking at it that we actually had color coding. The problem was it was dark purple, brown and black. So we actually didn't notice that there was color coding. So it was a bit of the impression that they took feedback from us, but it wasn't really the case. They had released the color coding. So just notice that piece because we didn't cover that. At least I remember that conversation.

Speaker2: I absolutely remember that conversation. [00:08:30] I remember going, God, it would be so cool if these were color coded. And I guess we just didn't figure out how to turn on the color coding from that.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. So so that's the desktop app for QuickBooks online. Let's talk about backdating paychecks or what we in the old school QuickBooks desktop world used to call after the fact payroll. So quick background in QuickBooks Online Payroll, you could only create a check, you know, with today's date or a future date. Uh, especially [00:09:00] if you're gonna do, uh, direct deposit. You can only use a future date, of course, because direct deposit takes a couple of days, and you could never go back and backdate the payroll where, like, for example, you wrote a manual paycheck by hand a week ago or two weeks ago, and you just wanted to go out there and record that that was never possible in Qbo. The big workaround that we used to do is, oh, we wrote a back check. I'm going to call that check alone. And then on the new check with today's date, I'm going to like [00:09:30] back out the loan from it and basically zero out the check. So there was always this sort of catch up mode where you could never, like backdate a paycheck. And there's all sorts of like, I don't want to call it security, but more like, uh, penalty avoiding, uh, reasoning for that where Qbo doesn't want to expose you to like an IRS error or expose themselves because Qbo does full service payroll, but it looks like they've managed to figure out a way to do this. I [00:10:00] haven't quite figured out how how it works. If there's like an amended return that you have to build in the backdating process. But for the time being, what I understand is you can backdate a paycheck as long as it doesn't cross that quarter where you have to amend the return. So, Alicia, what do you know about that or what are your what is your experiences with backdating paychecks?

Speaker2: I'm mostly the way that I think about it is the fact that. Sometimes you have to run a payroll that the date was in [00:10:30] the past and up until now you could only use today's date and forward, since I haven't tried it yet. Since it's brand new, I don't know if it has to be like a correction on a previous payroll, or just like maybe you didn't run it last week. I know that a lot of the time I wind up with clients who like, maybe their payroll wasn't set up yet, and all they did was write the net check to the employee, and they have to go back and actually create the proper paycheck with all of the taxes. And so this is new enough that I [00:11:00] haven't had the chance to dive in and play with it. But I love the fact that I'm going to be able to do that for my clients. I've got somebody right now that I think we just did it just before this was released, because it took us hours to get it up and running. So I am very, very happy that we can have a window before beforehand. Now the part that I'm questioning is it does say open tax quarter, but if you're paying your federal taxes monthly what's the impact. So [00:11:30] I'm wondering how they manage that. Does it have to be in the current month or the current um, 941 period, or is it really quarter based?

Hector Garcia: Yeah. Once we actually start testing it with a live clients, we'll come back and report any gotchas, anything that's interesting. One thing we can tell you from the article and from the webinar is that when you do actually go run the paycheck and you choose, that is an after the fact, uh, paycheck or a backdated paycheck, it will give you a [00:12:00] warning that says the following. And I think this is key here. And we start getting some answers to our questions here, which is they actually give you a little pop up that says if you didn't pay or underpay, an employee used today's date to avoid possible notices or penalties. So they're actually allowing you to break it. That's what it basically is saying. It's saying we suggest that you don't break it. Use today's date. But if you have to break it, there's kind of a little warning there saying to avoid notices [00:12:30] and penalties when you backdate a payroll, we calculate the taxes you owe, um, to keep you compliant, visit the tax center and view and address any taxes you might owe. So what I'm what we're thinking is happening is you you will create the after the fact payroll and it will then calculate it will go back and calculate the difference between the taxes that you paid and what you should have paid. What we do not know yet because we haven't done it, is will there be a way to electronically [00:13:00] pay that difference, which I assume it can, because you can do that.

Hector Garcia: Like in US tax terms, you can go to EFT gov and make an an IRS payment. I don't know if it's related to state because some states, some states allow easy digital payment of of of of taxes. Some only allow the payment to be bundled with the tax return like Florida is like that for example. So we don't know in the state portion how this backdating errors, changes [00:13:30] to paychecks will allow you to electronically pay that difference or not. Um, there's also a little checkbox in QuickBooks that says automate taxes and forms that you can turn on and basically turn QuickBooks becomes a full service system. One of the things I'm thinking is kind of based on the webinar and the articles is that if you backdate a paycheck, the automated taxes and forms gets turned off. And I kind of saw that live on that. So I wonder [00:14:00] if you have to call in and turn it back on. And so this is a questions that we have that until we actually do one. And I'm not going to play with a client just to see what happens. Like I have to wait until I have this situation. But I think these are the questions that I have about it at the moment. Right?

Speaker2: Yeah. I mean, those those are good questions. I know that with some tax payments, like the sales tax, if you make a change in the quarter, they'll roll the differences into the following tax payment. But you can't do that with payroll. So I'll be really curious to see how this plays out. Yeah I'm not asking [00:14:30] any of my clients out there to to need this please. But it's nice that we're going to have some additional flexibility.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. So we're excited about this. So next thing we're going to discuss is the concept of split billing okay. Now this is really cool. Um, conceptually I guess we're going to have to kind of see how this works in practice. But this is probably one of the biggest feedback items that you hear. Accountants. Uh, Alicia has done. Yeah. [00:15:00] Verbal about this forever. Uh, Alicia, tell us about split billing. Give us a sermon on split billing.

Speaker2: Oh, yeah. Now, this is one that I'm really happy to see because, um, the idea here is that you have some of your client costs, like your Qbo subscription is fixed. It's the same every single month. But then you have others like payroll, because you have a different number of employees every single month, or 1099 filings because you don't know how many you're. Going to have or QB bill pay, because if [00:15:30] you go over your allotted month, you're going to have extra, extra fees. So the problem that I have is that with my wholesale plan, which is going back ten years and I've got probably 60 people on it, as every time my bill comes in every month, I have to look at my people who are on payroll and see how many employees they have, and then go into their automatic billing and my recurring transactions and edit every single one of their next recurring transactions to change the number of [00:16:00] employees. So I'm always trailing by a month, and I have to do this every single month. So the idea of taking them off and breaking apart their QuickBooks subscription and their payroll and have them self pay on their payroll, instead of me having to go into all of my recurring transactions and add or subtract an employee or two every single month, I'm stoked. Very stoked that they can do this now.

Hector Garcia: And the common [00:16:30] theme here is that your core QuickBooks online subscription is a fixed monthly fee, but the payroll, uh, QuickBooks time bill pay 1099 contractors. All these things are based on volume, right? So like payroll has a charge per employee. Uh, QuickBooks time is per employee. Uh, 1099 is per contractor. Uh, bill pay is based on whether they paid immediately or paid with a check, a handwritten [00:17:00] check, or whatever. You print the check that QuickBooks sends or if it's, you know, ACH or whatever. So it is it is these add on services to QuickBooks online that have variable pricing. That makes it very challenging for an accountant to do what Intuit has been suggesting that we do, which is build it in your services. We've heard that forever. Build it in your services. But I have a client that one year could have 100 contractors, another year could have 500 contractors. And because [00:17:30] yeah, we do we do value pricing. So we try to price it high enough that if there's a variability, you know, it's covered. But it's not like QuickBooks services are cheap. You know, it's not like, oh, it's only a dollar per employee. It really isn't. Sometimes it's like five bucks or six bucks per employee. And that could be a variation of, you know, for some clients of a couple of hundred bucks in one month. So, so, so we as accountants don't want to also overcharge our clients for passing through this cost. And this essentially fixes [00:18:00] the problem. If you tell the client qbo that's included that will include that that's that's core payroll. That's your choice. Because you could go to ADP, you can go to gusto, you can go to QuickBooks. You're making the choice to go to Qbi or payroll. Maybe we're suggesting that you go to Qbi or payroll, but this is the pricing that Qbi or payroll has. And as you add employees and remove employees, this will be variable. You pay that on your own. I love that idea. Now, Alicia, you had a question. Go ahead.

Speaker2: Oh, yeah. The the the reason why I haven't been able to flat [00:18:30] Bill this is because the way that I run my wholesale program is I give my clients a 10% discount off of the retail of the services. But if I bumped up the price to accommodate any changes in employees, then they're not getting any benefit from being with me at all on this. So the way that this is going to work now is that when you onboard a new client and you set up their QuickBooks and you create the subscription, [00:19:00] you already have the ability to either add them to your own wholesale or to give them a direct pay route where they get 30% off for the first year. What this is going to allow you to do is bill your firm for their Qbo subscription, because you've hopefully built it into your flat rate fees, and then let the client do the direct pay with the discount on the payroll component or the the online bill pay component. So you're getting billed for the subscription. They're [00:19:30] getting billed for their direct services. And I think it's brilliant. I'm I'm really happy that they were able to figure this out. This was a pain point.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. And it's I think it's good to mention that you still have the choice again to pay for it yourself forever. 30% off. Uh, give the client a discount, but they don't. There's no revenue sharing. So your client gets 30% off the first year, and then they pay full price, or, uh, you split bill, [00:20:00] you don't offer the client a discount. They get the standard 50% off for the first three months. But then for the first 12 months, you get a cut, you get you get 30% of the revenue. So this is going to make it much easier to actually start using this revenue sharing program. Uh, because before you had to like if you brought in the the core. For accounting client, and you're paying for the qbo file. Um, you know, [00:20:30] this is a good opportunity to sort of upsell payroll. So, um, a lot of people don't change payroll in the middle of the year. Uh, people are using ADP or gusto or whatever. They're probably going to continue using it. But coming December or January, you're going to see a lot of activity in this area.

Speaker2: Yeah, for me, my revenue share doesn't work. There's some sort of error in my system, so I don't even get to use it at all. But instead I work with, uh, CBG Complete Business Group as a qsp. And even then, this is going to [00:21:00] I can incorporate this same split pay model into my billing through them to.

Hector Garcia: Right? Right. The only thing is that when you're a reseller, you have to get the account created outside of the QuickBooks Online Accountant portal. And this is all within the QuickBooks accountant portal, which adds tons of flexibility. And like most of us accountants, we don't want to call some 800 number to get something done. Like we we know how to press buttons. We're pretty slick at understanding these things, especially the [00:21:30] listeners of this podcast. You're listening to this because you're pretty savvy. I don't want to call some 800 number to add payroll client bill. Like I like self serving this stuff. And this is supposed to go live July 1st of 2024. Now, they did mention that after they go live with this, the next step is to go live with, uh, QuickBooks bill pay split billing. Uh, so they're only going to start with payroll 1099 and QuickBooks time. And then they set quote later [00:22:00] this year we'll add, uh, split billing with Qbo bill pay. So we'll wait to see, um, how that works. Um, but I do have an interesting question and comment for into it. Why didn't they think about QuickBooks Live as a, as an opportunity here? Because if you think about this, if Intuit Intuit's position is a QuickBooks Live, which is the live bookkeeping service doesn't compete with us. And as a matter of fact, it could be an added value to [00:22:30] us. You know, maybe as a ProAdvisor we pawn off the bookkeeping and then we focus on the advisory and the growth consulting and sort of thing within QuickBooks life be a good opportunity for us to sort of sell it to a client or wholesale it to a client, or split it with a client and start partnering with Intuit for this. Now, I know people listening to this are like, no, QuickBooks Live is the evil Hector. Why are you even talking about this? I'm like, this is worse moving. So I wonder if they're thinking about it or why they haven't even, [00:23:00] you know, started saying, you know, not just bill pay this year, but QuickBooks Live.

Speaker2: Yeah, I think it's a great idea. I look forward to that. I have further thoughts about QuickBooks Live, but I'm going to save that for the next time we do a real wheel of rants.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, okay. Yeah, we could do that. We could do that. The next thing they talked about is I-9 employment verification via the workforce portal. So I think this has been there for a couple of months already, but I guess they haven't really made a big announcement about it. But if [00:23:30] you have QuickBooks Online Payroll and you start onboarding your employee, and your employee goes to the process of creating the workforce, the QuickBooks workforce account, there will be a place where they can upload their documents, they can upload their ID, their passport, all the I-9 documents, and then once they click submit, uh, it can it will go check to see if you know that person, you know, all the, all the stuff, uh, matches. So that's pretty neat as some states are really enforcing I-9 employment verification. [00:24:00] It wasn't clear to me if this is an extra charge or if it's free included with it. You you recall seeing.

Speaker2: I think it's free. I didn't see anything about an extra charge. And, you know, they've been building out the workforce portal to have it do more and more self-service for on employee onboarding. So I expect that it's just an upload. My question is who's doing the verifications? Is it I looking to make sure that nothing's expired. What's the is the employer [00:24:30] still expected to go look and verify the documents. So I have some questions about it. But I think it makes perfect sense that as they've been moving towards having storing your employee documents inside their employee record inside Qbo payroll, I'm really happy that this is now a new service.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, I'm gonna make the assumption that they hired a third party provider that's been doing this forever and doing the, you know, the background check type of work, um, you know, using the API or the third party provider. [00:25:00] But I actually don't know if I if it's a person I don't know, but I assume they're doing, you know, like, I know some third party providers actually go and send the information to the Social Security, uh, um, uh, office and the Social Security office comes back and goes, yep, this is the Social Security. This is the name, this is the stuff. So I assume they're using a third party provider to verify this. And the last thing that they announced in the in the webinar and the firm of the future article is QuickBooks will [00:25:30] pay elite for accountants has been released. Now what's interesting about this is I did a whole video on this. It's actually in my YouTube channel. So you can go check my YouTube channel. It's called QuickBooks Billpay. It walks you step by step. How it works. I actually wrote myself a check for $10 and I, you know, and I waited for it to come in. I did the whole verification process. It was very painless. Like it literally, literally took like three days for me to do this.

Hector Garcia: I created the account. Um, [00:26:00] I have to put my personal information, just like with a payments account. You know, you have to. There's an underwriting process. Uh, then you have to add the bank account information, which you can do by manually putting the, um, routing number and the bank account number. Or you can use your login for those account banks that have the API. And then it sends like $0.10 or $0.12 or whatever to your bank account. You look at it, you confirm to just make sure the money's coming out from [00:26:30] truly your own account and avoid scams, you know, and that sort of thing. And then once you do that, you can literally start paying electronically or or via checks. And it was a very painless process. I'm actually very impressed. Now. Is it as powerful as Melio or Bill.com? No, it's it's it's going to be a very much simplified version. But the potential for Qbi bill pay is huge, because you will have one place where you have user IDs and, [00:27:00] uh, access permission levels, and you can say, this person can create bills, this person can pay bills, this person can, you know, cancel or delete bill payments or whatever.

Speaker2: So approved the.

Hector Garcia: Bills approve the bill before it gets paid. Of course, I missed that one. That was an important piece of the workflow. So especially when you start getting into like mid-market Qbo advanced world, some people are going to like having a single user ID that they manage and they change the permissions. The Bill.com is a lot more powerful. [00:27:30] The problem is that I have to now create a user in Qbo, figure out what that permission set is, create a user and Bill.com figure out what that permission is. Go to one app or the other to approve one thing or the other. I think people are moving towards, especially in the mid-market, to the ERP single system. I want to have one place to manage it all, but of course it's not going to be as powerful as a third party.

Speaker2: Well, with QuickBooks online advanced, the fact now that you have your bill pay workflows in [00:28:00] there and you can actually route your bills when it's created, send a notification to this person when it's approved, send a notification to this person. And the fact that they added multi level um approvers is fantastic. And so I think for some you know for. Straightforward needs. The new QuickBooks online bill pay is going to replace the need to turn to a third party, unless you have a lot of volume and complicated workflows.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, and needless to say, [00:28:30] you know, this came out a couple of months ago. It's not like this is new, but they finally rolled it out to accountants. Or at least most accountants should have it. And it's free for accountants. It's a $90 a month product that's free for accountants. Accountants will still need to pay the per transaction fee if they opt to do any of the additional per transaction fees, but um, standard ACH payments are all included with this. So accountants, you know, added to your qbo a master account. Start playing with it. [00:29:00] Once you feel comfortable, you should be able to, uh, recommend it to your clients.

Speaker2: I was actually surprised that it had multiple payments to one vendor, the ability to combine it. I wasn't expecting to see that right out of the gate. And so the fact that it was there, I was, you know, did a little happy dance.

Hector Garcia: That basically what you're saying is if you have three bills for the same vendor and you want to make one payment that pays three bills with QuickBooks, you normally can do, but we're saying we can do it through Qbi bill pay, which wasn't, uh, [00:29:30] released when it first came out. So that's out, which is great, very basic functionality, but it's out. We're very excited about that. So that's it for the article itself. Um, there were. Two other pieces of announcements that came out in June, which were not going to cover in detail in this episode. We're going to do a separate episode for that. One is, uh, price changes across the board coming up in Qbo and QuickBooks desktop. The desktop ones will surprise you, but it wouldn't surprise you. Like [00:30:00] it surprise you that they have the guts to go that big percentage wise. But it wouldn't surprise you because obviously they want to move out of the desktop platform and into Qbo, so we'll dedicate an episode to that. As a matter of fact, we already recorded the episode on that. We did a Willow Ranch that landed on price changes and we're like, okay, perfect. They literally just announced price changes. So we'll we'll release that soon. And the other thing that we have, we haven't recorded this one yet. This will be coming soon as well is they announced mid-year QuickBooks desktop [00:30:30] update changes. Now this is not a new for 2025. This is somehow in June, three months or 3 or 4 months before the traditional next year would get released. They release updates inside of the QuickBooks desktop version. So we have both changes in Pro Premier and we have changes in enterprise, and they're actually really good, cool changes. So we'll dedicate a whole episode of that, and you can check out the firm of the future article if you want to [00:31:00] get a preview to that. So with that being said, Alicia, what's going on in your world?

Speaker2: Well, coming down off the high from scaling new heights and now I'm getting ready for bridging the gap. I also am going to be doing a webinar for earmark. Remember when we did those that four episode series where we were going through my five page outline of all my considerations when I'm doing a desktop to Qbo conversion, and I was talking about it as a value added service for bookkeepers. Well, [00:31:30] earmark heard those sessions and asked me to do one with them. So it's on July 2nd. I'm not sure when this is getting released if it's in in time, but if you go over to earmark, I'm sure it's going to be recorded as well. But as I was prepping, I started writing another book. So when I started actually taking that five page outline and then explaining everything that was in each of those steps, I just started writing and writing and writing, and I got up to 60 pages before I said, okay, [00:32:00] enough's enough. And so I'm actually going to publish this as another book on Amazon, and so it will be ready to go. I'm going turbo on this. It will be ready to go by the July 2nd webinar.

Hector Garcia: Wow. That's that's quick. What's the title of the book or what's the what's the topic?

Speaker2: Uh, a Comprehensive Guide to converting from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks online.

Hector Garcia: Okay, so it's like a step by step guide or, you know, not just a conversion, but what you think about prior to the conversion, what you do after the conversion. Essentially, you've [00:32:30] now codified everything we covered in this. What I should get a royalty, I should get a royalty for being part of this, part of the developer process.

Speaker2: I thanked you in the acknowledgments.

Hector Garcia: Okay, well, I'll take that. I'll take that. So in my world, same thing. I'm actually going to meet, uh, Alicia in Chicago. So excited to to see her in person to person and talk shop, um, in person in in the Bridging the Gap in July. And, uh, just excited about my [00:33:00] conference, uh, reframe uh, in October in Fort Lauderdale and also the mini conference I'm doing in Dallas in August, uh, also under the Reframe brand, but with, uh, my friend Ed Kless, who's building a training session on how to become a consultant. Basically, he worked for Sage for, like, I don't know, a million years and Sage, uh, works with ERP, uh, implementing tech people. [00:33:30] Right. So the people that implement $100,000 software and they have to do these huge projects where like, it's a lot more than QuickBooks desktop to online conversion. Alicia, believe me, the really big projects and there's a lot more consulting that actual accounting happening because as you implement new software, you are essentially changing workflows. You're re-engineering processes to match the new software, or you are re-engineering the [00:34:00] software or adapting customizing the software to adapt to existing business workflows. That cannot be changed. And sometimes neither one of those things are straightforward. And it requires okay, let's stop. Let's think through this. Why do you need to move the paper from this, this place and get stamped at this place? And why does it need to get a yellow copy? And why does it have to get a signature from here? And why does it need to be stapled to this.

Hector Garcia: And why does it go in this folder? And why does it like we have to sometimes as consultants, [00:34:30] we have to break down some of these status quo processes that people build, that they're there because they're there. And you ask them, why do you do it like this? You're like, because we've always done it like this. And you're like, but has anybody ever stopped to ask why? So that's consulting. That's like that's to me, that's the heart of consulting. And I think accountants, we try not to get into that area. We try to say, okay, whatever, move the paper in whichever order you want. As long as you end up recording, [00:35:00] you know, the expense and scanning it and putting it in QuickBooks, and I can build a PNL and we can get the tax return out. I'm okay with it. And we tend to ignore all the stuff that happens prior to putting the transaction in in the system. So that was a long winded way to sell to say, hey, if you want to learn, you know, consulting and the consulting process, how to be a consultant, check out the Reframe event we're doing in August in Dallas. So we'll put links to Alicia's book, to the, um, to the [00:35:30] earmark webinar, to my conferences, to the Chicago conference that we're going to be there in July. We'll put links to all that. And with that being said, we'll see you in the next one.

Speaker2: See you in the next one.