Alicia Katz Pollock

What Losing Your Best Bookkeeper Reveals About How You Price Yourself

Earmark Team · June 1, 2026 ·

Alicia Katz Pollock, founder of Royalwise, published author, and host of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, spent two years training a bookkeeper named Brenda. It started as a coaching relationship, but ended up with Brenda earning $10,000 a month and giving notice because she’d outgrown Alicia’s “tiny little clients.”

That’s absolutely a success story. But when Alicia shared this story with Questian Telka and Nancy McClelland on a special crossover episode between The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast and She Counts, they heard something Alicia hadn’t noticed.

“Oh my God, I’m undervaluing myself,” Alicia admitted. “But it wasn’t part of my narrative, and I wasn’t thinking about it that way at all.”

That moment of recognition became the foundation for a brutally honest conversation. Three experienced professionals with decades of combined expertise discovered they all struggle with the same thing: chronically underpricing themselves. As a result, Alicia decided to build a paid bookkeeper incubator that turns her expertise into a scalable training model.

The episode dug into the invisible forces that cap the growth of technically brilliant professionals who can untangle any set of books but can’t bring themselves to charge what that skill is worth. As Alicia put it, “The ability to expand really happens when you step into your own worth.”

When Your Best Employee Outgrows You

Brenda’s journey from a coaching client to a $10,000-a-month earner unfolded gradually over two years. She asked insightful questions during Alicia’s coaching sessions. Then she began handling Alicia’s smaller bookkeeping clients. She bought a few personal finance accounts from Alicia’s book of business. She landed her own clients. Finally, a church hired her for $4,000 a month.

“Hey, Alicia, I need to give you notice,” Brenda said. “I can’t do your tiny little clients anymore.”

Alicia’s first reaction was panic. “What am I going to do now? Am I going to take these back and do them myself? Am I going to sell off my book of business?”

Nancy, who’s run a Chicago CPA firm for 25 years, had her own parallel story. Her first employee left without warning to start a competing firm after Nancy trained her from scratch. “I taught her everything she knew,” Nancy said. “And she didn’t tell me that’s what she was doing.”

When Nancy shared her frustration with Hector Garcia, he offered another perspective: “Yeah, but what if you don’t teach them everything they need to know and they stay?”

Questian, founder of a fractional CFO firm focused on nonprofits, cut through the emotion. “When that takes place, it forces us to realize the value of what we’ve built.”

That’s the mirror moment. When someone you’ve trained walks away making more than you charged for the same work, it stops being a staffing problem. It becomes a pricing problem.

Rather than shrinking after Brenda’s departure, Alicia asked herself, “If it worked for Brenda, can I repeat the success? If it works for one person, can I scale it?”

Why We Undervalue Ourselves

When Questian asked why technically excellent bookkeepers undervalue themselves, Alicia’s answer was immediate: “Human beings are wired for insecurity.”

Nancy wanted that line as a promotional clip. But the conversation identified three specific patterns that keep even accomplished accounting professionals from charging what they should.

Poverty consciousness hits hard

When Alicia calculated her incubator program’s value at roughly $19,000 a year, her first thought was “Who the heck is going to pay $19,000 to be part of this?” The discomfort was physical. “Everybody wants to spend a minimum amount of money,” she said. She worried about being seen as greedy.

She’s not alone. Nancy’s husband jokes she’ll eventually come home with a live chicken from bartering with clients who can’t pay. Then one client actually started raising backyard chickens and gave them eggs. Alicia’s husband trades Apple training for eggs, too. Someone recently told Questian she “runs her business like a nonprofit.”

“It’s not entirely untrue,” she admits.

Helper mentality runs deep

When your identity centers on serving others, asking for significant money feels wrong. Alicia genuinely worried that some clients would only do bookkeeping if she kept prices at rock-bottom levels. Nancy confessed she hasn’t embraced value pricing “at all.” The instinct to help can override business sense.

The expertise blind spot might be worst

Nancy explained it perfectly. “Oh yeah, I know how to do that. It only takes me ten minutes.” When years of expertise compress complex tasks into quick execution, experts discount the outcome’s value because the effort felt minimal. But clients aren’t paying for your ten minutes. They’re paying for the decade that made ten minutes possible.

Reading Blair Enns’s book The Four Conversations at Hector Garcia’s Reframe conference, Alicia encountered the expert’s mantra: “I am the expert. I am the prize. I am on a mission to help. I can only do that if you let me lead. I accept that not all will follow.”

“My value is not me being able to untangle complicated books,” Alicia realized. “That’s what I do. And it has value, but that’s not my value.” Her real value includes a master’s in teaching, two decades of QuickBooks expertise, practice management knowledge, and industry relationships so deep she can text Intuit product managers directly.

Nancy connected this to value pricing. “When everything depends on you and your hands and your knowledge, your time fills up, and there’s a cap. But when you multiply your expertise through others, your impact expands.”

Building the Incubator

Alicia did something most business owners wouldn’t dare. She asked her community whether her idea was any good.

At a Royalwise OWLS membership meeting, with Brenda present to tell her own story, Alicia asked, “Is this a good idea or a stupid idea?” The response was immediate. Members wanted hands-on experience with real clients because “every single one is different.”

The training model follows a deliberate progression. In month one, Alicia does the bookkeeping while interns watch. In month two and beyond, interns do the bookkeeping while Alicia talks them through it. By month five or six, they work independently, with Alicia only reviewing.

But the incubator goes beyond bookkeeping mechanics. She’s enrolling interns in Mariette Martinez’s accounting lifecycle course. She set up a roundtable with business coach Richard Roppa-Roberts without Alicia present so interns have a safe space for support or, as Alicia put it, “a grievance panel if it’s needed.” Everyone takes her hands-on QuickBooks training course built from her published textbook.

The financial structure makes it work for everyone. Interns earn 60% of client fees as salaried employees. Her lawyer insisted on employee classification, which meant Alicia unexpectedly doubled her company’s size and had to navigate employment registrations across multiple states. “Some of them were like twice as much,” she said about certain states’ requirements. “But for me, that’s exciting because I’m learning something new.”

She secured sponsorship from Double and converted it entirely into scholarships. She offered payment tiers and prorated fees for existing members.

The pricing felt right when she considered Brenda’s trajectory. If working with Alicia can lead to $10,000 in monthly income, then $19,000 annually is a clear investment.

Behind the incubator sits strategy. With 10 to 15 years until retirement, Alicia wants something she can sell. “Right now, Royalwise is based on Jamie and me. We are the product. But that’s not something you can sell.”

She’s also thinking about the profession. With outsourcing and AI reducing opportunities for US-based bookkeepers, the incubator invests in domestic talent. “We need to have talented people here.”

This is explicitly a pilot program. “We are building this together,” she told her cohort. Her exit strategy is still up in the air. It might continue with new cohorts, become permanent staff, or scale differently.

Questian, navigating her own business transformation, offered the episode’s emotional core. “I’m on the right track because I am absolutely terrified.”

Nancy pushed back against advice to “not be afraid.” Fear is human. Your brain is protecting you. The answer is to act anyway. “Be afraid,” Nancy said. “And do it anyway.”

You Get What You Have the Courage to Ask For

Three successful women in accounting discovered (again) that even people others admire struggle with insecurities. Alicia didn’t realize she was undervaluing herself until Questian and Nancy reflected her story back to her. Nancy still catches herself working for free. Questian is navigating changes she’s not ready to name publicly.

None have figured it out. All are moving forward anyway.

Here’s what their conversation teaches us:

Your best employee leaving is data, not a disaster. When someone you’ve trained outgrows your practice, it reveals what you’ve built and whether you’re pricing accordingly.
Technical mastery isn’t business authority. Knowing QuickBooks doesn’t mean you know how to price services or lead others. Those require separate skills, community, and practice.
Undervaluation has specific causes. Poverty consciousness, helper mentality, and the expertise blind spot are patterns, not flaws. You can interrupt patterns once you see them.
Scaling expertise multiplies impact. Training others creates value for clients, team members, the profession, and yourself.
Fear is a compass, not a stop sign. If the next step terrifies you, you’re probably headed in the right direction.

The accounting profession faces change. Outsourcing and AI are reshaping US-based bookkeeping. Professionals investing in domestic talent, including Alicia’s incubator, are investing in the industry’s future.

But these breakthroughs didn’t happen alone. Every pivot came from honesty about fears, mistakes, or unknowns. Community and vulnerability are business strategies.

The episode closed with Oprah Winfrey’s quote, “You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.”

So ask. Ask for fees reflecting your expertise. Ask your community about your ideas. Ask for help building what you can’t build alone.

Listen to the full episode and share your own undervaluation story in the Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast LinkedIn group. When you undervalued yourself, what helped you move past it?

If you’re thinking “who would pay me for what I know,” you’re in good company. Three experts had the same thought, caught themselves, and chose to charge anyway.

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!

What Happens When Your Best Employee Outgrows You?

Earmark Team · May 31, 2026 ·

Alicia Katz Pollock teaches thousands of accounting professionals how to use QuickBooks. She’s built a training empire at Royalwise, published textbooks, and earned the unofficial title of “QuickBooks Queen.” So when she joined the hosts of She Counts for a special crossover episode, she thought she knew exactly what story she was telling.

She was wrong.

“Oh my God, I’m undervaluing myself,” Alicia said after hosts Questian Telka and Nancy McClelland reflected what they heard. “It wasn’t part of my narrative. And I wasn’t thinking about it that way at all.”

This crossover episode brings together She Counts and the Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast for a conversation that digs into why technically brilliant bookkeepers chronically sell themselves short, and what it takes to finally stop.

When Success Becomes a Mirror

Alicia’s story starts with a bookkeeper she calls Brenda. Brenda was a coaching client in Alicia’s Royalwise On-Demand Web-based Learning Solutions (OWLS) program who had the quality Alicia prizes most: curiosity.

“I could tell she was thinking about the material,” Alicia explained. “Even if she didn’t know what to do, she knew there was something that needed to be done.”

At the time, Alicia was running a small bookkeeping practice alongside her training business. She had about 30 clients, mostly micro businesses, solopreneurs, and therapists. They’re the kind of clients who say, “I don’t need a bookkeeper” or “I can’t afford a bookkeeper,” even though they really need someone to handle monthly reconciliations.

So Alicia brought Brenda on to help. For two years, they developed systems together: Slack communication, technology processes and review protocols. Brenda got better and better. Then she started growing beyond Alicia’s small clients. She bought a couple of Alicia’s personal-books clients that didn’t fit the Royalwise model. She picked up her own $400-a-month client, then a $1,000-a-month client. Finally, a church hired her for $4,000 a month for bookkeeping and administration.

“All of a sudden, she found herself making $10,000 a month,” Alicia said. “And she’s like, ‘Hey, Alicia, I need to give you notice. I can’t do your tiny little clients anymore.'”

Nancy’s reaction captured what everyone listening probably felt. “Two completely opposing feelings at the same time. On the one hand, a huge freaking success story. On the other hand, you taught her everything she knows, and now she’s leaving.”

This wasn’t abstract for Nancy. Her own long-time employee of eight years gave notice just two days before recording. “I feel left behind. I feel trapped,” Nancy admitted.

But then Nancy shared wisdom from Hector Garcia that helped her reframe the problem. When she complained about training someone who left, Hector responded: “Yeah, but what if you don’t teach them everything they need to know and they stay?”

That’s the real mirror moment. As Questian observed, “It forces us to realize the value of what we’ve built.”

From Loss to Expansion

Faced with losing Brenda, Alicia had safe options. She could take the clients back herself, sell the book of business, or drop bookkeeping entirely. She chose none of them.

“If it worked for Brenda, can I repeat the success?” she asked herself. “Can I scale it?”

Showing remarkable vulnerability, Alicia went to her Royalwise OWLS members (the people who pay her for coaching). She asked point-blank, “Is this a good idea or is this a stupid idea?” Brenda was actually there to tell her own story.

The response was enthusiastic. Members said things like “I would love to study under you” and “I would love hands-on experience in real bookkeeping scenarios because every single one is different.”

So Alicia built something ambitious. The incubator model works like this: First, trainees watch while she does the bookkeeping. Then they do it while she talks them through it. After five or six months, they work independently while she reviews.

Beyond bookkeeping, the program includes:

Mariette Martinez’s accounting lifecycle course (because knowing QuickBooks isn’t the same as running a practice)
Richard Roppa-Roberts Roundtable Labs for peer support
Alicia’s intensive hands-on QuickBooks training
A grievance space where trainees can discuss problems without Alicia present

“I love that you created a space for grievances,” Questian said.

The $19,000 Question

When Alicia calculated what all these components would cost if purchased separately, the number came to roughly $19,000 per year.

“Who the heck is going to pay $19,000 to be part of this?” was her first thought.

Questian pushed, “How did it make you feel at that number?”

“I was distinctly uncomfortable with asking anybody for that,” Alicia admitted.

Nancy dug deeper. Was it fear of being seen as greedy? Alicia identified multiple layers, including poverty consciousness, a desire not to price anyone out, and the tension between the need for fair compensation and the need to keep opportunities accessible.

But the trainees are paid employees earning 60% of client fees for their work. When Alicia’s lawyer said they had to be employees rather than contractors, she suddenly found herself hiring five part-time salaried employees, effectively doubling her company overnight.

She also secured sponsorship from Dext to create scholarships, offered payment plans with discounts, and gave credits to existing members. People signed up across all payment options.

What ultimately justified the price was Brenda’s success. “The demonstrated outcome of working with me is somebody who is pulling in $10,000 a month,” Alicia reasoned. “$19,000 a year is a valuable investment to be able to get to that place.”

Why We Can’t See Our Own Worth

A notable pattern emerged during this conversation: None of the hosts could see their own blind spots without help.

Alicia didn’t recognize her burnout until hearing a She Counts episode. She didn’t see her undervaluation until Questian pointed it out. Nancy admitted she’d still be doing every webinar for free if Questian hadn’t pushed her to charge. And someone recently told Questian she runs her business like a nonprofit.

“Human beings are wired for insecurity,” Alicia said simply.

“You can look at the QuickBooks Queen herself right here struggling with undervaluing herself,” Nancy said, putting the conversation in perspective. “To me, that says I’m not alone.”

The conversation also brought up a critical distinction. Technical mastery doesn’t equal business leadership. As Nancy said, “Technical mastery of something doesn’t prepare us for stepping into authority and leadership.”

Alicia drew the parallel. “People think that because they know how to use QuickBooks, they know how to do bookkeeping. They’re not the same.”

Do It Anyway

What makes this story powerful is that Alicia is building her pilot program publicly, in real-time, with complete transparency about not having all the answers.

“I got the idea two months ago,” she said. “Asked my folks six weeks ago. Got the yeses and have been actively putting it in place.”

She doesn’t yet know whether there will be a new cohort next year or whether trainees will become permanent staff or become trainers themselves. “I don’t know what next year is going to hold,” Alicia said.

This level of public uncertainty would terrify most people. But as Questian shared about her own business transition, “I’m on the right track because I am absolutely terrified.”

Nancy pushed back against toxic positivity. “Don’t tell somebody not to be afraid. Of course we are afraid. Our brains are trying to protect us.” The point isn’t to eliminate fear. It’s to act despite it.

“The ability to expand really happens when you step into your own worth,” Alicia said, connecting every thread.

Your Turn to Look in the Mirror

This conversation between three accomplished women in accounting proves we all have blind spots about our value, and we need community to see them clearly.

Alicia’s story shows that when someone you’ve trained outgrows you, it’s not a failure; it’s proof of the value you create. The question is, are you capturing the value you clearly know how to build?

Listen to the full episode to hear all the vulnerability, specific numbers, and moments where the hosts surprised themselves with their own revelations.

Then ask yourself: What’s an example of when you’ve undervalued yourself, and how did you move past it? Share your answer on the She Counts LinkedIn page or in the Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast LinkedIn group to keep this conversation going.

Because if the QuickBooks Queen can have this blind spot, you’re allowed to have yours too. The difference is what you do once someone helps you see it.

What Tax-Season-Buried Accountants Need to Know About Intuit Accountant Suite Before May

Earmark Team · February 28, 2026 ·

Intuit recently dropped a surprise on accountants: pricing for its new Accelerate and Books Close features begins May 1, 2026, not at the end of the year as many practitioners understood. For professionals buried in tax season, the window to test these tools before paying just got smaller.

In Episode 130 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, co-hosts Alicia Katz Pollock and Dan DeLong dig into what these features actually deliver and whether they’re worth your money come May.

The Pricing Timeline Confusion

“When I signed up for it, they asked for my credit card information, and I was pretty darn sure it said it’s going to be free until the end of the year,” Alicia explains. But Dan sees it differently. “I took it as it’ll be free until it’s not. It’s kind of like the stock market, it will continue to go up until it doesn’t.”

This confusion stems from Intuit’s original announcement at QuickBooks Connect, which Dan diplomatically describes as having “a lot of opportunity for improvement.” Now practitioners have just three months to decide whether these tools deserve a spot in their tech stack.

What Stays Free vs. What Costs Money

Your ProAdvisor account, the portal where you manage clients, complete trainings and certifications, switch between files, and access accountant tools, will still be free.

“If it’s not, somebody from Intuit needs to tell me ASAP,” Alicia emphasizes.

What’s new (and will cost money) are two add-on tools:

Intuit Accountant Suite Accelerate

($149/month for your entire firm)

This unlocks the client insights feature, giving you a dashboard where you can view Balance Sheet or P&L data for all clients in a single grid. There are no per-user fees; one price covers your whole team.

“For a solo practitioner, $149 is maybe kind of expensive,” Alicia notes. “But if you’re running a firm with five or ten team members, and especially when you scale up, that’s actually really, really cheap.”

Books Close

($8/client/month, dropping to $6 after 50 clients)

This per-client tool lets you manage monthly closes without entering individual QuickBooks files. You only pay for clients you actually onboard to the feature, not your entire client list.

Even without these paid features, the free Intuit Accountant Suite now includes a dashboard with widgets that show which clients need bank feed reconnections or have integration issues. As Dan explains, “Instead of your home screen being your client list, it’s now a dashboard with customizable widgets.”

Books Close: The Feature That Surprised Alicia

During Dan’s live demonstration, Books Close’s capabilities genuinely impressed Alicia, including reconciliations.

“Wow. So it’s a straight-up reconciliation, but it’s from here and it lists all the balance sheet accounts so that I can actually run down the list,” she says, seeing the feature for the first time.

Workflow Management Built for Real Firms

Books Close includes three workflow roles (Preparer, Reviewer, and Approver) that you can rename to match your firm’s terms. Solo practitioners can turn off the multi-role structure entirely. For teams, you can assign different segments to different people and track progress as work moves through the pipeline.

The status options go beyond simple “To Do” and “Completed.” You can customize statuses like “In Progress,” “Waiting on Client,” or “Blocked.” Templates let you create different task lists for different engagement types. Your full-service clients get one checklist while lighter engagements get another.

Transaction Review That Catches Problems

The transaction review section offers visibility into issues that typically require hunting through client files:

Transactions without payees (critical for 1099 tracking)
Expenses without attachments (with customizable dollar thresholds)
Transactions auto-added by bank rules
Unapplied payments
Manually created transactions

Alicia shared why the bank rule review matters. “I was working with somebody who had a bank rule for Apple, putting everything in software. But then they had a vendor with Apple in their name, and it started classifying those transactions as software expense.”

Each review category lets you set thresholds and exclusions. If you don’t need receipts for certain expense categories, you can exclude them. If you have vendors that always code correctly, you can skip reviewing them.

The W-9/1099 Management Feature (Finally)

The W-9/1099 management just went live, unfortunately after 1099 season ended. “It would have been nice to know the W-9/1099 management was not coming soon,” Dan observed.

The feature shows vendor lists with EINs, 1099 eligibility, and year-to-date amounts. But Alicia immediately spotted a gap, as entity type shows only “Individual” or “Business.”

“I would like to see whether it’s an S-Corp or an LLC,” she points out, since that determines 1099 eligibility.

A Critical Limitation

Dan discovered a major problem after spending two hours with Intuit support: you cannot remove clients from Books Close once you add them.

“You can onboard a client, but you cannot offboard them,” he explains.

This creates multiple problems:

Clients who leave your practice still cost $8/month
You can’t remove Books Close while keeping other services
Testing the feature means potentially paying for test clients indefinitely

Intuit support offered two workarounds:

Remove the client from your list entirely (useless if you still provide other services)
Cancel Books Close completely, lose all customizations, then restart and re-add only the clients you want

“They have essentially three months to figure this out,” Dan notes. Both hosts urge listeners to submit feedback requesting offboarding functionality. Feature requests from within the beta may get higher priority.

Who Should Consider These Tools?

The value proposition varies dramatically by practice type.

Already using third-party tools. As Dan notes, “If you are already using something that does a lot of these features, you are probably not going to see the value.” Tools like Keeper, Financial Cents, or Double provide similar capabilities. Alicia admits she’s “kind of embedded with Double” and faces the switching-cost dilemma many practitioners will encounter.
Building a new practice. “Anytime Intuit creates something new, it’s not for existing users,” Dan says. “A new accountant coming in today doesn’t know any different.” When they need close management tools, they’ll see a built-in feature rather than evaluating alternatives.
Looking for one-off use. Alicia sees potential. “I would onboard somebody just to do a cleanup and then offboard them when I’m done. I would pay eight bucks for this for a job.” Unfortunately, without offboarding capability, this use case doesn’t work yet.

The Bottom Line

Intuit’s push into practice management shows promise, but the accelerated timeline puts pressure on practitioners during tax season—exactly when they have no bandwidth for evaluation.

If you’re testing these tools, submit feedback now, especially about the offboarding problem. Beta periods exist to surface these issues, but only if users speak up.

For firms with teams, the math likely works: $149 for unlimited users plus manageable per-client fees delivers real workflow improvements. For solo practitioners, the value depends on how much you value not switching between files.

Most importantly, if you’re considering adoption, test it with real client work. Theory doesn’t reveal whether the interface fits your thinking; only hands-on experience does.

Listen to the full episode for Dan’s complete screen demonstration. Seeing the interface in action reveals details that descriptions can’t capture, and might be the difference between a confident decision and an expensive guess.

Inside the Innovation Circle: Three Days of Conversations at Intuit Connect

Earmark Team · February 17, 2026 ·

After three days of walking around the Innovation Circle at Intuit Connect and filling 27 pages of Field Notes, it’s clear that QuickBooks is transforming from accounting software into a complete business operating system.

That’s the takeaway from a recent episode of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, where hosts Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT, and Dan DeLong wrap up their three-part series covering Intuit Connect, where Alicia skipped the workshops to spend her time talking directly with developers in the Innovation Circle.

Keep in mind that these conversations occurred three months before the episode aired. So Alicia notes, “A lot of the things they said are coming soon might have already been released. So the timelines are kind of vague on a lot of these.”

What isn’t vague is where Intuit is heading. From AI-powered construction project management to sophisticated bill-approval workflows, the platform is expanding across every corner of business operations. For accounting professionals, understanding this evolution is the difference between being a bookkeeper and becoming a strategic business advisor.

Construction Gets Industry-Specific Tools in Enterprise Suite

Alicia’s conversation with Uttam Ramamurthy, Principal Engineer – AI Builder at Intuit, revealed how Intuit Enterprise Suite is tackling construction accounting, one of their key mid-market targets. They’re building specialized tools that actually understand construction workflows.

The familiar project list with profitability stripes is becoming a full dashboard designed for construction companies. You can set default margin goals, such as 25% profit on all projects, and the system alerts you when profitability falls below your threshold. As Alicia explained, “If you fall below your profit margin settings, it alerts you and gives you a heads up when your profitability is too low.”

The AI capabilities show real promise. Upload your project notes, and the system auto-populates project details and phases. It pulls from your documentation and uses what Intuit calls “AI product knowledge from similar projects” to suggest project structure.

Other construction features in development include:

Upload spreadsheets directly into project budgets (finally bridging the gap between estimating spreadsheets and QuickBooks)
Create product and service lists with quantities and unit costs, grouped by phases and cost groups
Show collapsible estimate views where customers see clean phase summaries while you keep line-item detail
Build graphic proposals with text blocks, photos, before/after images, and testimonials
Take deposits from estimates with proper liability accounting

That deposit feature comes with a warning. Alicia tested it three times during a recent class. It worked once but failed twice to properly subtract the deposit when converting to invoices. “I’m not sure if it’s still in development or not working, or if it’s just my cookies on my computer preventing it from working,” she admitted.

The platform now supports AIA progress billing, addressing a major gap for firms with architect and government contracts. As Dan observed, “The devil is always in the details as far as how it actually looks, but they understand those workflows.”

You can even mark project phases as complete via text message to automatically generate invoices. When projects close, Intuit Enterprise Suite creates a summary with lessons learned, profitability reports, and outstanding transactions, essentially a built-in project post-mortem.

For construction companies with multiple entities (common with separate LLCs for different projects), Intuit Enterprise Suite offers consolidated views across companies with shared charts of accounts, vendors, dimensions, and customers. You can create entity groups and filter views to specific business segments.

Mailchimp Integration Powers Marketing from Your Financial Data

The Mailchimp integration shows how seriously Intuit takes the connection between accounting and marketing. After all, your QuickBooks already knows who your customers are and what they buy. So why not use that for targeted marketing?

Alicia shared an example from her own business. When Intuit announces price increases, she needs to notify clients on wholesale QuickBooks plans where she pays for their subscriptions. She creates a Mailchimp segment where “product or service equals wholesale QuickBooks,” finds everyone affected, and sends targeted emails, all driven by her accounting data.

Stephen Yu, CPA and Product Manager at Intuit, walked Alicia through upcoming enhancements that will connect additional platforms. Soon, you’ll see email campaign success alongside data from Shopify, Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Wix on a single dashboard.

Other Mailchimp features coming soon include:

Click maps showing where recipients engage in your emails
Audience dashboards tracking growth by channel (Meta, Google, website forms, manual imports)
Revenue attribution connecting sales to specific campaigns
Journey tracking from page views through cart additions to checkout
Send time optimization revealing best days and times
AI-generated performance digests with recommended actions
Drag-and-drop templates that auto-generate newsletters from blog content (targeted for 2026)

ProAdvisors get Mailchimp discounts based on their tier level. The higher your tier, the better the pricing. Though Dan noted these discounts do expire.

What impressed Dan was Intuit’s patient approach to integration. “They’re not taking Mailchimp things and putting them in QuickBooks or taking QuickBooks things and putting them in Mailchimp. They are truly putting them on the same level. It’s a lot more polished than what we’ve seen in the past.”

The platform is also adding SMS messaging capabilities and, potentially, WhatsApp integration, expanding beyond email to meet customers where they communicate.

Customer Hub Becomes a Real CRM System

Christina Stansbury, Principal Product Marketer at Intuit, showed Alicia how the Customer Hub is evolving into a true customer relationship management system. Alicia already covered this development extensively in a previous episode, Customer Leads Hubba-Hubba.

You can now embed contact forms directly on your website and route inquiries into QuickBooks. The AI “customer agent” scans your Gmail to surface inquiries about your services and automatically convert them into leads.

The lead management system offers both list and Kanban views that visualize your pipeline from inquiry through discovery, negotiation, and closing. The system suggests next steps: draft an email, create an estimate, or book a site visit.

Other communication features built into Customer Hub include:

Emails sent through your Gmail (appearing completely natural to recipients)
Calendar integration for appointment scheduling
Self-scheduling links for customers
Video calls with automatic transcription (no recording, but searchable transcripts)
Mobile app integration for site visits with voice recordings, images, and notes

The mobile app deserves special mention. Dan highlighted how Intuit overhauled it to mirror the desktop experience. “The terminology changes on the web version found their way pretty quickly to the mobile app, which I appreciate.”

Coming soon: a proposal builder that pulls from your lead notes, emails, and conversations to generate polished documents connected to customer data. As with Intuit Enterprise Suite proposals, professionals can collect signatures and deposits directly from the proposal.

Bill Pay Gets Enterprise-Level Sophistication

The bill pay evolution addresses both processing efficiency and compliance requirements. You can email bills to a custom intuit.com email address or drag multiple documents into the business feed.

The current limitation is line-item detail. As Alicia explained to Abby Chu, Staff Marketing Manager at Intuit, the system reliably captures vendor names and dates but struggles with individual line items. Intuit is building machine learning to address this. Eventually, it will prompt you to create rules.

This creates what Alicia called a chicken-and-egg problem. “If it doesn’t work, people can’t use it. But if we don’t use it, then they can’t build the AI generator to make it work.”

Fees vary by payment speed:

Standard: 3 days (free)
Faster: 1 day ($10)
Instant: Minutes (1% fee, $100 maximum)

That instant option with the capped fee is noteworthy because you can pay a large urgent bill for just $100.

Bill Pay Elite introduces sophisticated approval workflows with full segregation of duties. You must have different people as bill clerk, approver, and payer—no overlap allowed. Approval conditions can stack up to seven levels deep, with complex if/then logic based on vendor, amount, and products.

Future enhancements include group approvals (any team member can approve), delegation for out-of-office situations, and audit history tracking workflow changes.

For bookkeepers managing multiple clients, Intuit Accountant Suite provides an eagle-eye view of bills across your entire client base. You’ll soon see available cash balances to prevent bounced payments.

But Alicia offered an important caveat about high-level views. During year-end cleanup, she discovered a client paying both personal and business electricity bills from the company card—something only visible at the transaction level. “There are some times when the eagle eyes still don’t give us the details on the ground view,” she noted.

Lending Services Leverage Your Financial Data

QuickBooks now incorporates Credit Karma’s embedded lending capabilities. Think of it like LendingTree built into your accounting software.

For loans under $250,000, Intuit offers direct lending. Above that, they connect you with third-party lenders. The system evaluates your credit score and business history to provide terms with no origination fees or prepayment penalties, although interest rates vary based on creditworthiness.

For customers, there’s a toggle in settings (currently defaulted on) that offers financing on large estimates. As Alicia explained, “If one of your potential customers turns down your bid because they have cash flow issues, then you may be able to win the engagement by offering them financing.”

On the collections side, you can now require auto-pay for recurring invoices. Looking ahead, customers will have their own dashboard to manage payments across all QuickBooks-using vendors. Update a credit card once, and it applies everywhere.

The Platform Evolution Continues

After three episodes covering Intuit Connect, Alicia concludes, “Intuit is really true to their mantra of powering prosperity around the world. They’re trying to help us increase revenue and improve cash flow. Having the data and insights to see what’s happening beyond just running a P&L and balance sheet is really super helpful.”

The challenge for accounting professionals is keeping up. Even Intuit’s own sales teams struggle to understand the full platform. Dan shared his frustration with telesales agents who don’t realize what Intuit Enterprise Suite offers, requiring multiple handoffs to get clients the right information.

But the opportunities are substantial for those who embrace the platform’s evolution. You can offer advisory services around marketing analytics, design approval workflows, guide construction clients through industry-specific tools, and advise on embedded lending options.

QuickBooks will continue transforming. Will you be the advisor helping clients navigate these new capabilities or the one still explaining why they need separate software for everything?

Listen to the full episode to learn more. And remember, as Dan and Alicia noted, they’re “almost ready for the next Intuit Connect to do this all again.”

How to File 1099s Without the January Scramble

Earmark Team · February 2, 2026 ·

Alicia Katz Pollock, host of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, just spent a week in what she calls “1099 Heaven,” teaching her comprehensive 1099 class and attending Nancy McClelland’s Ask a CPA workshop. She came away from that week ready to share a concentrated breakdown of everything accounting professionals need to know about 1099 filing.

“I’ve been watching the socials and people are asking, ‘Which report do I run so to filter out payments under $600 and payment processors?’ and, ‘How do I export to Excel?’” Alicia observes. “And the truth is, you don’t need to.”

QuickBooks Online has built-in tools that handle most of the filtering and analysis automatically. Yet every January, accounting forums light up with practitioners frantically exporting data to Excel, second-guessing payment methods, and chasing down W-9 forms as the deadline approaches.

In episode 125, Alicia breaks down what you actually need to know, including who qualifies for a 1099 (and why small errors won’t hurt you), which payment methods trigger reporting in our fintech-heavy world, and the QuickBooks tools that eliminate hours of manual work.

Understanding 1099 Compliance

Before diving into QuickBooks tricks and automation, you need to understand what these forms actually accomplish, and what’s changing in 2026.

Essentially, the 1099 system exists because the IRS wants to verify that contractors report their income. When you pay another business for services, you’re telling the IRS about that payment. They match your report against what the contractor claims on their taxes, making sure nobody’s working under the table.

“Literally millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, is wasted in lost productivity while we chase down W-9 forms and file all these forms and do all of our research just to make sure that everybody is on the up and up,” Alicia says, not holding back her frustration. “So it’s kind of a vicious cycle.”

What’s New for 2026

This year brings a significant addition with Form 1099-DA for digital asset transactions. The IRS is finally tracking cryptocurrency sales and income, attempting to bring crypto economics into the traditional tax framework.

The $600 threshold that’s been in place for decades stays the same this year, but relief is coming. The One Big Beautiful Bill raises this to $2,000 starting in 2027. As Alicia notes, “The vast majority of my small businesses and micro businesses probably wouldn’t even qualify and won’t need to do this at all next year.”

Who Gets a 1099?

The rules are simpler than many make them:

Send 1099s to:

Self-employed individuals
LLCs filing as sole proprietors
Partnerships
Attorneys (even if incorporated)
Independent landlords (not property management companies)

Don’t send 1099s to:

S Corps
C Corps
Property management companies

Remember to check beyond your expense accounts. Balance sheet items like prepaid expenses, leasehold improvements, and due to/from accounts might contain qualifying payments. And if one company pays on behalf of another, the company that received the service files the 1099.

The Accuracy Question

Fear of making small mistakes keeps practitioners up at night unnecessarily.

“If your 1099 is off by $100 or $200, nobody’s going to come knocking on your door,” Alicia says reassuringly. “The IRS is short staffed. They’re really not looking for $600 in revenue. But if you’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars, then it’s a bigger concern.”

The IRS primarily cares whether contractors report income lower than their total 1099s. If someone receives $200,000 in 1099s but reports $250,000 in income, no red flags appear. Problems only arise when reported income falls below documented payments.

Alicia shares a cautionary tale about a cleaning service client who paid cleaners as contractors for 15 years despite warnings. “Sure enough, she got audited after 15 years. And it turns out that the IRS agreed with me that they really are employees, so she now has some fines to pay.”

W-9 Best Practices

The key to avoiding January panic is to collect W-9s immediately when hiring someone. Don’t wait to see if they’ll hit the threshold; just send it. And don’t pay until you receive it back.

If contractors ignore your requests, you have leverage. Threaten to withhold 24% of their payment for backup withholding. “That warning is usually enough to get them to reply,” notes Alicia. If they still won’t cooperate, file the 1099 anyway with a blank EIN. “Unfortunately that might trigger an audit for them, but if they’re not sending you a W-9, well, what are they hiding?”

One persistent problem is W-9 forms often come back filled incorrectly, especially from LLCs. The form should show information for the entity actually paying taxes, not a pass-through or disregarded entity. Many people put their personal name on line one and business name on line two backwards, creating confusion about their tax status.

Navigating the Payment Method Maze

Much of the 1099 confusion stems from uncertainty about which payments count. With the explosion of fintech platforms, determining what triggers reporting has become increasingly complicated.

The Foundation Rule

You send 1099s for payments from your bank account, including:

Cash and checks
Online bill pay
ACH transfers
Wire transfers
Zelle

You don’t send them for credit or debit card payments. The merchant processors handle their own 1099-K forms.

The Fintech Gray Zone

PayPal, Venmo, and similar platforms create confusion. The determining factors are whether you use the business or personal version and whether you’re paying “friends and family” or for “goods and services.”

Alicia recommends asking two key questions:

Does it charge a transaction fee? If yes, you likely don’t need a 1099
Does it have its own bank balance? PayPal and Venmo do, so that’s another sign you’re off the hook.

Business versions of these platforms send their own 1099-K forms. However, merchant services use different thresholds: $20,000 and 200 transactions, maintained by the One Big Beautiful Bill. This creates a gap where payments between $600 and $20,000 via credit card aren’t reported by anyone, and that’s perfectly fine from a compliance standpoint.

For navigating the infinite fintech combinations, Alicia strongly recommends Jennifer Diamond’s 1099Problems website.

Material Reimbursements

How contractors invoice determines the treatment:

When materials are wrapped into the service invoice, you include everything.
When materials are itemized separately, you exclude materials and report services only.
When materials are invoiced separately, you ignore them entirely.

“The IRS knows you’re paying them the full price for the whole service, and it’s up to the contractor to do their own deductions for their own material costs,” Alicia explains.

The Reference Number Secret

Alicia shares a “hot tip” most practitioners don’t know. QuickBooks expense forms have a reference number field that automatically excludes transactions from 1099 processing.

“You would think the payment method would be the thing that allows you to do the exclusion, but no. It doesn’t work that way,” she notes. Instead, enter “debit,” “card,” “Visa,” “MC,” “Chase,” “Discover,” “PayPal,” or “Amex” in the ref number field. The wizard recognizes these and excludes the transactions—a feature carried over from QuickBooks Desktop.

Mastering QuickBooks Online’s 1099 Tools

Despite QBO’s built-in capabilities, Alicia observes practitioners still asking which report to run in order to filter out for the $600 and for the payment processors. The tools exist, but many don’t know where to find them.

The Contractors Center Hub

The Contractors Center, located under Expenses and Bills (and under Payroll, if enabled), manages 1099-eligible vendors from start to finish. Any vendor with “track 1099” checked appears here automatically.

The standout feature is self-onboarding. Invite vendors via email to complete a digital W-9 through their QuickBooks account or the free QuickBooks Money app. The system captures everything, including their name, address, tax ID, entity type, and qualification status.

“Tell them to look for it because it looks like spam,” Alicia warns. “It just says QuickBooks needs your W-9 and bank info and who is going to click that?”

Payment Processing Options

The Contractors Center offers multiple payment methods, including:

QBO Payroll subscribers: Contractors treated as employees at your per-employee rate
Contractor-specific plan: $10.50 monthly for up to 20 contractors, $1.70 each additional
QBO Bill Pay: Standard functionality

The 1099 Preparation Wizard

Access the wizard via “Prepare 1099” in the Contractors Center or the dedicated 1099 section under Expenses and Bills in the new navigation.

There are two approaches available: “Try Autofilled Forms,” which is an AI-powered automation, or “Prep My Own” for manual step-by-step control.

“I tried it this year and honestly they came up with the same information,” reports Alicia. Choose based on comfort level—automation for hands-off clients, manual for those wanting verification.

Custom Reports for Analysis

The wizard includes two reports: Accounts to Pay Vendors and Vendor Transactions. “I turn on the track 1099 status and then filter it so the status is on and the amount is greater than $600 instead of looking at the big list of all the payments for all the vendors,” Alicia says, explaining her workflow.

State Filing Complications

Some states participate in the Combined Federal and State Filing Program, and QBO handles both simultaneously. Others require separate filing through state websites.

Alicia’s particular frustration is that she’s located in Oregon. “it stinks for me because QuickBooks doesn’t export any kind of report that I can import into Oregon’s filing system. So I wind up having to type them all in by hand.”

Corrections After Filing

If you make an error, QBO allows corrections after IRS acceptance. Replace incorrect forms with $0, add forgotten contractors, or submit corrected amounts. Third-party platforms offer similar capabilities.

Your 1099 Action Plan

As Alicia emphasizes throughout the episode, the tools exist to make this process manageable. Stop exporting to Excel. Stop manually filtering. Use the automation that’s already there.

Looking ahead, the 2027 threshold increase to $2,000 will eliminate this requirement for many small businesses entirely. Until then, master these tools and workflows to transform 1099 season from a compliance nightmare into a streamlined process.

For an even deeper dive into 1099 filing, check out Alicia’s Payroll Perfection bundle, which includes QBO Payroll, QuickBooks Time, and payroll compliance training. And be sure to listen to the full episode for additional insights from Alicia’s week in “1099 Heaven.”