Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast

Alicia and Hector share their top feature requests and improvements they'd love to see in QuickBooks during 2025. From rethinking pop-up notifications to bringing back QuickBooks Labs, they discuss practical changes that would make a significant impact for accounting professionals. The conversation covers both technical requests like improved AI functionality and revenue recognition tools, as well as broader organizational changes like transparent product roadmaps and feature testing. Along the way, they share insights about the evolving relationship between accountants and automation tools.


  • (00:00) - Welcome to The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast
  • (00:53) - Rethinking Pop-Ups
  • (06:15) - QuickBooks Labs Revival
  • (09:04) - Public Roadmap and Feedback Transparency
  • (18:11) - Perfecting Autofill
  • (23:03) - Turning Off AI Features
  • (25:26) - Issues with Reporting Features
  • (28:37) - Bringing Dimensions to QBO Advanced and Classes to QBO Essentials
  • (35:03) - Final Wishlist Item
  • (39:45) - What's New with Alicia and Hector

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

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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 Katz Pollock, the original, the one and only QBO Rockstar CEO and founder of Royal Wise Solutions.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And I have the privilege of collaborating with Hector Garcia, CPA, the founder of Right Tool for QuickBooks. I

Alicia Katz Pollock: n this episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, [00:00:30] Hector and I are going to celebrate the ending of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 with our wish list. If we were going to get presents from Intuit for Christmas and Hanukkah, what would those presents be? Hey, Hector, how are you doing today?

Hector Garcia: I'm doing excellent. Looking forward to another great year of growth for our firm and everything else happening in the in the industry.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I've got so many plans for 2025 that I'm so excited about, so we'll come around to those in a little [00:01:00] while, but I want to hear from you. I know that we both have kind of a good list of things that we would love to either see inside QuickBooks or see Intuit do. So would you like? Well, let's go back and forth. And why don't you start? What's the number one thing that you want to see from Intuit next year?

Hector Garcia: Well, unofficially, I have this huge list that contains over 100 items, and I used to update that every month or so for like seven years until right tool was built and I stopped updating that. [00:01:30] And I could go back to some items there because there are some items that are really pressing there. But I do want to talk about, like the stuff that I feel immediately in the interactions I have with QuickBooks users, either my clients, my training consulting clients or colleagues in the Facebook groups, which is, um, they need to rethink pop ups. For some reason, they did really well with pop ups at some point where they started removing the pop ups, and now there's a whole myriad of new pop ups in Qbo that's truly, [00:02:00] truly affecting our workflow. Now for for end users, for Non-accountants, I get the existence of pop ups right. You have to warn people that a transaction is being changed and the transaction was reconciled before, and if the amount changes, it might affect your reconciliation. That is really important. However, accountants all the time change a category, A note, a tag, an attachment. They change something in the transaction where the date and the amount is not necessarily changing. [00:02:30] So it doesn't matter that the transaction has been reconciled or not. So you get these pop ups and then usually the pop ups are supposed to have a checkbox that says, don't, don't show me this, don't show this to me again, but this don't show me this again thing doesn't seem to ever work in the world of, of of QuickBooks, and particularly with the reconcile ones, you actually don't even have to. You really don't have the option to don't show. Again, you actually have a checkbox where you acknowledge the fact of what you know, what is happening on the checkbox and click okay. That's [00:03:00] two additional clicks that we just don't need to have.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And I've actually noticed that that particular checkbox has stopped working. I was just with a client, and for some reason it's showing up even in the same bank account every single time. So something's a little glitchy with that particular one right now.

Hector Garcia: So some, some background about how maybe possibly this was thought about at some point in the last couple of years, which is Intuit received general feedback that [00:03:30] was very different from the accounting community versus the end user community. So Intuit at some point they figured, you know what? There needs to be an advanced mode and accountant mode and accountant view, a business mode, a novice mode, a business view. And Intuit did this, this version of this two views. But the two views really missed the mark in terms of what we wanted overall. So like we weren't looking for easy, [00:04:00] dumb, dumbed down terminology for the end user and advanced accounting technology. A terminology for us. That wasn't what we meant. Like for us, advanced view or accountant view is can we have a little bit more control over the pop ups? Like there are certain things that we're comfortable with bypassing and not getting. I get how end users, you have to give them warnings. Um, you know, could we get, you know, buttons that get us access to direct things that we don't have [00:04:30] to click 2 or 3 things to get to? Like to me, that would that would have been a much better visualization of accountants view with what they did. So but particularly because the direct feedback of accountants view versus business view really was the change of interface and how difficult it was for accountants to support business owners, you know, when they were in business view, because accountants were always an accountant view. That was the crux of why Intuit dissolved the whole dual view thing, but I don't think that it was off [00:05:00] the mark to think that the end user, the power user, the end user versus the accountant and power user are two different users, and the behavior of the software should be different and adopted depending on how the user interacts with the software. Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Even just having you just gave me an idea that if they had a notifications options where you can say like what kinds of notifications do you want to turn on and off, I would find that really helpful. You know, I absolutely don't need to get [00:05:30] the payroll notifications from all of my clients. I would love to turn those notifications off. And I do absolutely don't need to know about my my reconciliation notifications, but oh my god, I'm so glad they got rid of accountant view and business view. The moment they installed that, my heart sank and so I'm glad that that is gone most of the time now.

Hector Garcia: So that's my my first wish list wishlist item, I'm going to pass it over to you. So mine was a rethink. The pop ups get [00:06:00] accountants involved and what pop ups are important gives give us more control in which pop ups we want to see and don't want to see. And for God's sake, if you click on don't show this again. Don't show this again.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. So that was wish number one. Okay. Wish number two. Long time listeners have heard me talk about this again. But one of the things that is always challenging for me is how the interface is changing all the time, and the a b testing that they're always doing on [00:06:30] new features, where the responsible part is that they're doing new feature rollouts in phases, where they release it to a small amount of people, and they get to gather feedback and then release it to another group of people and get more feedback. And then once they're confident in it, they roll it out. But that means that all of us, all the time, are all working on slightly different versions of the software, and it makes it hard To assist clients because we can't articulate what's on the screen. It makes it impossible for us content creators [00:07:00] because we can't control the environment for what people are actually seeing. So my wish is to bring back a feature that used to be there called QuickBooks labs. It used to be able to go up under the gear and choose QuickBooks labs, and it would show you all of the features that they're currently developing and give you a little slider to turn on and off the different experiences. For example, in the customer center, you know how when you go into a customer, there's a little sidebar on the left hand side that has the whole [00:07:30] list of customers, so you can go back and forth between them. That wasn't there in the original release. That was one of the QuickBooks labs. So you would turn it on, you would try it out, you would give we gave feedback about it, and then they said, oh, people like this.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And then they made it a permanent part of the software. So what I like about this idea, and why I think it's actually extremely important, is because when you just change things out from under somebody while they're trying to get their work done. It's it's lost productivity. You're actually making us [00:08:00] stop what we're doing. Figure something out. Go. Wait a minute. This isn't working. Occasionally get get exclamations of delight. That's the fun part about it. But we have to figure it out. Or we have to do your troubleshooting for you in the middle of the job that we're supposed to be doing for a client, which is billable hours. So if you have QuickBooks labs turned on, we opt in. We know we're getting something experimental. We can we're choosing to do [00:08:30] it, and we can give constructive feedback because we're expecting it and we can make suggestions about it. So we're in control. I think that would really elevate the a lot of feedback that they're getting instead of just bursting it on you. And then you're like, oh my God, this is terrible. Just because I'm not used to it and I've never seen it before and I don't know how to use it, that doesn't mean it's terrible. It just means you've never used it before, and so I really think it would help intuit with their development. So that is my number one wish for 2025 [00:09:00] is the reemergence of QuickBooks labs.

Hector Garcia: Very good. And this is this will be similar. This will be a similar one that's on my wish list. My wish list is to have a more public roadmap. Um, to number one, grab all the feedback items you're into. It takes tons of pride on how they're a really big feedback based listening business, and I believe it as someone with sort of inside knowledge of working inside Intuit and being at [00:09:30] the councils and giving feedback sessions into it, and the individual people are into it. Truly, truly are feedback gathering machines. The challenge that we have as end users is believing that something is being done with that feedback, and the only way for us to believe it is number one, to make the feedback public. Now, it doesn't mean that every single random comment that goes to the feedback gets public. But I think that with artificial intelligence [00:10:00] technology, Intuit should be able to grab the feedback and use AI to automatically categorize it automatically, clean it up, automatically, group it, and then sort of show you like sort of a heat map of where most of the feedback is coming from. If most of the feedback is coming in the reconcile screen, or most of the feedback is coming on the build screen, and then also go a little bit deeper and show you, yeah, most of the feedback is coming in these drop down menus in this attachment module in here.

Hector Garcia: And then kind of give us an idea for what other [00:10:30] people are giving feedback on to also, by extension, give us an idea of what Intuit will be working on. Because if you make if they make a public declaration about where people are giving most feedback to and they've made a public declaration in a declaration Intuit connect that said, hey, accountants, let's build it together. And, you know, do you need to make it 100% public? No. Maybe you only make it available to ProAdvisor or something like that. That would be really cool. So then we know where most of the feedback is [00:11:00] coming from. Which also by the way, um, we are sort of social creatures. So if we're very frustrated about one thing, but we see that 90% of people are also frustrated about it, something about that makes us less frustrated because it doesn't let us. It doesn't cause us to doubt whether we're the problem or it's a the software is the problem, right? So number one, knowing where everybody kind of is, knowing what Intuit is looking at, what they have visibility to, and then also committing to making to to working on those things will [00:11:30] make us feel that they are listening to the feedback and they are their product team is developing around the feedback.

Hector Garcia: One of the major criticisms I've given to Intuit in public and in private and in groups, and to leadership and to individuals, is that Intuit develops with marketing in mind. You know what looks sexy in a marketing message? What looks sexy on a website, what looks sexy on a one minute video, and okay, this thing looks sexy. Let's market that and let's develop that. The challenge is [00:12:00] that even though it's sexy, it might not be useful in accounting professionals. We don't care about sexy things. We care about useful things like for example, using your phone, your iPhone to do accounting stuff. Super sexy, like watching a business owner taking a picture of a receipt to a business owner. It's like, oh my God, this will solve all my problems. But in reality, pictures of receipts don't really advance the underlying problems in accounting that we have, which is, you know, people don't understand their accounting. There are way too many chart of accounts. [00:12:30] They're duplicate vendors and duplicate customers. People don't know how to pull the reports. We don't have access to the right reports. So they're like really under underlying issues that can advance the business forward insights and that sort of thing. It's not powered by sexy videos of people taking pictures of receipts with their phone.

Hector Garcia: And that's what most of the marketing focuses on and what looks cool in from a marketing perspective. So again, you know, show us that you're developing from feedback. Get the accountants involved, [00:13:00] show us the heat map of kind of where the problems are. Show us the public roadmap and basically acknowledge because you've given us this feedback, we are working on this and then make us feel that you are working in the same direction that we want you to to work towards, because unfortunately, they do get the feedback. Then, you know, 2 or 3 months later, Ted Callahan or some of the other people that we love at Intuit come out and say, oh, by the way, here's your feedback in action. And they give you a laundry list [00:13:30] of things that they work on. But the way it's delivered, it just never felt through the three month process that they were working on it. And then they fixed it and whatever. They're like, oh, good that they fixed it. But like, we don't it doesn't feel like we were truly involved in the process. And I think if we if we see kind of like how the sausage is made in the background a little bit, I think it gives us a little bit more feeling that we are part of the building process of it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I agree that it should be more transparent. You actually, there's two things about what you just said that I want to reflect on. And the first one is [00:14:00] you just brought up the the receipts. I actually had two appointments yesterday where I taught people to take pictures of their receipts, and it blew their minds and transformed their workflows. So I actually kind of considered that one one of the sexier realities of but, you know, but I totally get that. It makes a great commercial and isn't the right tool for everybody.

Hector Garcia: But if you had if you just wanted to ask you if you had the choice between the customer being super happy about taking pictures of the receipts, [00:14:30] but being two months behind in the reconciliations, or not being able to take pictures of the receipts and their bank balance in real time, always being real time reconciled in their books so they can trust the balance that's in there. What would you choose?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, no, I absolutely agree that it's not the biggest priority, that it's kind of it's more of a bell and whistle than the the reality of the actual accounting. But if you're the bookkeeper who's two months behind on those reconciliations because you don't know what the if [00:15:00] the The Home Depot receipt was business or personal, then those receipts actually do help solve the other problem. So the other thing that I just wanted to remind people, we're talking about putting in feedback, and I realized that not everybody actually knows where to go and how important that is. As their testing features, you will very frequently see up in the upper right hand corner a little link that says feedback. And so if you are using a feature and you want it to do something different than it does, or [00:15:30] you can't figure out how to do something in it, click on that little feedback button and let them know the ones on the screens. Go directly to those development teams. And then for more general issues, if you go up to the gear and on the right hand side, right hand bottom. There's an option for giving feedback there. And they they do compile these. We don't have the transparency to it. But I know that there's a team that meets every single Friday and looks over all the feedback that was submitted and whatever got the most [00:16:00] attention from the public and the users is where they focus their attention. So the more of us who give feedback about what we want to see and what needs to be fixed, the the quicker they're going to get to it. So be an active feedback submitter. You know, I call it flood that feedback and, you know, send things in several times a day if you want.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Ready for the next one.

Hector Garcia: Yep.

Alicia Katz Pollock: My my next wish list [00:16:30] is I've been playing with the new AI assist, the Intuit assist. And you've probably noticed by now that when you open up an invoice or a bill, there's a new sidebar on the left hand side that allows you to import an existing sales document or bill, and you can drag it in. It can be a PDF, it can be a JPEG, it can be a handwritten note. And ideally it [00:17:00] scrapes it to create the transactions out of it. And it's been really well received by all of my customers. But the times that I have tried to use it, what it's not doing for me that I want it to do is parse to line items. I want it to be able to identify what products and services should show up on the bill. And if it's simple, it's absolutely doing it. But if I have something with multiple line items, it doesn't have any real way at this [00:17:30] point of interpreting which of my classes it means, for example. And so I'm looking forward to that developing more over the years. And we know the technology is there. You know, shout out to Makers hub who is perfecting that particular technology. And so I know that it will be coming. So that's on my wish list.

Hector Garcia: I think the way this will work is if Intuit actually acquires Makers Hub.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I was going to say [00:18:00] that I'm glad you did.

Hector Garcia: I think if Intuit acquires Makers Hub and maybe only includes that in advance or something like that, to to to justify, let's call it justify the investment or IIs or whatever that was. That would still be a huge win because that's essentially what Sage did when they bought Hubdoc, right? So they bought Hubdoc. So what they acquired was that OCR fetching sorting of the internal data inside the document technology to make Xero better. Now, I don't I don't use Xero enough to know whether [00:18:30] or not Xero today can do something like this, but knowing that maker's help does it so well, my recommendation to anyone into listening is go by Makers Hub and Makers Hub guys. Just throw 5% of the acquisition cost over to the unofficial QuickBooks accountant podcast. If it does happen because we're making that recommendation now. But but seriously, it's what Alicia is saying is spot on. What happens is when you start using this AI tools to autofill things, and then it only autofills like document [00:19:00] number and that's it, then it just feels like a gimmick. It just it doesn't feel like it's actually saving us time. And what it actually makes us feel is that they're using us as beta testers for their half developed technology, so they can just observe whether or not, you know, it's what we're doing is working. So it just doesn't feel like like it's not not yet. It's happening where we feel that AI is our ally. Like if you still feels like AI is like we're building the AI that's going to replace us. And so like, it's just [00:19:30] such a bad position to be in. It's like, you know, most of us are very discouraged from trying to teach the AI that's going to replace us. So.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, that is absolutely. What's happening is the AI is being built off of our experiences and perfecting it so it can be better than human. All right. What's your next one?

Hector Garcia: Yeah. So I'm going to throw two in there because one is actually connected to what you were talking about is I just want the ability to turn off the AI stuff. Like could I just like, as an advanced user, just turn off the AI [00:20:00] stuff? You know, maybe I'm like, heads down, I'm in the middle of something, and I all I need to do is get data in the books, classify some transactions, reconcile the accounts, pull up a PNL and a balance sheet. And I just I know that maybe possibly something that pops up about AI could potentially help me, but I am pretty, pretty sure that if I am heads down and do what I've always done in the past 20 years, I can get my work done without the need of AI. So give me the ability to like, just [00:20:30] sort of quickly turn off AI or like just disable it on my user on the accountant side. Not for the. I get it, you're not going to that's not going to work for the end user. But I like to do that at the same time. If I am the ProAdvisor paying for my clients qbo account, I would like to also turn off the AI. Again, I don't I don't want I don't want my client to fall in love with QuickBooks automations. I want clients to continue to trust our collaboration. So like, I don't want to give my client the impression that [00:21:00] QuickBooks is going to be able to do things for them automatically, even if even if the truth is that it will at some point.

Hector Garcia: I just don't want them to give them the impression that it will happen tomorrow, and me having to have wasteful conversations about whether or not AI is ready to replace us today, right? Like, I am comfortable telling my clients, hey man, I know that at some point what I'm doing now, computers will do it. I'm comfortable. At some point that will happen, but I don't want to have that conversation every month where the client goes, well, I saw a pop up in Intuit that [00:21:30] does this. Is it is it now? No. Or I saw this thing that says, I automated this and that. Is it. Ready now? No. And it's like every single month I'm going to have a conversation with my clients about whether or not AI is ready to replace us. Right. So, like, just give me the ability to turn that off. Man, I'm the one paying for qbo. Anyway, if I'm the ProAdvisor paying for my client's account. Like, really? Who you care about? It's my my payment. My credit card payment. Not the client's. Because if I get out of QuickBooks and send my client to zero or somewhere else, and you're going to lose the client 100%, [00:22:00] so give me that control, I get it. If the client is paying into it directly and you're into it, you control that client relationship. You want to impress the heck out of them with AI, I get that, but if it's my account, I want to be able to control that. So mini rant slash feature that was connected with what Alicia said, but I have a more immediate wishlist item.

Hector Garcia: Alicia. And if you haven't done like reports lately, you might not directly connect with this, but the new modernized reports it's now available for PNL and balance sheet. [00:22:30] Okay, so for summary reports, one of the problems is when you go into a PNL or a balance sheet in the modern reports, and you collapse or expand the subaccounts and you go print or create the PDF. The current state of that report, whether it's collapsed or expanded, doesn't show on the print. The print just shows everything expanded automatically. So that's very frustrating. Um, you know, for us, because we may be, you know, like meticulously spending five minutes opening [00:23:00] and closing certain accounts where, like, you know what I want to I want to collapse my fuel or my, uh, auto and fuel expenses. I collapse that, but I want to expand my marketing expenses, and I want to collapse my cost of goods sold. But I want to collapse a particular subcategory of income accounts, because that's how I want to present the financial statements to my customer. Guess what? When I go create the PDF or go print it, the state of that collapsed state of any of the accounts doesn't show everything. Shows expanded. So I have to export the report to excel [00:23:30] and then do manual collapsing. It's absolutely horrendous. So Intuit, please can you please read the collapse or expanded state of the report, and generate the PDFs or the print out of the reports to match that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I will, I'm actually talking to the guys about that. So I will actually put in that feedback for you. And that actually reminded me I also with the new P and L and balance sheet in modern, I really want to be able to filter by custom field. That [00:24:00] would that's on my wish list is you know I was talking to I think it was Carol in the in the forums. She wanted to be able to do a P and L by sales rep and that would be fantastic. So there's a couple modern report wishes for us.

Hector Garcia: But okay. So there's there's two to geek out on this for a little bit. There's two challenges here. One is a PNL by sales rep where the sales rep is like a column, and then it shows the PNL across multiple sales reps. [00:24:30] So that's one. And two is to show a PNL that only shows one or a particular group of sales reps as a filter. So there's it's actually. Yes, this wish list actually contains two layers here. The other the other part here that might also be a complex layer, is that sales by custom field might be an easy type of transaction. Pnl might be hard because it contains cost, and that means you have to add custom fields to expenses. So I'm not sure [00:25:00] if if, um, I.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Do that all the time.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, but like that only works in Qbo advanced. Right. So so like that is that, is that the context Qbo advanced because you can only add custom fields to expenses on Qbo advance. Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So we are it is a qbo advanced consideration. Yeah. Okay.

Hector Garcia: You got one?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Uh, yeah. Okay. So my next one, while we're talking about Qbo advanced the, the this is actually kind of a blend [00:25:30] Intuit Enterprise Suite. One of the new things that it's bringing to the table is dimensions, which essentially is multiple classes, parallel classes. And I think if they put that one feature in advanced, they would be able to sell a ton of advanced subscriptions that, you know, I don't need multi-company for most of my clients, but oh my God, being able to have multiple dimensions would be a game changer. And instead of [00:26:00] a handful of people on advanced, I would put all my people on advanced. So that's on my wish list.

Hector Garcia: I got something to say about that. Um, so because I've been very, very deep in depth hands like just knee deep in the AIS world right now with Intuit, I can tell you that because it doesn't have that many additional features in compared to Qbo advanced and dimensions being like the one thing that they got right, it feels like [00:26:30] it's the one thing that they kind of nailed in is I very much doubt that they're going to grab that, that little golden egg that they have in is with the multiple dimensions and bring that to advance. However, one thing and a good thing you brought up because it actually was in my list. One thing I think that we need to consider, in my opinion, is we got to consider bringing classes down to your essentials, particularly because QuickBooks desktop is no longer for sale and classes were available [00:27:00] in QuickBooks Desktop Pro. And unfortunately, you have folks that are used to buying the lowest version of QuickBooks Desktop Pro. You know, paying. I forget what the last number was 500 bucks a year or whatever the last number was, and then moving to Qbo to get classes requires them to pay double. So like, I think that at least Qbo essentials should have at least one class. Now if that were to happen where Qbo essentials gets class, gets the class, and then Qbo [00:27:30] plus gets classes and locations, which is which works right? I think I think that works. I think then Qbo advance could have classes, locations and maybe one dimension, and I think that that might work well. So just get get us at least. So I'm with Alicia that get us at least one dimension. And I think the strategic beauty about getting us one dimension is that once people enable one dimension, you have a popup [00:28:00] that says you want more dimensions, upgrade to into enterprise suite. The challenge is that we don't even know what the dimensions are until you give us the sort of the preview to that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Dimensions will, dimensions will be like potato chips. You're not going to want just one.

Hector Garcia: Exactly, exactly. So just give us one dimension and advance. That's the gateway drug towards the four dimensions that we get in IIs. And I think in the same token, I think we can bring custom fields that are only available in advance, bring maybe three [00:28:30] custom fields or five custom fields into plus with the same system, right? With the drop down menus and being able to pick whether it's a text and amount. Give me the custom field capability that advance has possibly again three maybe in plus. And I think that the way into it can create a much better ladder like sort of upgrade ladder is always give someone in the skew before a little preview of what the next skew feels. [00:29:00] So. So in essentials you got people with classes and then if you know, then once people enable classes and essentially go by the way, do you also need locations go to plus right. You go to plus and it goes, hey do you also need dimensions. Go to advanced. You're an advanced. Do you need multiple dimensions. Go to is. So I think that Intuit can create a much smarter upgrade ladder by giving a little bit of what the of what the higher version has, bringing that downwards.I think.

Alicia Katz Pollock: One of the reasons why I think that's actually a really smart [00:29:30] idea is we're now paying for essentials what we used to pay for plus. And so as they're raising the prices on all of the SKUs, on all of the versions, being able to actually get a little bit more out of it and not just inflation, I think that would make people feel better about the increased pricing.

Hector Garcia: Now, the good news is our list of wish list items is enough to make 27 episodes. So, so because we [00:30:00] don't want to overwhelm into it and we actually want into it to take action in every one of these items, we're going to probably end it here. And Alicia, if you have maybe one more, one more, one more.

Alicia Katz Pollock: One more.

Hector Garcia: We'll make that the official wish list item. And this will become the ethos of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast. Every time everybody from Intuit talks to us, we're going to say, did you listen to this episode? Don't talk to me until you listen to this episode. Don't talk to me until these items are in your roadmap, because we think that these are actually [00:30:30] not that we're not asking for that much. Really? Um, but go ahead, Alicia, throw in your last one.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. My my last one is a little bit of an advanced geeky thing, but in QuickBooks Online Advanced, there's a tool called revenue recognition. So what that does is, for example, if somebody subscribes to my, my library and instead of the annual lump sum all being recognized at the moment, I get the money, I want to be able to parse it out through the year, you know, true accrual accounting on the [00:31:00] revenue recognition and the tool that they have in Qbo advanced is great. But there's one thing that I do, which is one, a revenue recognition is done. I go to that field and I reconcile it. So I pick the the one original charge and the 12 broken charges and reconcile them against each other to zero. And the reason why I do that is then I can go run a report and filter it by status equals unreconciled. And I can see what's still open and pending [00:31:30] versus what has been closed and finished. But because the revenue recognition is working off of automations, those 12 splits don't actually exist. They're just math and programing. So I can't use that trick. And it kills me every time because I want to be able to to look at my revenue recognition status. So that's my last, my last of my wishes. And of course, that's only for us really super geeky accounting people. But yeah.

Hector Garcia: Absolutely. [00:32:00] I'm gonna add one that's not like for users. This is like Intuit corporate policy wish list item. So I'm talking to Intuit executives. Now listen to me, Intuit executives, do you want QuickBooks to accelerate faster than ever in terms of features? Allow Intuit employees to install right tool into their qbo. Allow them like figure out what you need, who you need to talk to in the IT departments. Let them install the right tool in their computers, [00:32:30] because if you do that, they're going to, quote, draw tons of inspiration from right tool to make QuickBooks better. And it's already been happening. And I guess they watch videos or they install it in their own personal computers from, from my understanding, because of Chrome extensions and security and stuff into it, computers cannot have right tool installed. But I'm going to throw one more thing out there, okay? At least I don't know if you knew this, but we actually set up right tool in such a way that if your email is at [00:33:00] Intuit. Com right tool is free for you. The right tool Pro account is free for you. So Intuit employees will have access to the right tool and all of the features. And what we want, we always want is for QuickBooks to get better. And you can draw as much inspiration from right tool as possible to make QuickBooks better.

Hector Garcia: And they've already added tons of features that have been on Right Tool for months and months and months. A few that were announced at Intuit Connect, and a few people came to me and go, hey, wait a second, Hector. They stole your idea. I'm not going to say stole your idea [00:33:30] because, like, we need QuickBooks to survive. In many ways, I think QuickBooks needs us to draw inspiration from. So we see a symbiotic relationship. So I think if more Intuit employees have access to the right tool, not just the right tool, everything. Like if every Intuit employee should have access to SAS and every Intuit employee should have access to um, Makers Hub, which we mentioned earlier, every Intuit employee needs to have access to all these amazing tools and nullify whatever, um, these amazing tools that people [00:34:00] are using to make their software better. And you have to draw some, like it just has to happen. I'm not saying copy everybody, but draw some inspiration to make your software better. Like, does it have to be the same? No, but there could be a QuickBooks version of that that's easier to use. Simple. And that is fully integrated and not have to force third party developers to have to find all these creative workarounds to solve issues for people.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I'm going to second that and whether it's the right tool or the other apps, but especially with right [00:34:30] tool in particular, because everything that's in right tool is by request. It's something that that US users said to Hector and Mark, oh my God, I wish it would do this. That would totally save me a whole bunch of time. And then they program all these little links and tricks and buttons all over the interface, you know, being able to when I'm, uh, which I think it's the reconcile. No, the undeposited funds just being able to see 999 and see all [00:35:00] of them at once, instead of only 30 at a time. Game changer for us doing cleanups. And so, yes, I think Hector is absolutely on to something and to it, folks, go take a look at what Rachel is doing, because you can see what it is that people need that QuickBooks is not already doing.

Hector Garcia: So, with that being said, Alicia, anything interesting going on in your world?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I'm right now in my 2025 planning phase. And so we're actually mapping out all of our courses for the whole [00:35:30] year, which is super exciting. We are also starting a project to translate our content into Spanish. So by the end of 2025, we're going to have at least our fundamentals courses, if not the whole library available in Spanish, including the including the books and the hands on training course that I've been doing based on my college textbook, has been absolutely a game changer for us. It's succeeding better than I thought it was going to be. [00:36:00] And so we're going to turn that into a regular ongoing course, probably do summer school next year with it. So I'm having a whole lot of fun imagining and reimagining my 2025 roadmap. So lots of exciting stuff to that. I'll announce as we as we're ready. How about you, Hector? What do you what's going on for you for next year?

Hector Garcia: Yeah, we are about a week away from signing a contract with a hotel in Miami for Reframe 2025. The dates [00:36:30] that this hotel have penciled for us is the first week of November. Because it's not official yet, we haven't signed that. I want to give exact dates, but first week of November it looks like we might have a location in in Miami. The number one feedback we got from reframe was, you know, at night when the conference is over, we want to be able to like go out and walk and go to a restaurant nearby. That was the challenge with the beach location, right? Because there isn't that much walking, you know, restaurants and that sort of thing. So we went from beach back to urban, right. [00:37:00] So we're going to we picked a place that actually has tons of restaurants nearby. So we do sign this contract. We should be before the end of the year announcing exact date and location for reframe and the the theme for Reframe conference is pricing with confidence. Originally was called Effective Pricing, but we changed it to pricing with confidence because we think that there's a direct relationship between having self-confidence and pricing high, and then also pricing high and getting [00:37:30] and getting self-confidence. So it's sort of like a vicious cycle. If you don't have good confidence, you're going to price low. And because you price slow, your confidence goes down. So we think that pricing precedes confidence. At the same time, confidence precedes pricing. So we're trying to present both things as the biggest area of opportunity that we have. Even in the in the age of AI and people thinking that ah, that ah ah services are commoditized, I think there's a way we can have the confidence to price and price the portion that we add value on. [00:38:00] So we're excited about that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I really like that because it's not just firm development, but it's personal growth as well. It really shifts your mindset about how you see yourself and your how you show up in the world.

Hector Garcia: All right, everybody, thank you very much for listening to this episode. And we'll see you on the next one.

Alicia Katz Pollock: See you in the next one.