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What Intuit’s $3.3 Billion QuickBooks Quarter Really Means for Your Practice

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In a room of 100 accounting professionals at the Scaling New Heights conference, host Alicia Katz Pollock asked, ‘How many of you have actually explored the new QuickBooks features you’re now paying more for? Have you uploaded a contract and sent it for signature? Did you use the customer hub to build a pipeline? Tried the anomaly detection to spot errors in your data?’

Three hands went up. One of them was hers.

The gap between what Intuit is building and what practitioners are actually using speaks volumes about the tension at the heart of Intuit’s latest earnings report. The company is pouring billions into AI, mid-market expansion, and payments infrastructure. But if the people who use QuickBooks every day haven’t caught up with what’s already there, every price increase feels less like added value and more like a shakedown.

In Episode 148 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, Alicia flew solo to break down Intuit’s Q3 fiscal year earnings report. She delivered a line-by-line translation of Wall Street numbers into plain English for the people who actually live inside QuickBooks every day.

The numbers show Intuit is transforming QuickBooks from bookkeeping software into what Alicia calls “an AI-powered financial operating system for businesses.” The revenue figures, growth rates, and strategic shifts show where QuickBooks is heading and what accounting professionals need to prepare for right now.

 

Where Intuit’s Money Comes From

Before diving into QuickBooks specifics, it helps to see the whole landscape. Intuit reported total revenue of $6.6 billion for the quarter, up 10% year over year. Operating income hit $4.7 billion, up from $4.3 billion last year. Those are healthy numbers, but the prior quarter grew by 17%, so growth slowed.

When growth slows at a company this size, management tends to double down on what’s working. And in this report, what’s working is QuickBooks.

Intuit even raised its full-year revenue guidance to $21.3-21.4 billion, expecting 13-14% growth. That tells us that even with weak spots in DIY TurboTax and MailChimp, management sees enough strength elsewhere to raise expectations. QuickBooks is carrying the load.

QuickBooks: The $3.3 Billion Growth Engine

The Global Business Solutions segment, which covers QuickBooks Online, payments, payroll, MailChimp, and desktop, generated $3.3 billion in revenue, up 15% year over year. But strip out MailChimp, and the segment grew 17%. As Alicia noted, “MailChimp is pulling the segment average down. Without MailChimp, the core QuickBooks-related businesses look stronger.”

Intuit raised full-year guidance for this segment to 16% growth, up from 14-15%. When management raises guidance, they’re telling investors they’re more confident than before. Clearly, QuickBooks is one of Intuit’s most important growth engines.

QuickBooks Online alone generated $2.5 billion in one quarter, up 19% year over year. Exclude MailChimp, and QBO revenue grew 22%. As Alicia emphasized, “QBO is no longer simply the online version of QuickBooks. It’s the center of Intuit’s small business strategy.”

At this size, 22% growth is remarkable. It means Intuit isn’t treating QBO as a mature product to maintain. They’re treating it as a growth platform to expand.

The growth did slow slightly from 21% to 19% quarter over quarter. Part of the reason is more new customers start on lower-end plans like Simple Start, and Intuit offered bigger discounts through accountant wholesale billing. For ProAdvisors, that’s worth watching. Your pricing arrangements clearly affect Intuit’s revenue calculations.

The Real Money Is in Payments and Payroll

The subscription fees are just the beginning. QBO accounting revenue was $1.28 billion, up 22% year over year. That growth came from higher prices, more customers, and people upgrading to better plans. The annual price increases are working (at least from Intuit’s perspective).

But the bigger story is QBO services revenue, which includes payments, payroll, and MailChimp. It hit $1.22 billion, up 15%. Strip out MailChimp, and services grew 22%. QuickBooks payments and bill pay volume grew 30% year over year.

“That’s one of the most important numbers in this entire report,” Alicia said. “That’s not just revenue, that’s volume.” It measures actual money flowing through QuickBooks, such as payments received through merchant services and payments sent through bill pay.

When QuickBooks becomes the place where money moves, not just where it’s recorded, everything changes. Payment links, bill-pay fees, merchant services, financing, lending, and cash-flow tools all become natural parts of the platform. For bookkeepers, this means clients will see more financial products offered directly inside QBO.

Payroll tells a similar story. Growth came from more customers using payroll, existing customers upgrading to better offerings, and higher prices across the board. Intuit also launched QuickBooks Workforce, an integrated Human Capital Management suite.

Meanwhile, desktop revenue was $788 million, up 6%. It’s still meaningful, but growth slowed from 10% last quarter. Desktop remains financially important, especially for existing users, but it’s clearly not where Intuit’s putting its energy. The future is online.

Mid-Market and Enterprise Show The Fastest Growth

The most telling number in the entire report is revenue from QBO Advanced and Intuit Enterprise Suite grew 38% year over year. That’s the fastest growth in the entire QuickBooks ecosystem. Enterprise Suite contract volume grew 37% quarter over quarter, and Intuit is scaling its sales capacity by 30%.

“Intuit is moving upmarket,” Alicia explained. “The fastest growth is coming from larger, more complex businesses, not just microbusinesses or brand new startups.”

For ProAdvisors and consultants, this is a major opportunity. If your practice supports growing businesses, expect more demand for implementation, cleanup, reporting, workflow design, app advisory, and internal controls. But watch out: Intuit’s expanded sales teams might approach your clients directly about upgrading. Have those conversations first.

AI Is Already Here and Processing 50 Million Transactions Weekly

The AI conversation isn’t theoretical anymore. Intuit’s accounting AI agent already powers recommendations for more than 50 million transactions every week. That includes categorization, anomaly detection, review workflows, and cleanup assistance.

“That does not mean bookkeepers disappear,” Alicia emphasized. “It means the work changes. The value may shift away from entering and categorizing transactions towards reviewing, correcting, advising, training the systems, and interpreting the results.”

The strongest AI adoption comes from QBO Advanced and Plus customers. That’s one reason those tiers see the biggest price increases. Intuit also plans to introduce consumption-based pricing for AI, so the more AI work you ask the system to do, the more you pay.

The August Pricing Reality Check

Starting in August, Intuit is restructuring its entire product lineup. New plan names (Free, Lite), redistributed features, and significant price increases weighted toward upper tiers. Essentials goes up $10. Plus jumps from $115 to $140. Advanced leaps from $275 to $340.

This brings us back to Alicia’s Scaling New Heights story. She was presenting a QBO-Xero comparison the morning the pricing email dropped. Her slide was instantly wrong. The room erupted, especially when attendees saw Xero at $90 next to QBO Advanced at $340.

“No wonder everybody was up in arms about the price increase,” she said, “because you’re actually getting more for your buck. But if you haven’t tried and implemented all the new features, you just feel like you’re getting price gouged.”

Her advice is to “look around at all the different features in there and press buttons you haven’t pressed before.” She thinks Intuit “put the cart before the horse” by raising prices before users adopted the features those prices supposedly pay for.

What’s Happening Beyond QuickBooks

The broader Intuit ecosystem tells us where QuickBooks is heading, too.

TurboTax is undergoing a dramatic shift. Consumer tax revenue was $5.3 billion, up just 8%, slower than expected. About two million expected DIY filers didn’t file. Low-end filers earning under $50,000 proved especially price-sensitive.

But TurboTax Live grew 38% in customers and 36% in revenue. Assisted tax now accounts for 53% of TurboTax’s total revenue. As Alicia noted, “Customers still pay for human expertise even in a world with better software and AI. That’s encouraging for accountants and bookkeepers.”

Credit Karma generated $631 million, up 15%, with guidance raised to 19% growth. Customers using both Credit Karma and TurboTax generate 30% more revenue than TurboTax-only users. The same financial services strategy appears in QuickBooks: estimate funding, buy-now-pay-later, and payment plans. “Even though you hate the pop-ups,” Alicia said bluntly, “this is a major revenue stream for Intuit.”

MailChimp revenue dipped slightly year over year. It’s struggling with small business churn and weak customer acquisition. Ironically, in the same SMB market where QuickBooks thrives. Alicia likes the MailChimp-QuickBooks integration for targeted customer emails, but adoption is low. “If you haven’t used it,” she said, “that’s exactly why MailChimp is struggling.”

ProTax revenue was $278 million, flat year over year. Professional tax is stable but not exciting. The real tax growth story is TurboTax Live.

Finally, Intuit cut 17% of its workforce (about 1,800 employees) to flatten management layers and eliminate duplicate roles. The restructuring costs $300 million now, with expected savings later. The question for practitioners is, will a leaner Intuit mean faster development or weaker support?

The Bottom Line for Your Practice

When you put all these numbers together, the story, as Alicia summarized it, is “QuickBooks is healthy. MailChimp is weak. Do-it-yourself TurboTax is under pressure. Assisted tax is strong. Payments and payroll are becoming major growth engines. Mid-market QuickBooks is growing fastest. AI is already operating at scale. And Intuit is preparing to charge more for higher-end QuickBooks and AI usage.”

“Intuit is not just building bookkeeping software anymore. It’s building an AI-powered financial operating system for businesses, accountants, payments, payroll, tax, lending, and advisory services.”

Whether we love it, hate it, or feel both ways, these numbers tell us where QuickBooks is going next. Start exploring those features you haven’t tried yet. Build your mid-market consulting capabilities. Embrace AI tools as capacity multipliers. And prepare your clients for the August changes before they arrive.

Listen to the full episode for Alicia’s complete breakdown of every earnings metric.

Meet the Man Who Turned Insurance Forgery Into an Assembly Line

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It’s December 1971, in a comfortable living room in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles. Two men sit on a couch, sharing some Scotch and maybe a Quaalude. One is Art Lewis, a 28-year-old executive. The other is Alan Green, a 21-year-old actuary who’s been working at Equity Funding for over a year while finishing his senior year at UCLA. They’d become friendly. Alan and his wife had even gone skinny-dipping in Art’s pool on a previous visit. This wasn’t a smoke-filled backroom of hardened criminals plotting a heist. It was a casual evening between a young employee and his boss.

It ended with Alan agreeing to help fabricate tens of thousands of fake insurance policies.

On this episode of Oh My Fraud, host Caleb Newquist, joined by co-producer Zach Frank, sits down with Alan, an actual insider from the Equity Funding scandal of the early 1970s. Alan wasn’t just another participant. He automated and scaled the creation of phony insurance policies at the center of one of the largest financial frauds in American history. (If you’re not familiar with the Equity Funding case, listen to Episode 66, The Case of Equity Funding Corporation of America. You’ll need the full backstory to understand the magnitude of what Alan is describing.)

What makes Alan’s account so unsettling is that he wasn’t a criminal mastermind. He was a talented kid who said “yes” because being chosen felt good. When Art revealed the scheme and asked for help, Alan didn’t hesitate. He felt “special.” His story shows the most devastating schemes aren’t built by obvious villains. They’re built by ordinary, capable people who are seduced by a sense of belonging and reassured that no one’s really getting hurt.

The Price of Belonging

The line between an honest employee and a convicted conspirator often has nothing to do with greed. For Alan, it was about something far more ordinary: the human need to belong.

Alan was exactly the kind of hire any company would want. The son of a pension consultant, he’d discovered his gift for numbers early. At UCLA, he took a computer programming course in Fortran, aced it, and switched his major to the brand-new field of math computer science. When he started working afternoons at Equity Funding in 1969, he was newly married and still finishing school.

His first day at the small Beverly Hills office felt “like walking into a party.” The entire actuarial department worked in one room, everyone young and friendly. “All my future friends were there,” Alan recalled. “It really was family.”

For over a year, Alan did normal actuarial work, like calculating insurance premiums using massive paper spreadsheets and projecting income and expenses. He had no idea that Mike Keller, working in the office next door, was creating fake insurance policies.

Then Mike quit at the worst possible time. It was December 1971, year-end was approaching, and Equity Funding needed certain numbers on the books. That’s when Art invited Alan to his house.

Sitting on Art’s couch, both men feeling good from drinks and drugs, Art revealed the scheme, or at least the part he wanted Alan to know about. The company had been creating fraudulent insurance policies and selling them to reinsurance companies for cash. They needed Alan’s programming skills to continue the work.

“How did you feel?” Caleb asks Alan about that moment.

“Special,” Alan answers. He said yes immediately. No negotiation or agonizing. Art valued his abilities, and that recognition was everything.

Decades later, Alan still wrestles with that moment. “Why did I say yes? Why was I so flattered?” The answer he’s found has little to do with money. Art offered membership in what Alan privately called “the fellowship,” his name for the scheme, borrowed from Tolkien. “We want you to be in our group,” is how Alan describes the appeal. “We’re inviting you to have a secret family.”

How Talent Became a Weapon

Once Alan said yes, his professional instincts took over, and that’s when a crude fraud became an industrial operation.

The numbers tell the story. When Mike left at the end of 1971, about 10,000 phony policies existed. By the end of 1972, after Alan’s improvements, that number had exploded to between 64,000 and 66,000.

Nobody told Alan to automate the fraud. “That was just my inclination,” he said. He did what any good programmer would do. He streamlined the process, built flowcharts, wrote programs, and documented everything so clearly that “it could easily be handed to the next person.”

The mechanics were sophisticated. Equity Funding sold the fake policies to reinsurance companies for cash. To keep the books consistent, Alan had to weave the fraudulent data through multiple systems. Fake policies required fake commissions. The computer even determined when fake policyholders would “die” so the company could collect death benefits. A $50,000 payout then equals about $500,000 today, Alan notes.

Most cleverly, Alan embedded hidden codes in each fake policy. They were markers only he could read. This let him mix real and fake policies so seamlessly that “you can’t tell the difference when looking at a listing.” When investigators later tried to separate legitimate from fraudulent policies, they discovered Alan was “the only one who could do that.”

The lesson is chilling. The same qualities that make employees valuable, like initiative, systematic thinking, and technical skill, can scale a fraud beyond anyone’s imagination. Alan turned forgery into an assembly line, complete with documentation for the next shift.

The Architecture of Denial

How did twenty-five people participate in this fraud for years without anyone stopping it? The answer lies in how Equity Funding compartmentalized the conspiracy and delayed the victims’ appearance.

Alan’s isolation was nearly complete. In his entire time at Equity Funding, he never once met CEO Stanley Goldblum. “Never saw him,” he emphasizes. He barely knew President Fred Levin or executive Lloyd Eaton beyond glimpsing them at parties. When asked about the accounting department that was cooking the books at the corporate level, Alan says he was “completely” isolated from them.

He knew nothing about the other frauds happening simultaneously, like the forged bond certificates, the gold-plated bricks placed in the vault to fool auditors, or the bugging of the conference room where auditors worked. As Alan learned later, “the higher up they were, the more they knew.” Everyone else saw only their piece.

The culture helped maintain the illusion of normalcy. Alan tells a story about Fred calling down from the 28th floor one night because he’d received a delivery of cannabis but didn’t know how to roll joints. Could anyone in the actuarial department help? Alan could and did, keeping a little for himself. “He had a lot better stuff than we could afford,” Alan notes. In his telling, drugs were “an equalizer” that dissolved hierarchy and made the company feel like a family rather than a criminal enterprise.

Even the fraud itself felt routine. The infamous “signing parties” gathered department heads around a conference table to forge signatures on fake policies—doctors approving medical exams, agents closing sales. Ordinary managers, sitting together, manufacturing fraud like it was paperwork.

Most importantly, while the scheme ran, there were no visible victims. “When it’s going on, there are no victims,” Alan explained. “The victims come at the end.” The stock kept climbing. Reinsurance companies collected their premiums (funded by selling more fake policies to other reinsurers). Everyone was “getting what they expected to get.”

There was also a comforting story that this was temporary. Art told Alan they wanted to wind it down. According to Art’s later recollection, executives even pleaded with Stanley Goldblum to pause the scheme for just one year. Stanley refused. Earnings per share had to rise from $1.80 to $2.00 to $2.25, no exceptions. “Growth at all costs,” as Caleb puts it.

When the Music Stopped

Alan left Equity Funding in January 1973, not from guilt, but from wanderlust. “My lifestyle was really turning very bohemian,” he explains. “I really needed to cut free and go explore the world.” Art wanted him to stay but didn’t push hard. Alan suspects Art’s first thought was, “Are you going to talk to anybody?”

Alan didn’t talk. But three months later, in April 1973, another employee named Ron Secrest did. When the scandal broke, Alan got a call from a friend still at Equity Funding warning him to cooperate now, and there might be immunity. Alan immediately agreed to help.

The investigators couldn’t tell which policies were fake. Alan was the only one who could identify them, thanks to his hidden codes. He returned on a contract basis, spent about a week reversing his own work, and gave investigators the evidence they needed.

The meeting location shows how serious things had become. Investigators first met Alan on a golf course road where “you can see anyone coming.” They knew it might be dangerous.

When sentences came down in October 1974, Alan got the lightest, with three months at minimum-security Lompoc. He brought his own box of books and played bridge nightly with three fellow conspirators: Attorney Jim Banks, head of policy service Bill Symonds, and Larry Collins, the head of underwriting. They never discussed the fraud.

Stanley Goldblum got eight years, served four, and paid a $10,000 fine, pocket change for a fraud this size. He kept his Beverly Hills house and later got caught in a 1990s workers’ comp scheme. In his seventies, he was arrested again for trying to get a bank loan with fraudulent information.

The real victims appeared when the company collapsed. Shareholders lost everything when the stock went to zero. Legitimate insurance agents lost their careers. Alan tells one story that haunts him. A friend’s father, an agent who’d been advised to hold the company stock, lost everything when it crashed. He had a heart attack and died.

Lessons from the Fellowship

Alan’s story isn’t about a criminal mastermind. He was a talented young programmer who wanted to belong, said yes to feel special, and automated a fraud because that’s what good programmers do—they make things efficient.

The warning signs aren’t always in the numbers. Watch for cultures where forgery becomes routine, departments are so isolated that no one sees the full picture, and growth targets are so sacred that leadership won’t pause even for a year. Watch for the quiet seduction of the inner circle, the promise of belonging to something special.

Most unsettling of all, watch your best young hires. The same talents that make them valuable, like systematic thinking, technical skill, and the drive to improve processes, can transform a small deception into an industrial fraud. As Alan still asks himself: “Why did I say yes?” His answer has less to do with greed than with being human.

Listen to the full conversation with Alan on this episode of Oh My Fraud. Because sometimes the biggest frauds are orchestrated by ordinary people, one yes at a time.

98% of ProAdvisors Miss the Features They’re Paying For

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Picture a packed ballroom at Intuit Connect. An Intuit vice president wraps up his keynote and drops a bombshell, saying, “The ProAdvisor program is going away at the end of the year.” Then he walks off stage.

The room freezes. Attendees turn to each other, stunned. As Margie Remmers-Davis remembers it, “We all looked at each other and said, wait, what?”

Within minutes, panic spread to the vendor hall. Margie walked straight to an Intuit booth labeled “ProAdvisor” and said, “Well, I guess this booth is going away.” Then she learned that the moment those words left the VP’s mouth, Jaclyn Anku, Intuit’s ProAdvisor Program Leader, had texted her entire team: ProAdvisor is not going away. He misspoke.

The room could breathe again. The program wasn’t dying. It was transforming.

In Episode 150 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, host Alicia Katz Pollock sits down with Margie Remmers-Davis, Founder and CEO of Akadian Accounting Education. They unpack what they call “the ProPartner paradox,” or the rebranding of ProAdvisor into the ProPartner program, launching January 2027.

From Advisor to Partner: What’s in a Name?

For the past decade, Intuit pushed bookkeepers to evolve. Stop just doing data entry. Start advising clients. Look forward, not backward. Help businesses understand what their numbers mean.

As Alicia puts it, “We’ve finally grown into the name that they gave us 30 years ago.” Just as the industry embraces advisory work, Intuit switches the name to “partner.”

The evolution shows in Intuit’s flagship conference. Ten years ago, QuickBooks Connect was mostly product training. You learned what was on the certification test, then took it right there. Over time, it shifted to advisory: interpreting numbers and helping clients succeed. Now, as Intuit Connect, it focuses on firm growth, the hiring crisis, and AI adoption.

So why “partner” now? Alicia sees two meanings, and both make sense.

First, it signals renewed commitment. After a challenging year of interface changes that slowed everyone down, Intuit wants to make amends. They now view accountants “as a customer,” meaning they’ll listen and build what practitioners actually need.

Second, it’s transactional. In the vendor world, “partner” means affiliate, someone earning residuals for referrals. With three-year revenue sharing at the program’s core, this interpretation also fits.

But what worries Margie’s students is ProAdvisor’s complete disappearance.

It won’t. At least, not exactly. Margie believes the ProAdvisor name will stay for certifications and learning. You’ll still be a Certified ProAdvisor. The ProAdvisor Academy continues. What changes are the benefits and tiers. Gold, elite, and platinum become Member, Partner, Preferred Partner, Premier Partner, and Elite Partner.

Still, when Margie checked Intuit’s FAQ, it says: “The ProAdvisor name and tier designations will sunset and will be replaced by the name ProPartner.” The exact details remain fuzzy.

Real Benefits Worth Having

Whatever you call it, the new program delivers concrete value. Let’s break down what matters most.

Five New Tiers

The bottom two tiers set a low bar to entry. Members just created an account, maybe to fix their own books. Partners passed Level 1 certification and have one client. That’s it.

Three-Year Revenue Share

This is the headline change. Revenue share extends from 12 months to three full years:

  • Partner: 10%
  • Preferred: 15%
  • Premier: 20%
  • Elite: 25%

As Alicia says, “25% revenue share for three years doesn’t suck.” Though she admits loyalty to her QuickBooks Solutions Provider means weighing what to run through them versus capturing residuals herself.

Free Premium Tools

It is widely rumored that at Premier and Elite levels, the $149 Intuit Accountants Suite Accelerate will come free. This matters for firms with many clients who need dashboard oversight, or for teams using ProAdvisor Academy. Solo practitioners without big rosters probably don’t need it anyway.

Expanded Support Hours

For anyone working nights and weekends, ProAdvisor support now includes staff with actual accounting experience, not just software troubleshooting. Call (888) 333-3451 and follow the prompts.

Silver-level hours:

  • Monday-Friday: 5 a.m. to 6 p.m. Pacific
  • Saturday: 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific

Gold, Platinum, Elite hours:

  • Monday-Friday: 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific
  • Saturday: 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific
  • Sunday: 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific

“I can’t tell you how many times it’s been 5 p.m. on Friday when I need to talk to them,” Alicia says. Weekend support isn’t a luxury; it’s reality.

The Directory Problem

The Find-a-Pro directory brought accountants frustration and hope. Currently, you need 500 points to get listed for gold status. That’s Level 1 certification plus clients, or Level 2 plus payroll certifications.

Nine months ago, Intuit killed the lead-capture form. That form generated real clients because business owners could fill it out, and you’d get notified to book consultations.

Intuit killed it because of scammers. Both hosts laughed at the recurring characters, including the “casting director” needing QuickBooks training for $5,000 a day and the father with three daughters (always three) starting businesses. Spam overwhelmed the system.

The directory still exists, but prospects work harder to reach you now. They need to visit your website or call directly.

Future improvements sound promising. Instead of just ZIP code searches, clients will find firms by practice areas and skills. Firm-level listings replace individual-only profiles. As Alicia notes, “ZIP code doesn’t matter anymore.”

But Margie’s students face a catch-22. Many get certified specifically to land in the directory and win first clients. But if listing requires clients you don’t have, you’re stuck. You can’t get clients without the directory, and you can’t get in the directory without clients.

The Real Value

What should really worry Intuit is they’re delivering more value than anyone realizes.

The problem crystallized at Scaling New Heights. Xero invited Alicia for a head-to-head comparison with QuickBooks. When the pricing slide appeared, the room erupted. Xero’s top tier is $90. QuickBooks’ is $275 to $340.

But Alicia knew something the attendees didn’t. That $340 includes $90 of bill pay (now free), workforce enhancements, and built-in AI. Factor in the $20 monthly that practitioners already pay for Claude or ChatGPT, and the math changes.

Then she demonstrated contract signing inside QuickBooks. Upload a contract to the customer hub. Mark where they initial, sign, and date. Send it off. The signed document lives in their customer details. It replaces DocuSign.

“How many people have heard of this?” she asked the room of 100 professionals. No hands went up.

“How many have explored the new AI features?” Two or three hands, including hers. That’s little to no awareness of the features justifying the price increase.

As Alicia puts it, Intuit “put the cart before the horse.” They raised prices before anyone knew what they were paying for. Instead of thinking “Look what I’m getting,” practitioners thought, “You aggravated me all year, and now I pay 20% more?”

Margie says this offers job security for people like her and Alicia. There’s so much to teach because there’s so much practitioners don’t know exists. Alicia’s planning dedicated classes just for overlooked features like AI agents, customer hub, and workforce management. Her 600-page QuickBooks book, once complete, is now just “fundamentals.” There’s enough new material for a second book.

What November Means

Margie explains why November matters at Intuit. The certification season runs November 1 through October 31. When one season ends, Intuit previews what’s next.

This November, expect to see your current points and new tier equivalent. You have the rest of 2026 to position yourself before the January 2027 launch.

Two more programs require at least Partner level:

  • Career pipeline: Intuit’s training one million students to build an onshore talent pool
  • Awards program: Recognition for Pro Partners

The Bottom Line

The ProPartner rebrand is an industry mid-pivot. Just as bookkeepers embrace advisory work, Intuit reframes them as partners and paying customers.

The concrete benefits are real, including three-year revenue shares up to 25%, free Accelerate at higher tiers, weekend support, and a smarter directory. These are overdue recognition of the small firms who built Intuit’s empire.

But value only matters if practitioners understand it. Those staying “heads down” in daily work miss the features that justify higher prices.

As Margie says about the rise of AI doing transactional work, AI is “confidently wrong.” You need deep knowledge to be confidently right. You can’t correct a machine you don’t understand. Advisory is survival.

Much remains unknown, including how you’ll earn points, which tier unlocks the directory, and whether certifications change. Intuit promises more details this fall.

Want the complete conversation? Listen to episode 150 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast. Get ahead of the changes before Pro Partner launches in January 2027.

Alicia Katz Pollock’s Royalwise OWLS (On-Demand Web-based Learning Solutions) is the industry’s premier portal for top-notch QuickBooks Online training with CPE for accounting firms, bookkeepers, and small business owners. Visit Royalwise OWLS, where learning QBO is a HOOT!

The Seven-Part Framework That Turned a Bottlenecked Firm Into a Director-Led One

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Rachel and Marcus Dillon were in the middle of pricing out a closet remodel when the numbers stopped making sense. Rachel was thinking maybe $5,000—and even that felt steep for organizing a space that already had decent storage. Marcus had mentally prepared for $10,000. Then the custom closet consultant dropped an estimate for $30,000.

“She equated it to a trip to Europe that may cost $20,000 to $30,000. And that’s just one trip. You use your closet daily,” Marcus recalled on a recent episode of Who’s Really the BOSS? “And I’m like, lady, I’m not spending 30 grand to go to Europe either.”

The disconnect was almost comical. But Marcus quickly flipped it into a lesson for accounting firm owners. “You could spend $30,000 on a closet. Why don’t you spend $30,000 a year on a really good accountant and know where your business is at any given time?”

That conversation about value sets up the bigger story. Because just like that closet consultant needed to find her ideal customer, Marcus and Rachel had to figure out who should truly own each piece of their growing accounting firm.

When the Owner Becomes the Bottleneck

In the beginning, Marcus was everything at his accounting firm. Business development started with him. Some preparation work landed on his desk. And he reviewed every single deliverable before it went out the door.

“You were the beginning, the middle and the end,” Rachel told him during the episode. “And there was help in between those things.”

That worked fine when the firm was smaller. But Dillon Business Advisors (DBA) is now a $5 million-plus CPA firm with about 24 team members. At that size, having one person as the center of every decision is impossible.

The first breakthrough came when they built what they call the “team of three,” a pod structure that created capacity for quality service delivery and allowed them to scale. They could keep bringing on new clients because the pods could handle them. But even with that structure and Rachel’s help, Marcus remained the person everyone ultimately answered to.

“Your org chart and responsibilities have to look a lot different than they did at one, two, or three million,” Marcus explained. The question that forced their hand was uncomfortable but necessary: What in the firm still waits on the owner?

Why Summer Is the Time to Fix It

The Dillons tackled this restructuring during what they call “improvement season,” which runs from roughly April 15 to August 15. It’s after tax season but before extension deadlines heat up. Since most firms in their network run both tax and client accounting services, summer is when they have breathing room to experiment.

“We like to do our refinements, improvements, and sometimes experiments during the times we’re not in a deadline crunch,” Rachel explained. The timing is deliberate. They implement changes in summer, practice them during the lighter extension season in September and October, then refine them once more before year-end. By January, when the volume returns, the new way of working is second nature.

“That’s really a gift to our team,” Rachel added, “to not pull a software and change it or completely rework a whole process in the middle of tax season.”

This particular improvement season, Amy McCarty, DBA’s Director of Operations and People, led the charge to formalize director roles. But before they could put people in seats, they had to define what those seats actually were. They’d learned that lesson the hard way with a director of business development hire that didn’t work out, largely because the role lacked clear definition.

The Seven Parts Every Director Role Needs

The word “ownership” does heavy lifting in this conversation, and Rachel made the distinction crystal clear by referencing an episode of The Double Win podcast. Real ownership means handling something from conception through planning to execution, at an agreed-upon standard.

“It’s fine for a spouse to say, ‘Can I go to the store for you?'” Rachel explained. “But it’s another thing for that spouse to know we need things for the weekend, to make that list, go to the store, and unload the groceries. They need to own the whole process.”

Until someone owns the entire function, the mental load stays with the original person. They’re still wondering, “Do they know what they’re supposed to do? Will it get done to the standard I expect?”

DBA built its director roles around seven specific components:

  1. Primary Focus: A one-sentence statement that captures the role’s core purpose. “If you can’t say it in a sentence, then the role isn’t clear,” Marcus said.
  2. Owns: What they’re specifically accountable for. “Not aspirational, but concrete.”
  3. Measured By: The outcomes that prove it’s working. “That’s where ownership gets teeth,” Marcus noted.
  4. Not Responsible For: Marcus called this “the most underrated section” in the whole framework. In small firms where everyone wears multiple hats, explicitly naming what’s not someone’s job gives them “freedom, a breath of fresh air.”
  5. The One-Liner: The soul of the role. For example, the Director of Technology and AI “builds the machine, but doesn’t run it.” The Director of Sales and Marketing “brings in the right work, doesn’t execute it.”
  6. KPIs: The numbers that prove success.
  7. Weekly Question: A single recurring question that keeps the role honest. For operations, it’s “Where are we overloaded or at risk of missing a deadline?” For sales, it’s “Do we have enough right-fit opportunities coming in?”

Rachel, drawing on her background as an elementary teacher, explained why the “not responsible for” section is so powerful. “Our brain is forming pathways, right? And trying to connect to something that we already know. You help your brain out by saying it is not this.”

The Five Director Roles at DBA

With the framework built, DBA mapped out five director positions. Each deliberately combines two related areas. This is a design choice that works at their current size but anticipates future growth.

“At a $5 million company, the directors can handle those two areas,” Rachel explained. But at $10 or $15 million, those roles might split. Sales and marketing could become two separate directors. Technology and AI might divide.

Here’s how the roles break down today:

  • Director of Tax and Financial Planning: The technical authority who ensures everything the firm delivers is correct, sound, and within the firm’s risk tolerance. He doesn’t own workflow enforcement (that’s operations) or sales (that’s marketing).
  • Director of Accounting and Advisory: Focuses on client experience and ongoing advisory value. “It’s not just accurate financials,” Marcus explained. “It’s the perceived insight and the conversations that you have with clients.”
  • Director of Operations and People: Runs the machine and the people inside it, owning execution capacity and accountability. “She runs the thing, essentially,” Marcus joked.
  • Director of Technology and AI: Builds the systems and automation layer. After 18 months on the team, DBA’s Director of Technology and AI, Angel Sabino, has moved from playing with AI tools to actually deploying them across the firm.
  • Director of Sales and Marketing: Brings in the right work without executing it, working closely with operations to pair new clients with teams that have both capacity and expertise.

The process of defining these roles surfaced some surprising overlaps. Rachel’s previous title was “Firm Administrator.” It was a catch-all that mostly meant she didn’t do tax or technical accounting. When they formalized the director structure, they discovered that Rachel, Amy, and Marcus were all holding pieces of the “people” function.

“When we did this, we really created a clear divide,” Rachel said. “Amy’s really going to own people. Can I help her? Can you help her? Yes, but she owns it.”

Making It Stick Through Scorecards and Trust

Defining roles is necessary but not sufficient. “If you never review this again, if you only bring it up at someone’s annual review, this is not going to be successful,” Marcus warned.

DBA’s accountability lives in a spreadsheet. Each director has a tab to log their KPIs, which feed into a color-coded dashboard showing whether each area is on track, at risk, or off track. Directors update metrics weekly and rate their KPIs monthly.

But the magic isn’t in the spreadsheet. It’s the question they ask when something goes red. Instead of “What went wrong?” or “Why didn’t you hit your number?” they ask, “What do you need from this room?”

Rachel gave an example. If sales and marketing show zero right-fit leads, she might tell the other directors she needs educational materials or downloadable resources, something technical that makes the firm attractive to prospects. “That’s something where they could help me, since I’m not an accountant,” she said.

This only works with genuine trust. “If you have people that are not there to really ask what you need from this room, and they’re okay with either you failing or wanting you to fail, that’s an awful situation,” Marcus said bluntly.

The owner also has to resist the rescue instinct. If Marcus jumps in too quickly when someone struggles, “you’re always going to be the person picking up the pieces and quote unquote rescuing that person. And they never fully own anything.”

The Payoff Is A Firm That Can Scale Without the Owner

The shift from owner-led to director-led reduces Marcus’s workload while creating real opportunities for talented team members. These are the kinds of opportunities that, when missing, send good people out the door to create their own.

It also positions the firm to scale differently. “With the director levels plus new technology, we’ll be able to grow and scale a little bit more without adding the same number of team members,” Marcus explained. They can contemplate growing to $10 million without doubling their headcount, especially as AI and automation reshape what capacity means.

Marcus offered a simple example of how it works now. Someone forwarded a news article about COVID-related penalty and interest clawbacks. Instead of Marcus making a snap decision, three directors evaluated it together. Sales assessed the opportunity, operations checked capacity and tax confirmed feasibility. They made a collective, informed decision with no bottleneck.

“The minutes that exist here in improvement season are maybe more important than the minutes that exist during busy season,” Marcus reflected. “Because here’s where we’re planting the seeds to harvest later on.”

For firms still centered on the owner, the Dillons’ journey offers a warning and a roadmap. The warning is that growth will eventually make the owner-as-bottleneck model impossible. The roadmap is clear role definitions, genuine ownership transfer, and the trust to let capable people either succeed or occasionally fail.

DBA is sharing its complete director role framework with members of the Collective by DBA community. To learn more about joining, listen to the full episode.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a national, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 25 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through community, groups, and one-on-one advisory. 

Growth and rest aren’t opposites when you build the machine that makes both possible

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When someone tells Rachel Dillon they landed 20 new clients in six months, her first thought is chaos. Overworked staff. Missed deadlines. A firm running on caffeine and adrenaline. So when the team at Dillon Business Advisors gathered for its mid-year retreat this summer, Rachel noticed that her firm celebrated not just new-client wins but also paid time off taken. More clients and more rest, in the same six months.

On Who’s Really the BOSS?, hosts Marcus and Rachel Dillon walk through the numbers behind their first half of 2026. They measure those results against the goals they set at their November 2025 team retreat. The numbers prove fast growth and a healthier team aren’t competing goals; they’re two outputs of the same well-built system. DBA landed 20 new client accounting services (CAS) clients (five more than its annual target) at an average of $1,965 in monthly recurring revenue. Meanwhile, the team took 75% more paid time off than the year before. It turns out sustainable scaling is a system.

In this episode, Marcus and Rachel look at the numbers behind the growth, the team structure that absorbed it, the PTO shift that proves it didn’t come at the team’s expense, and where the clients actually came from.

The numbers tell the real story

Back in November 2025, DBA set a goal of adding 15 new monthly client or family-group relationships in 2026. These are small businesses or complex families that need income and expenses tracked year-round, at roughly $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue each. Annualized, that’s about $30,000 in MRR. The firm built the goal around what it could capably deliver, because its teams of three are structured to serve exactly this kind of work.

The results beat the target. Through June, DBA accepted and onboarded 20 CAS clients. At DBA, base CAS work includes monthly bookkeeping, tax returns, two tax projections per year, and at least one advisory meeting, plus payroll or sales tax when applicable. As Rachel points out, most of these clients are on an annual advisory touchpoint rather than quarterly or monthly meetings. That’s how the team scales without drowning. Fees ranged from a $500 Schedule C add-on to a $3,000-per-month engagement. On top of the 20, the firm added two monthly tax advisory plan (TAP) clients at $800 and $500 per month. That’s recurring revenue even from clients who aren’t business owners.

Then there’s the revenue from onboarding fees. Standard onboarding starts at $7,500, and across those 20 engagements, DBA charged $101,415 in total, averaging over $5,000 per engagement. The charges ranged from $2,500 for a well-known client setting up a simple new entity to $10,000 for a complex engagement with lots of moving pieces and a tax return.

The reason DBA charges onboarding fees is straightforward. In Marcus’s words, “position it to where you’re coming out of the gate showing value and getting paid for the value you bring from the very beginning.” Both the monthly service and the onboarding begin the day the client signs the engagement letter. No delayed starts, no prorating headaches. The signing date is the anniversary and charge date.

Why 20 onboardings didn’t create chaos

Big numbers only stay healthy if you engineer the work behind them. DBA’s clearest proof that growth is a system is its onboarding engine.

There’s no single “onboarding person.” New clients are spread across teams of three. The firm started 2026 with five teams that could accept work and grew to about seven by mid-year. That meant more homes for incoming clients. Every month, Marcus meets with Lezlie Reeves, CPA, DBA’s Director of Accounting & Advisory, and Amy McCarty, Director of Operations, to review client exits, the pipeline, and each team’s workload, all of which DBA tracks in Excel.

DBA clearly defines roles within each onboarding so no one drowns. 

  • Tax admin: sets up projects, folders, and client communication
  • Client service manager: builds the QuickBooks Online file, chart of accounts, reports, and workflows
  • Controller: reviews the compliance work, moves it into the tax software, and issues the first set of financials
  • CFO: supports the team, fields early advisory questions, and starts building rapport

They document the whole process in Canopy, beginning with a kickoff call, and an insights report tracks how many days each onboarding takes.

They complete most onboardings in 13 to 14 days. Only two ran past two weeks, and those were a three-entity family group at 29 days, and another at 21 days due to complexity and the client being out of town. Incentives keep the rhythm going. DBA pays onboarding bonuses after the first financial statements go out, and the bonus shrinks each week past the two-week mark. Just as important, the same team that onboarded a client serves them long term. That eliminates the hand-off friction Marcus has seen at firms where one person onboards and then tosses the work over the wall.

Celebrating time off as a growth metric

A system that spreads out the work also makes rest possible. In 2026, DBA moved from a designated, accrual-based PTO model to flexible, “unlimited” PTO with guardrails.

The firm tackled the obvious fear head-on. At the year-end retreat, a team member raised the well-known concern that unlimited PTO can lead people to take less time off. So DBA kept tracking it. They confirmed PTO taken was up 75% compared to the same period in 2025, even during tax season and 20 onboardings. Marcus offers an honest caveat, noting past tracking might be imperfect because some of that time was always being taken. But better data now means a stronger foundation either way.

The change built on years of evolution. DBA started with tenure-based weeks that included three weeks of PTO, plus a fourth after five years of service. Then it moved to a year-of-service payout model that extended benefits to part-timers by establishing a reliable base workweek, such as a committed 24 hours. Flexible PTO now has the same base: 24 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, guaranteed comp, with pay for anything above it.

The real goal was removing uncertainty. When employees have doctor’s appointments, they don’t have to wonder whether they need to make up hours or use PTO. That system kept people tethered to their phones instead of disconnecting, and often meant time simply went untracked. Flexible PTO lets a team member “turn messages off and go do what they need to do.” And there are no blackout periods, even during tax season, because, as Marcus puts it, “people probably need to take more time off during tax season than any other time.” Coverage is handled inside the team of three.

Key lessons:

  • Track what you value, even after you make it “unlimited”
  • Guarantee a reliable base so time off feels safe, not risky
  • Cover the work inside the team instead of imposing blackout dates

The growth came from relationships, not ad spend

Systems for onboarding and rest explain how DBA absorbed the growth. But where did the growth itself come from? Not $100,000 in paid ads, a lead-gen company, or an in-house social media team. The firm invested in its website about 18 months ago to fix schema and technical SEO to regain visibility and search ranking. But that wasn’t the engine.

Eighty-five percent of new wins came from existing clients or referrals:

  • 10 (50%) came from existing clients expanding into new businesses, acquisitions, or new entities. In one case, a client left a W-2 job to open their own practice and upgraded from a TAP to a CAS plan. Simply adding more advisory meetings does not count as a new client. Only a new entity or client ID does.
  • 7 (35%) came from referrals.
  • 1 came from website or search (Google or an LLM). More prospects entered through search, but they didn’t convert.

The tactics behind that are low-tech. Tell your best clients you have capacity. “Don’t send this to your worst client,” Marcus warns. Push back on the reflexive “I know you’re busy” culture that stops clients from asking for more. Talk naturally about your team and services in everyday settings. Marcus points to cars-and-coffee conversations and a morning workout, during which his trainer asked for 1099 help. And help people even when they aren’t a fit. “Leave people you know better than you found them,” Marcus says. In this case, he pointed his trainer toward simpler tools rather than selling him a service he didn’t need.

Marcus also cautions against taking on annual, tax-only clients, hoping to convert them to CAS later. If you already deliver great annual service, clients have little reason to pay more for monthly work. You’ll end up with a pile of tax clients and no base to build teams around. Meanwhile, an emerging trend fuels onboarding demand. Businesses are migrating from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online as longtime staff retire. Marcus cites a large oral surgeon group whose office manager, after decades in QuickBooks Desktop, was nearing retirement. These conversions justify onboarding fees precisely because the firm gets to build the systems right from the start.

Build the machine, then let it run

Landing 20 clients in six months wasn’t luck or hustle. It was the payoff of intentional systems. Defined pricing everyone can articulate, a separate onboarding fee that funds the real setup work, onboarding shared across teams of three, monthly capacity reviews, and people-first flexible PTO. Growth and a healthier team came out of the same machine.

For firm owners, spouses, and accounting professionals, that reframes the classic trade-off. You don’t have to choose between scaling revenue and protecting your people. But you do have to build the infrastructure that lets both happen. Rest and growth stop being opposites when you design capacity rather than hoping for it.

Here are Rachel’s practical things you can do today:

  • Assess your pricing: define service plans and base pricing that your team and clients can all articulate
  • Charge an onboarding fee: it funds the real setup work and lets you reward the team
  • Define and delegate your onboarding process: never one person doing it all, since shared responsibility prevents bottlenecks when clients flood in
  • Communicate capacity to your best clients and referral sources

For the deeper numbers, the full onboarding-role breakdown, and the evolution of DBA’s PTO models, listen to the full episode of Who’s Really the BOSS? And don’t miss the follow-up episode on the firm’s tax advisory plan (TAP) clients.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a national, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 26 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through community, groups, and one-on-one advisory.