Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast

Alicia and Hector dive deep into Intuit's newly announced Enterprise Suite, breaking down its features and potential impact on mid-market businesses. They discuss the platform's advanced multi-entity management capabilities, enhanced project tracking for construction companies, and the introduction of customizable dimensions. The hosts also speculate on pricing, integration with third-party apps, and how this new offering might reshape Intuit's relationship with solution providers and ProAdvisors.


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  • (00:00) - Welcome to the Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast
  • (00:27) - New Intuit Enterprise Suite
  • (01:25) - Initial Reactions and Key Features
  • (03:32) - Pricing Speculations and Customization
  • (09:21) - Multi-Company Management and User Permissions
  • (14:10) - Cross Entity Workflow Templates
  • (22:30) - Advanced Reporting and Project Management
  • (36:00) - AI and Integrations: Profitability Monitoring
  • (46:52) - AI Forecasting
  • (49:35) - Future Enhancements and Industry Customization
  • (52:33) - Upcoming Events and Training

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.

Hector Garcia: Welcome to the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast. I am joined by my good friend Alicia Cat Pollock, the original, the one and only Qbo Rockstar CEO and founder of Royal White Solutions.

Alicia Katz Pollock: 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 talk about the new Intuit Enterprise Suite. Now, this is a huge new announcement that we got recently. Now, for some context, we're actually recording this between the announcement and the official unveiling of this product to accountants. So depending on when you're listening to this, you may be listening to this prior to the official unveiling or or before. Now they did through slides [00:01:00] and screenshots and some announcements and some press releases. Talk about what Intuit Enterprise Suite is. So Alicia and I are going to do a combination of of reporting. We're going to tell you what we know. We're going to tell you what we don't know. And we'll probably propose that as a question. And we'll tell you what we're speculating based on our combined experience on how these things work. So anyway. Hey, Alicia, how are you?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh, I'm excellent. I'm really looking forward to this. [00:01:30] The In the Know yesterday was really eye opening. And all of these things that we've been hoping for and wondering, it's really nice that some of them are actually coming to fruition.

Hector Garcia: Now, the one most important thing I think we need to start with, especially if we have any, uh, sort of, um, highly experienced QuickBooks users that come from the desktop world is that this is not QuickBooks desktop enterprise on the cloud. It's not that. And Intuit was very, very [00:02:00] clear that they're not aiming towards trying to replicate what QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise is or was in a cloud platform. What this is going to be is going to feel a lot more like what we're used to with QuickBooks online. But since they don't use the word QuickBooks and they use the word Intuit, and this is a combination between what we know and what we can speculate based on everything we're seeing in how Intuit is branding, Intuit first and QuickBooks [00:02:30] second into a dome, the Intuit a conference that's coming up, Intuit Connect. What this is going to be is Intuit grabbing all of their assets. So grabbing their QuickBooks, right, their accounting software, their payroll, their QuickBooks time, which combined they're calling workforce management and HR solutions, which they're going to be continually adding more services to the sort of HR part of this. We [00:03:00] have obviously the MailChimp, which was a huge acquisition, you know, payments, QuickBooks, Bill pay, all of these things are going to be sort of packaged together as a single unified offering for the higher echelon of small businesses, or what Intuit is calling the mid-market. And we don't want to get into, like whether they're calling the mid-market the right group of people or not, but it's going to be the ones that are way beyond, you know, using QuickBooks [00:03:30] for 100 bucks a month type of thing.

Hector Garcia: And the other important thing is we actually do not know as of the date of this recording what the price is going to be. And I think, like especially accountants, the first thing we want to know is the price, because we want to know what category of customer we even need to get our brain wrapped around whether or not we should be thinking about this product. Right? Because when we look at the traditional pricing model of QuickBooks online. We have solopreneur at $20 a month. We have [00:04:00] simple start at $35 a month. We have essentials. At $65 a month, we have plus at $100 a month. And then we have advanced at 235. If you're thinking that this is going to be the next version of QuickBooks, if you're saying, oh, this is going to be one step above QuickBooks Online Advanced, then you're thinking that the price is going to be somewhere double of the 235. Right. So we went from plus to advanced. We doubled that price a little bit maybe a little bit over. [00:04:30] And Alicia did a whole episode on whether or not, um, QuickBooks online was worth the $210 or the the $110 more than plus was one thing that we can speculate is that this is not going to follow that model, that because they're bundling a whole bunch of things and because they're calling it mid-market and because they took the QuickBooks Live name out of it. And because they're trying to compete with the net sweets of the world, my speculation is you're going to see this probably [00:05:00] five times the price that QuickBooks Online Advanced is. Alicia, what are your thoughts on that?

Alicia Katz Pollock: So the key word here is that they're calling it a suite. And what they did indicate in the know is that right now the pricing depends on customers is actually a customized bespoke and a what's the word I want experience modular.

Hector Garcia: Maybe the modular might be.

Alicia Katz Pollock: The word modular right. So the pricing is going to depend on how many companies you have. Since it's [00:05:30] multi-company, whether you're doing project management and then your utilization of all of the different features. And so I also suspect that they're not announcing pricing right now because they're kind of pressure testing the elasticity. They want to know how much people are willing to pay for it before they come up with pricing. So I have a feeling that the, the, the sales calls are kind of a pricing experiment so that they can right price the suite for where people find the value. [00:06:00]

Hector Garcia: Yeah. So let me preface that she did sales calls in quotes because they actually specified on the announcement that this is not going to be something that you go to QuickBooks commies and you sign up like you actually have to talk to an Intuit Enterprise Suite specialist inside of the QuickBooks ecosystem. They're going to qualify the person. They're going to do questions and discovery, and then they're going to give a what looks like they're going to give a custom price or a custom package, [00:06:30] custom, uh, system based on the modules that they want. Like like Alicia said, are they using MailChimp? Yes or no? Are they using payroll? Yes or no? Do they have ten users or 50 users. So they have three companies. So they have 20 companies. So that's going to be the the key is that it's going to be more of a sort of custom pricing Scenario, which is going to put this suite in an entirely different category than QuickBooks online. So you also want to get the user thinking, oh, this is not QuickBooks [00:07:00] online. This is something else. But the screenshots I warned you. The screenshots that we saw, it looks like it's QuickBooks online with a different logo. I mean, like it just. And by the way, nothing wrong with that. Like if you already if you already have users that are familiar with the platform, you know, why would you completely redesign it? Like I understood that they probably had the decision say, should we redesign the whole thing so it also looks like something different? Or should we make it familiar so we can grab some of our existing QuickBooks online? Advanced clients that [00:07:30] maybe are are are reaching the top end of the features and getting them to upgrade sort of thing. So that was basically a decision they had to make.

Alicia Katz Pollock: They actually made it a point to say that they wanted it to still be a familiar platform, so that they didn't have to retrain everybody and have that loss of productivity that it. It looks like and it behaves just like the qbo that we're used to. It's just completely buffed with all kinds of new opportunities.

Hector Garcia: Now, [00:08:00] what.We don't know is if the underlying guts of it is regular QuickBooks online. And the reason why that would matter is because the conversion process from an enterprise client to QuickBooks online is usually an issue when the enterprise files are really big, when they contain tons of transactions, tons of targets. You know, there's a, I think, a 750,000 limit of how many targets the QuickBooks desktop file can have before you go to QuickBooks online. So if the guts of it is [00:08:30] regular good old QuickBooks online, then we don't know if when this thing launches. If you're going to be able to convert the larger QuickBooks enterprise clients without having to condense data straight into this. So that's, that's that goes under the category that we don't know of. A big question that it hasn't been answered yet, and hopefully in the next couple of webinars that are going to be announcing, I think September 26th is the big announcement to the resellers, and October 10th is the big announcement to the general accounting [00:09:00] population. I think that in those webinars, hopefully people will ask that question, because that's a significant one for people moving desktop to online or into an enterprise suite.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, with those dates, there's also a training on October 16th. So they've got three different events about this release.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. And we'll make sure that in the show notes we'll put links to all that. So maybe let's summarize what we, what we think they're going to launch with in terms of who this is for. [00:09:30] Alicia mentioned multi entity I believe that they're going to lead. They're going to lead with this is valuable because you manage three or 4 or 5 companies and the traditional QuickBooks online model has one subscription per company. Right. And the files don't talk to each other, right? They're all their own separate different files. Yes. You can use spreadsheet sync to run a consolidated PNL, but one of the biggest pain [00:10:00] points that any accountant and any end user can tell you when dealing with multi entity typically is dealing with intercompany transactions. So what I think they're going to be leading with and they talked about it in the in the know webinar and they showed some screenshots is not only this is going to be a place where you're going to easily switch between companies, but you're also going to be able to register a transaction in one company that belongs maybe in the balance sheet of the other company, and you're going to be able to cross over those transactions. [00:10:30] What what are your thoughts on that, Alicia. Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So the the way that this is being set up is that there's a parent company and then sub custom sub companies underneath it, but the child companies Essentially. And so all of the companies can see each other. And one of the examples of where it becomes multi-company is for example, due to froms, if you have multiple entities financing each other, and let's say you've got five companies, that means that you have five due to froms [00:11:00] that you have to manage, which is actually 25 different due to Froms. And so what this is bringing to the table is, for example, a journal entry in that journal entry, you can actually now specify the company on the line item. So if you are let's say you're paying rent across five companies, you can break down that rent payment into each of the five. And then it creates the due to froms across all of the entities, or just simply splits those expenses so that you don't need [00:11:30] to manage due to froms. So it was something that was pretty interesting how they were approaching it.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. To be clear, we haven't seen the mechanics of this, but I mean, obviously the working theory is that the parent company, the corporate company makes one expenditure that is supposed to be spread across multiple companies. And supposedly there will be a workflow to automate the journal entries to register that everywhere. Now, when it comes to multi company or multi entity, the other challenge [00:12:00] that most people have is managing user permissions across multiple entities. Like you could have an employee that has full access to all companies, or an employee that has full access to two of the five companies, and maybe limited view only access to three of the companies. So one of the things that they proposed is that into an enterprise suite, it's going to give you the ability to to visualize what one user has access to across all the companies. So you can have one user, all the companies listed, and you can say, [00:12:30] this user has this role, they're the bookkeeper on this company, or they're the payroll manager in this company, or they're full admin on this company. So I really like that. Alicia. Any thoughts on that?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, the universal granular permissions is one of the hallmarks of this, that you can set the permissions for one person and spread them out across all of the files, or set the permissions for a role and spread them all out across the files, so that you don't have to go to each company individually and set all the permissions in that one [00:13:00] company.

Hector Garcia: Now, they did mention that they were going to have more, quote, granular permissions. Now I don't know. And this wasn't clear if they're touting the granular permissions that's already available in QuickBooks Online Advanced. And they were using it just to kind of like connect the dots in terms of this is these are the needs of the mid market. Or if this um, into an enterprise suite will have more granular permissions that Qbo advance has. I think [00:13:30] Alicia and I have done an episode where we talked about the shortcomings of that, and we probably should do one an update pretty soon on all the things that they've changed on granular user permissions, but they did not specify whether it was going to be more or, you know, more than what Qbo advance has, or something more similar to a QuickBooks enterprise has. So did you hear anything on that?

Alicia Katz Pollock: They weren't specific at all. I would assume that right now, since they're just getting going, they're just adopting the model that's in Qbo advanced. And hopefully since Qbo advance is [00:14:00] still more limited than we need it to be, any any changes that are made here or any improvements that are made here, actually roll back to advanced because they are needed.

Hector Garcia: The other thing they mentioned is QB advance has this thing called workflow templates, where you can create automations where you know if this action is triggered by this transaction, you know, go ahead and create these other transactions or these other workflows automatically. Now, because sometimes workflows are [00:14:30] things that across entities. So for example, one action in one entity really should trigger a transaction in a different entity. They mentioned that workflow templates are going to be able to be created and be able to be enabled and managed across entities. So that seems pretty interesting. I can't even think fathom how that's going to work, but that seems really interesting.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I mean, when you make a workflow template, for example, if you're doing an expense. [00:15:00] Expense workflows, sometimes these trees can get really, really, really extensive. And setting up one of them and making sure it works can be really cumbersome. So the idea of having to do that in all of the companies is daunting, if not even realistic. So when you create a workflow now in one of the companies, you can use it as a template or push it across to all of the companies. But then you further customize it because obviously the the roles of who's managing what are going to be different in each company. [00:15:30] Just the fact that you don't have to rebuild one of those 25 branch workflows is really fantastic.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, and there was one screenshot that just blew my mind. Like as an accountant. Like like it it made me shake to my core. They showed the journal entry that has a little checkbox journal entry screen. That's the little checkbox at the top that says intercompany transaction. And when you enable intercompany transaction, it creates [00:16:00] a brand new column in your journal entry that lists all your companies that are in this group of multi entity. So we have like a 3D chess style journal entry that goes across multiple companies. I don't even know how this is gonna work. But I you know I you spend so much time just wondering which is the debit which is a credit. And I got to think of one more layer of, okay, which is which company am I debiting, which company am I crediting? This is going to be really interesting. And for accountants that [00:16:30] that felt maybe that accounting wasn't challenging to them. I'm telling you. Welcome to welcome to the world of 3D chess of journal entries. This is going to be really cool.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, this is what I was alluding to earlier with the revised approach to due to from's that this could be used for due to from's, but it also could just be done instantly for the allocations. And then you don't have to manage the due to from depending on your needs.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. On the staying within the multi entity theme they talked about [00:17:00] consolidation. So consolidating PNL balance sheet cash flow balance sheet. They show the spread. They showed a screenshot that looked like a spreadsheet. So I think this is just spreadsheet sync. This might not be new but what will be new is because of this multi-dimensional, you know, 3D chess journal entries that go across multiple company files. I believe that the user is going to have a much easier path to canceling [00:17:30] intercompany transactions, and they'll be able to clean up. You know, I assume through the parent company clean up all the intercompany transactions. So when the PNL by entity is created using all the entities as columns, it will eliminate those. Those things will be pre eliminated for you. So that's going to just save so much time for people that build consolidated reports. Any thoughts on that Alicia.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah.The screenshot we're looking at actually has a column for elimination so that [00:18:00] you can pull out those duplicates. So right now the consolidated reporting is for Pnls balance sheets, cash flow and trial balance. But they said that there's going to be more of them. And one of the things that they said is coming. Hector, go to the next slide. One of the things that they are looking forward to is actually the ability to manage the chart of accounts simultaneously across all of the companies. If you're doing consolidated reporting in your chart of accounts is different in all of the companies, then you get different lines with [00:18:30] one entry on them, and it makes it a little harder to compare. What they're going to do is give you the ability to create one chart of accounts across all, all of the entities.

Hector Garcia: This, to.Me, will be an incredible feat getting multiple entities with a single chart of accounts. Now the big question I have is will every user be able to modify chart of accounts across any specific entities, or are they going to create a master user who's the only person [00:19:00] that has dominion over the chart of accounts? Because it could get really confusing if anyone in any specific entity starts creating accounts and they start rolling up across all the companies. So that's a big question that I have in terms of how they how they how are they going to, um, manage this. But it's it is interesting nonetheless.

Alicia Katz Pollock: The easy solve would be having the primary administrator be the person who can actually do that. Um, the other thing about those consolidated reports is right now it is leveraging spreadsheet sync, but they are actually [00:19:30] looking forward to bringing these reports in product so that the consolidated spreadsheets are just part of the reports, just not there yet.

Hector Garcia: Right. I mean, we have to make the assumption that there's going to be like a parent child relationship, and then you have to be sort of logged in into the parent to be able to do any sort of like consolidations and eliminations and all sort of that. Okay. So let's move over to reports. I think it'd be worth discussing that. So they show us a screenshot of a [00:20:00] dashboard that contains new widgets. And these widgets are mostly on the sort of construction project management side. You see widgets for estimate versus actuals. You see a widgets for estimates versus cost, you see widgets for project expenses, which is a really, really good, um, transition into discussing specific new set of reports. Full reports, and not just the dashboard and the widgets. A full set of reports for [00:20:30] the projects feature for construction companies. And this is how they led. They led that into enterprise solutions was going to be industry centric. So I assume they're going to build packages for each industry. And the first industry that looks like it's going to be sort of the first one they're going to tackle is construction.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That was one of the things that they said was really important is having different industry verticals. And we know that the two things that desktop enterprise has that QuickBooks online didn't were construction [00:21:00] and manufacturing. But construction was the biggest barrier to entry to just statistically there's more people doing construction than manufacturing. And I remember back in the day when I couldn't put people on QuickBooks online because there was no progress invoicing. So once that got handled, I had a lot of people to move over. Now, with these new construction reports, it's going to just be that much more robust. And this is pretty exciting because what they're basically doing is they're looking at all the reports that were in desktop [00:21:30] that QuickBooks online did not have about construction and work in progress and cost to complete and things like that, and then put putting that into QuickBooks online so that those tools were now available. And because QuickBooks online has the project center, which desktop doesn't have, this has the potential of just absolutely blowing construction management out of the water compared to desktop, because the project center didn't [00:22:00] exist. And the project center is amazing. So if we can take everything that was missing from desktop construction and put it in Qbo here in Intuit Enterprise, they really, really have something pretty, pretty awesome.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, sure.And we'll just go to the reports real quick to give you a general idea. So some of the reports that we're spotting on the screenshot that were like, oh my, QuickBooks online doesn't have that. Number one, there's one called Open Balances by Customer and Project, which I assume is, um, sort of a pivoted report [00:22:30] that shows you the customer, the project, and then all the invoices that have open balances, which is pretty neat. Then they have one called Project Cost by Vendor and Project, which we're going to make the assumption that it's going to be the vendor name, then sort of a subcategory for the project and then all the expenses detailed, like every bill, every expense for that project, but grouped by vendor, which is really cool because looking at that dimension is really interesting. Then you see unbilled time and expenses by project. So that's really good. So those are time and expenses that were marked [00:23:00] billable that hasn't been that haven't been invoiced yet. Then a big one one that was added to QuickBooks enterprise I would say maybe like 4 or 4 years ago committed cost by project. And what committed cost by project did in desktop. And I'm not sure if they're going to do it here too.

Hector Garcia: And this is probably what we expect to see. But what committed cost by project did in desktop It showed you your actual costs, your estimated cost, and then costs that were sitting in non posting transactions [00:23:30] that are likely to become posting transactions. So there's two types of posting transactions. Sorry non posting transactions that they used in desktop. One was timesheets. So if there are any time on timesheets that have not been created into a paycheck yet, and that contains project information and then purchase orders that have not been created into bills yet, and those contain purchase information, that's what they're calling committed costs. So we're assuming that the committed cost by project will have that information. [00:24:00] And if they also talked about having change orders as a separate transaction type, which I don't know how that's going to work in QuickBooks desktop, that was basically an estimate renamed to change order. So if there's going to be change orders as well. And they talked about a change order report, we're making the assumption that committed cost by project will contain change order information as well. Because these are all the things that are not posted yet, that we're sort of expecting to see cost for Alicia on that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I want to actually pause for a moment and and just focus on those two magic words, change orders, because [00:24:30] that was one of the things that have been a stopping point for people. And a change order essentially really is just an addendum estimate. But it's different. It's not the exact same thing. And I was really excited when I saw that there's now actually a form called change orders here, so that we can use the same terminology and you can send somebody a change order now, not just, oh, here's a supplemental estimate. I think there's that [00:25:00] shouldn't be under underestimated. Right.

Hector Garcia: I mean the thing. Yeah. Good good good pun there. The from accounting perspective I change order and an estimate is the same. But from a management perspective it's not I guess that's the point, right? Like this is not just an accounting software. This is a management Software, then we have project cost. Detail, which is basically going to be a detailed list of transactions for each project. I assume. I mean, there's really nothing else to that. Then there's a really cool one that we've had in desktop, probably for [00:25:30] 20 plus years, which is a project status report, which is, which should. It should show you all your active projects. Um, what the status is, you know, whether they're work in progress, completed start date, end date, notes, hopefully custom fields. You know, all the all the data points that we enter basically in the project info section, we should be able to see that in the in that report. Then we see time by employee and project. So pretty cool. So you have time grouped by employee but then subcategorized on [00:26:00] the project. Then there's a really neat interesting one, which I don't know exactly because desktop doesn't have a counterpart to this, which is unallocated amounts to projects. So all I can think of is transactions that don't contain project information. That's for you to like, try to spot potential transactions that, oh, this should have gone to a project. So a management tool for you to every month or whatever, take a look at which transactions potentially belong to a project. Any thoughts on that?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Alicia sometimes in your workflow you don't [00:26:30] actually do the allocations at the time. You have to come back and actually see if you buy a pallet of wood, you don't know who it got allocated to until after the fact. And this is now you have a report to be able to pull up those transactions and say, okay, this is where that wound up going.

Hector Garcia: Now one thing I want to add is anytime we talk about a new report in quotes, Intuit is developing all the new reports in the new modernized reporting platform. So what I'm also hoping to [00:27:00] see is that these reports not only contain new information, but also contain new filtering tools and grouping tools and that sort of thing. Because the new modernized reporting platform does provide sort of an edge versus the old reporting platform on being able to do that. And they listed estimates and progress invoicing by project, which already exist in advance. But the one that's already in advanced is on the old platform. So I assume it's going to be the new platform. So that sounds like a good thing. And then there's cost to complete by project. Now that's [00:27:30] really interesting because that will require the user to start entering information about like where the project is. Right. Because remember there are two ways to manage a project status in terms of completion. One is to take the mathematical transaction, the mathematical equation of how much I thought I was going to spend on the project, estimate how much I actually spent. This is what you call the accounting completion percentage. And then there's the managerial accounting completion percentage, where [00:28:00] from an accounting standpoint, it could show that you're 75% there. But when you go look at the house, you're like, oh, that's only 10% there. So it's it's being able to track not just the accounting effect of completion per se, but as a manager, being able to go in there and say, okay, this is where I am. So you can compare your accounting performance versus sort of your visual managerial contract based performance. Any thoughts on that, Alicia?

Alicia Katz Pollock: My thought about this is that there's there's this feature [00:28:30] is something that a lot of my construction clients right now need that are on plus. And I know that they're developing this for an enterprise, but I really would love to see them bring these specific project reports down to Qbo advanced that I could bring up probably 20 of my clients from plus two advanced if these reports were available in advanced. And I'm hoping that the development that they're doing in the name [00:29:00] of enterprise, some of it actually flows, trickles downwards.

Hector Garcia: Something else we had in our notes, based on some of the screenshots that we saw, is that this change, this new change orders, when you actually open it, it has a little link saying that the change order was linked to an estimate. So I like that the fact that they're not like a separate transaction sitting in an island somewhere, that the change order has sort of logical connectivity to the original estimate. So I like that a lot. So we can move on from the [00:29:30] sort of project based reports. Let's talk about the other things that they kind of mentioned. They mentioned something called profitability monitoring. What was your take on that?

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's really a new use for AI, where they're looking at your estimates or your budgets. And if you have variance, it's actually looking at the root cause, like what are the anomalies? What were the unexpected accounts that caused a change? Was it somebody overtime? Was it that [00:30:00] a purchase was more expensive than it was supposed to be? It's actually keeping an eye on those anomalies and calling them out so that it can bring them to your attention. And they did say also make recommendations, but we haven't really seen that come out yet.

Hector Garcia: So you missed your budget or your your trending to miss your budget. And it's going to tell you the likely reasons why you're doing that. So hopefully you can pivot and make a decision. And that way you don't miss the budget and [00:30:30] you actually have a profitable sort of deal.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Exactly.

Hector Garcia: Now, within the same sort of construction time tracking world, they mentioned enhanced integrations to notify and big time. So notify is a construction management app that talks and talks to QuickBooks is wonderful whether you have Essentials Plus or advanced. It works really well now. It can do. It can do everything that this enterprise uh, suite does. So most people, when they want to want to be in Qbo and they want construction, they go with notify. And big [00:31:00] time is basically a really robust sort of time management system. So I find it interesting that they're leading with, we're going to solve for this industry, but also we're going to deeply integrate new APIs, etc., with these other apps. So that's an indicator of kind of two things. One is that they're going to release this I don't want to say not ready for prime time, but they're going to release it where it's still not comparable with third party apps. So they're going to say [00:31:30] so they sort of they want to live. They want to they want to have their cake and eat it too. Where they go, we can solve a lot of these things. And if you still need a third party app, we're going to integrate it to the third party app even deeper. So I find that that's a really balanced approach. Instead of saying, we're releasing this so we can kick the third party app market out of the equation, they're saying we're going to, in parallel, also allow people that want to use the third party apps to integrate deeply with it. So I actually like that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: There's there's a lot of things that nullify that shouldn't [00:32:00] be in your general ledger. All the project management and all the construction Management elements that go into the daily use. That's to do lists and planning, and that does not belong in your accounting. So the fact that it they worked with NOAA to really make a robust integration. And I a little bird told me that the that NOAA I actually went out of their way [00:32:30] to adjust some of their underpinnings in order to foster this integration. So it wasn't just Intuit saying, okay, here's nullify, nullify and Intuit. Hand in hand developed this these integrations together.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. So we're hoping that the integrate into all the projects integrate into all the time sheets that integrate into all the custom fields that integrate into the new dimensions. It's a good it's a good segue to talk about what the heck is that? Sure. So I talked about this [00:33:00] new concept called dimensions. And basically dimensions. Think about what classes are and think about being tags. Yeah, the only thing about the only reason why I think it's different is because if you look at the screenshots. Tags are only one per transaction, where classes have the ability for you to have multiple classes per transaction in the line levels.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I didn't bring up tags saying that it's comparable. I'm just saying that classes, tags, and locations are all existing examples [00:33:30] of dimensions and that this is a totally blowing that out of the water. Correct?

Hector Garcia: Yeah. Tags is a good example of a customizable dimension, right? With custom with custom drop down menus. But what this is looking like is, is going to be just like class. So imagine if you were able to grab the class, duplicate it and give it its own name and give it its own drop down list. So they I think dimension 20 was the 20. They said that the total that they can do. So you can do up to 20 custom dimensions class [00:34:00] would be one obviously the original, the OG dimension. And then you can create any other dimension that you want based on whichever way you want to track the individual lines in transactions, but it does look like it's going to behave like classes. So it's going to be for individual lines. Which brings us up to the, the, the one of the points they made, which is the reclassified tool that accountants have, where they go in there and they choose a bunch of transactions and they change the classes or the locations [00:34:30] and bulk will also include the, the custom dimension. So that's great because we'll be able to sort of go backwards and add dimensions to existing existing data or if we miss it, that sort of thing.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, that was actually one of the things they specifically said about your migration. When you start up with Intuit Enterprise, is that you're going to be able to look at your, for instance, your classes, and then use the reclassified tool to go and add the dimensions into your history instead. [00:35:00] So it's not just day one forward. You will be able to add the dimensions backwards.

Hector Garcia: Well, we'll be cool, which I assume is not because I don't think they think in those dimensions. No pun intended is if you could take custom fields in QuickBooks enterprise now that are line item level custom fields that contain detailed transaction information and convert those into dimensions discussed, that would be incredible. But I doubt that they that they thought that far [00:35:30] because that's obviously converting one field type to another field type. But that would be that would be really interesting because that will help with conversions.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I don't know how hard that really would be, but it's definitely a great idea. There's a lot of companies that added all kinds of custom fields, and there wasn't any way to bring that over, although maybe even custom fields might be your answer on that one.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, I have.

Hector Garcia: A feeling that if a developer on on this world, Intuit World is listening to this and making their head hurt right [00:36:00] now with that.

Hector Garcia: With with.

Hector Garcia: That request. They also mentioned that the mentions are going to be fully available for PNL reporting. So that means that just like you were able to do a profit and loss by class, you'll be able to do a profit and loss by a dimension. And they talked about it being available in custom reporting. So I'm going to assume that these dimensions are also filterable across multiple types of reports. So you'll be able to filter transaction detail reports by a particular thing. It'll be interesting to know if you can create custom summary [00:36:30] reports, you know, to to have the, you know, one dimension on the on the columns, one dimension on the rows. That would be pretty mind blowing, actually, when you think about as a report builder, you know, the the the the, the possibilities are sort of endless. So that's I find that to be really interesting and I'm very appreciative that they're going to lead with it being in the bulk classified immediately. Because if you don't add bulk reclassify and just release the dimensions, then you don't get to enjoy how beautiful your [00:37:00] reports are going to look with existing data. Only with data moving forward, because nobody's going to go in there and add a bunch of dimensions after the fact. And he also mentioned that it would be in in budgeting. So like when you just like you can budget by class or by location, you'll be able to budget by dimensions, which is awesome. Okay. Alicia, they talked about, um, fpna tools. So forecasting that sort of thing. What, what what was your take on the whole AI [00:37:30] forecasting front?

Alicia Katz Pollock: So what they're doing is kind of similar to what we talked about earlier, where it's looking for anomalies and calling them to your attention. So it's doing some analysis and it's going to give it additional ability to to look at the history and pull it forward. It's going to be able to work with your budgets and create tasks or approvals around those tasks that they're [00:38:00] really looking, especially at the profitability monitoring, which from the examples that I've seen, are basically taking your charts and taking your numbers and turning them into text so that you can just read about them. You know, these numbers went down, these numbers went up. So instead of you having to sit there and look at the numbers and compare all the different lines and all the different columns, and do the gymnastics in your head to see that, oh, this one's higher. It's going to actually tell you, you know, in this net income went up [00:38:30] 25% more than expected over this period of time. And that's just all that work that you don't have to do now.

Hector Garcia: I wonder if they're going to solve the cash flow prediction issue that most business owners have, where they want a system that can predict what's going to happen to their cash next week. So it's been an issue that tons of third party app developers have been trying to create cash flow apps. You ask a business owner, if [00:39:00] I could wave a magic wand, what would you want my your QuickBooks to do? And usually they say cash flow and you're like, what does cash flow mean? They're like, well, I want to know if I can pay this or I can pay that. And I wonder if they'll be able to somehow crack this nut where they can use your historical spending, your historical, uh, pnl your budgets, and be able to project forecast into the future what your income and your expenses are going to be based on all the variables. So I'm excited to see how they're going to do that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I mean, the bare [00:39:30] bones of that is already in the cash flow planner in Qbo where you can it will look at your history and tell you what your cash expectation is, and then you can go in and add in, uh, things that aren't in your QuickBooks, or change the invoice date for when you expect to get paid for an invoice without actually changing the invoice date. So if you haven't checked out the cash flow planner, some of that's already there. The idea of adding the I as a layer on top is really going to be exciting in the future. Yeah.

Hector Garcia: And the last [00:40:00] sort of like bullet points that they announced saying and we're working on more things. So they it seems that they're going to add more to revenue recognition like more features, more, more robustness, I guess more to fix assets to the fixed asset module. That's these two things are already in Qbo advance. Um, it's worth mentioning an end to the workflow. So all all three things right. Revenue recognition, fixed asset manager and workflows that are all in Qbo advance. But we're making the assumption that, uh, [00:40:30] Intuit Enterprise Suite is going to add more to it. And they said industry customization. So they're they're leading with construction project based businesses. But I'm going to have to make the assumption that in a few months time when they have, let's say, the suite of solutions for manufacturers or for nonprofits Profit or for e-commerce or whatever. Whatever industry, they're going to do that when when they create these companies, when they create these companies or, or multiple entities, [00:41:00] that there will be some sort of in the setup process where you tell it what your industry is and it'll slightly change some of maybe some of the wording or some of the, uh, the approach, maybe even the chart of accounts that they suggest the unified chart of accounts across multiple companies, whatever it is. So they just said we will have more industry customization in the future, whatever that means. Um, either way, that sounds interesting.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Um.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I think that I think that goes back to what we were [00:41:30] talking about with the, the different verticals that are addressed in desktop enterprise. Um, there's one other thing that came up in the, in the know that we didn't mention during this, especially with the AI and the Fpna is they said that you're going to be able to set goals. Aspirational goals. And then be able to monitor them. So you can say like, I want to be able to grow my company 20% next year. And here are the places where I want to see that growth. And [00:42:00] then the I will track that for you and let you know if you're on target or not. So these are some of the examples to come.

Hector Garcia: Yeah that's really.Interesting. So it's kind of a budget or a forecast, but it's maybe like a sort of like a soft budget. So it's like not the official budget report, but it's more like, hey, I'm tracking this particular, I'm tracking my payroll expense, and I want to reduce that by 20%, or I'm tracking my marketing spend and I want to. So it's more of a more of a surgical [00:42:30] approach to, to to to achieving something small rather than managing an entire budget. I found that to be interesting, too.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, especially since a budget, a lot of the time is here's the amount of money I have. Let me allocate it to these different things. Whereas this is more about this is where I want to get and how close am I?

Hector Garcia: Yeah. So I wonder if those goals will be turned into like widgets too, that you can have in the dashboard, because that would be that would be great. [00:43:00] So I think that's it. So the only thing worth mentioning is and we mentioned it kind of at the beginning, there is an official website for the Intuit Enterprise Solutions um, platform per se. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. There's an official accountants showcase on October 10th. This is where they'll unveil this stuff, maybe with a little bit more detail to the entire ProAdvisor community, and then there'll be a full sort of training, uh, on it on on October 16th. So it seems to be [00:43:30] a lot of content that's going to be coming in the next couple of weeks. And for our resellers, for a QuickBooks solution providers, we're going to get a bit of a preview on on September 26th. But I'm making the assumption that's going to be that's going to be very similar to the one in in October 10th. But the reason why I'm mentioning that is because, uh, QuickBooks enterprise, which is sort of a counterpoint to this, has traditionally been mostly sold through QuickBooks, uh, resellers, through the, [00:44:00] uh, QuickBooks solution providers. So I wonder exactly what's going to happen in terms of how Intuit sees, uh, who is responsible for delivering this message to the mid-market? Who's responsible for showcasing this product, demoing this product, implementing this product and the best workforce they have is their shops, is their solution provider. So I wonder what that relationship is going to look like. They did mention somewhere that there'll be like a spiff that they'll pay to the partners [00:44:30] that bring a customer in. So I wonder if that's they really meant only solution providers or proadvisors. Alicia, was it advisors?

Alicia Katz Pollock: They they did say that there will be a bounty for referrals. So there will be a referrals program for ProAdvisor.

Hector Garcia: So yeah.So so you don't have to be a qsp to sort of recommend this and still get paid for the effort of bringing somebody in.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Although I always recommend working with my qsp because you actually usually get enhanced support and enhanced benefits and enhanced [00:45:00] bounties.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. That's awesome. So yeah. So that that wraps it up for Intuit Enterprise Suite. With that being said, Alicia, anything going on in your world?

Alicia Katz Pollock: I actually have something huge and exciting happening in my world. We've talked several times about one of the books that I wrote for the consultants, and it's a college textbook that's used in college and vocational programs in high schools all over the country. It actually stems from Doug Slater's book from way, way back in the day as The Roots. But, you [00:45:30] know, it's come. It's totally different now. But in any case, I wrote this book back in 2021 and other people are teaching it. But I finally went, you know, it's probably time for me to teach my own book and teach my own course. So I am in the process right now of rolling out. The registration will probably be available by the time you all hear this. We are in November and December teaching an eight week, 16 session, college style QuickBooks [00:46:00] online training that starts all the way from the beginning and goes all the way up through projects and inventory and payroll every. It's going to be on Mondays and Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific Time, which is 12 to 2 Eastern Time. And in those 16 sessions starting November 4th, I'm going to start by teaching the chapter in the first half, and then you are going to do [00:46:30] a hands on project, building a qbo file from scratch with real life scenarios based on a company called Imagine Photography, that is a retail camera store that also does photo shoots. So you get the retail and the the service both. So I'm super looking forward to this. It's in conjunction with Alignable and with Universal Accounting. So we're all teaming up on the delivery of this. The price is going to be just shy [00:47:00] of of $1,500, but it's 32 contact hours, 32 CPE hands on, step by step, click by click training with an actual with an instructor and a Ta. And I'm really, really looking forward to it. People's reactions to it have just been off the chain, so that's super.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I'm excited and.

Hector Garcia: That's going to be live and virtual. So like I was saying, it's combined. It's virtual and it's live. It's not self-paced. It's not going to watch a [00:47:30] bunch of videos. Like you have to show up to class like like a school, like it's basically like a school.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Now now we we understand that people have have lives and that sometimes a rigid schedule like that is challenging. So the difference between us and a real college class is it's not graded, it's just participation. And the sessions will be recorded if you miss a class. But the idea is that you are committing to [00:48:00] two hours twice a week over eight weeks. So November, Monday, November 4th is when it starts. Monday, December 30th is when it ends. Yeah, and you'll get actual Q&A, hands on self-paced training.

Hector Garcia: So like a real school, you recommend showing up on time, being there live asking questions, live while it's being taught. But for those that need the flexibility to go, oh, I missed this class. [00:48:30] I'll just watch the recording and do the exercise on my own. You have the ability to do that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mhm.

Hector Garcia: That's great. Awesome.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And how about for you? What's going on? You were getting close to reframe.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. So by the time this episode drops, uh, the registration for reframe should be closed because the hotel had a deadline for locking in their room. The the room block rate on September 25th. So by the time this this episode drops, you [00:49:00] won't you probably won't be able to book the hotel anymore. Maybe we'll have tickets. If you're local, that's fine. Uh, but I will be 100% on planning to run the best conference ever mode. Right. So no longer marketing it. No longer selling it, no longer answering questions. Is this conference right for me or not? Just focus 100% on getting the speakers in, helping them prep for the content. Uh, getting all the all the all the booklets printed, getting all the big format, um, banners [00:49:30] printed and the logistics. So I'm in full, conference logistics mode at the moment. So if you happen to be maybe local and you don't need to stay in the hotel, you should be able to still register for the conference at reframe 2024. Com and Alicia, I'm looking forward to seeing you there as well.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I'm also going to say that, you know, sharing a room with somebody is also an option which cuts your costs. So maybe you can find a roomie and still.

Hector Garcia: That's true.That's true. There's enough there's enough Facebook groups with accounting [00:50:00] professionals that all help each other. And they're a big, big family where they probably want to get a roommate and reduce those costs as well. So with that being said, thank you Alicia. Thank you everybody. Thank you, Intuit, for giving us a brand new product that's going to give us job security for a podcast for months and months to come. Things to talk about and things to speculate about and things to criticize for the next couple of months. So we'll see you in the next one.

Alicia Katz Pollock: See you in the next one.