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Dan DeLong

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

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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:

  1. Remove the client from your list entirely (useless if you still provide other services)
  2. 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.

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!

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

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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.”

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!

Intuit Finally Tackles Practice Management But Will Accountants Actually Switch?

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For years, QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA) served as little more than a client list with basic billing features. That’s about to change in a big way.

In episode 121 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, hosts Alicia Katz Pollock and Dan DeLong dive deep into everything they learned about Intuit Accountant Suite (IAS) at Intuit Connect. The hosts brought insights from their conversations with the developers and project managers building these new features.

Dan, who was one of the first four Intuit agents to support QBO back in 2013, found the transformation almost surreal. “To see its evolution from 2013, when it first started as just a client list dashboard to what it’s actually evolving into, is a pretty surreal thing,” he reflects.

Alicia spent most of the conference in what she calls the “Innovation Circle” rather than breakout sessions. In the Circle, she talked directly to developers at about 20 different stations, gathering pages of notes about features that will fundamentally change how accountants manage their practices.

From Simple List to Practice Command Center

The transformation starts with the news that Intuit Accountant Suite will replace QBOA entirely. The new home screen adapts to each user’s role and access level, making it different for everyone based on their specific workload.

“Instead of having to go into each of your clients and find out those anomalies, you’ll have a dashboard inside of a one-stop shop,” Dan explains. “You need to look into anomalies for this client, fix a disconnected account for this client, reconnect an app for that client. The dashboard basically lists the fires you need to put out today.”

The home screen will show integration issues across all clients, news with product updates, and a ProAdvisor team certification bar graph. You can pin custom items and see product recommendations, although Intuit promises these won’t advertise services you already offer.

One of the biggest workflow improvements is the new client groups feature. Instead of assigning permissions client by client and team member by team member, you can now create groups based on any dimension that makes sense, such as office location, industry, service type, or subscription level. Assign team members to a group once, designate a lead, and everyone gets appropriate access automatically.

This is especially valuable given the current wave of mergers and acquisitions in accounting. “With private equity happening in the accounting space and smaller bookkeepers joining forces to turn into larger firms, this was a big sticking point,” Alicia notes. The new realm consolidation features let you transfer clients between accounts and reassign primary admin status to accommodate these structural changes.

The Practice Management Play

Intuit Accountant Suite will have two different plans: Core and Accelerate. Core includes everything currently in QBOA and will remain free. Accelerate adds the new features and will have a price after the first free year. Some features, like Books Close, might be available à la carte.

Client Insights offers what many accountants have been building manually in spreadsheets. You’ll choose from over 30 KPIs at launch, with more coming. The dashboard refreshes every 24 hours, though you can update on demand. The AI “accounting agent” (shown as a sparkle icon) flags anomalies and significant changes across your entire client base.

“You’ll have default template views—P&L data, balance sheet data, bookkeeping data,” Alicia explains. “And then you’ll be able to design your own custom views as well, with your own KPIs.”

Books Close made Alicia do a double-take, as it works a lot like Double (formerly known as Keeper). The feature lets you handle routine reconciliation and review without clicking into individual client files.

The transaction review capabilities include counts for uncategorized transactions, transactions without payees, transactions posted to parent accounts, expenses without attachments, transactions over your threshold, transactions auto-added by bank rules, and transactions auto-posted by AI.

“That’s huge,” Dan responds to the bank rules visibility. “As long as you can do a batch action type of thing or multiple edits, that will actually put the word ‘quick’ back into QuickBooks.”

The workflow system assigns team members as preparer, reviewer, or approver. You create templates, assign them to new clients, and your month-end process is structured automatically. Capacity planning shows team workloads, tracks budgeted versus actual time, and lets you set utilization rates by person. When someone goes on vacation, you reallocate their tasks directly in the interface.

Intuit also positions QuickBooks Live experts as an overflow option when you’re over capacity—a feature that drew mixed reactions from the hosts.

Training Goes Firm-Wide

Jaclyn Anku, ProAdvisor Program Leader, explained to Alicia how they’re adapting to industry changes. “She’s really conscious that the industry is changing and the ProAdvisor program needs to stay relevant to today’s firms as we move into advisory and human intelligence,” Alicia notes.

The new training dashboard in IAS solves a persistent problem: every team member’s certifications lived in their own portal with no firm-wide visibility. Now administrators can view all staff certifications on one screen, track progress toward ProAdvisor tiers, access complete transcripts, assign courses firm-wide or individually, and set due dates with automated reminders.

The new CAS Foundation Badge indicates where Intuit sees the profession heading. It requires completing five programs, including a new three-hour AI for Accounting course, communication training, and financial analysis modules. Unlike regular certifications, there’s no test-out option. You must complete the training.

“It covers things you don’t get taught at accounting school,” Dan observes about the communication and soft skills components.

The resource hub adds marketing collateral, workflow templates, and presentation scripts for client trainings. Intuit commits to quarterly updates to keep screenshots and processes current.

What This Means for Your Practice

The hosts offer practical advice for navigating these changes. Since pricing isn’t available yet, they suggest testing features with one or two clients during the free year.

“Double does way more than this is going to do for any length of time,” Alicia notes realistically. “So if you’re only using the basic features of Double, then maybe this will work for you. But we don’t know the price, so we don’t know how it’s going to compare.”

“This is leveling up from individual details of having to go into each of your clients, or having to go into each of your staff members. It’s all in one place for you as a firm owner,” Dan says, summarizing the value proposition.

For solo practitioners or small firms without existing practice management tools, IAS offers infrastructure that was previously out of reach. For established firms with existing workflows, the calculation is more complex. You have a year to test, compare, and decide whether Intuit’s vision aligns with your practice needs.

It’s clear Intuit recognizes they were “leaving money on the table,” as Alicia puts it, and they’re moving aggressively to reclaim that territory. Whether they succeed depends on execution, pricing, and whether accountants find enough value to abandon their current tools.

Listen to the Full Episode

For the complete discussion including all the developer conversations and specific feature details, listen to The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast. You’ll hear firsthand how these changes might impact your practice and get practical tips for making the most of the free trial period.

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!

Your QuickBooks Is Smarter Than You Think (And Getting Smarter Every Day)

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When you can upload a photo of a bank statement and watch QuickBooks turn it into perfectly categorized transactions, you know something big is happening in the accounting world. The tedious work that once took hours is disappearing, replaced by something far more valuable: actual business insights.

In episode 114 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, titled “Those Sneaky AI Agents,” hosts Alicia Katz Pollock and Dan DeLong explore the seven AI agents that Intuit built into QuickBooks Online. After testing these tools extensively, they conclude it’s “90% AI and 10% marketing,” a ratio that should interest any accounting professional wondering if these changes matter.

The Seven AI Agents

Intuit rolled out seven different AI agents across QuickBooks: accounting, payments, customer, finance, project management, analytics, and payroll. As Alicia explains, “All of this is not even version 1.0. It’s kind of version 0.5 at this point.” Some features are in beta, others depend on which QuickBooks version you use, and a few you might not see unless you’re using specific features like projects or payroll.

But these agents are turning QuickBooks from a recording system into something that actually helps you make decisions. “What they’re trying to do,” Alicia notes, “is take the data, make it actionable, and give us insight into what’s happening in the business so we can actually take action on it.”

The Accounting Agent: Your New Data Entry Partner

The accounting agent has completely redesigned how bank feeds work. While teaching a three-hour class on the new features, Alicia made a surprising discovery. “All the things I was taking out were all of the gotchas and the troubleshooting.” Problems that plagued users for years, like dealing with duplicate transfer rules, simply don’t exist anymore.

The new banking interface features inline editable fields, meaning you can categorize transactions without constantly clicking into detailed views. Yes, it looks more cluttered at first, especially on smaller monitors. But there’s a fix: hit Control+Period (or Command+Period on Mac) to activate Zen mode, which folds away the sidebar and gives you full screen for your banking work.

The AI now explains why it’s suggesting certain categorizations. As Alicia describes it, “This is why you are off base, or oh, this is why that actually makes sense.” The downside is you have to retrain the AI from scratch. The good news is it learns fast—usually after seeing each transaction type once for monthly items, or three times for quarterly ones.

The Game-Changing PDF Upload

Here’s where things get really interesting. If your bank doesn’t connect to QuickBooks, you no longer need to wrestle with CSV files. Just drag in a PDF, JPEG, or PNG of your statement—even a photo from your phone works. The AI scrapes the document and creates a functioning bank feed with all the categorization benefits of a direct connection.

There are limits. Statements with both checking and savings accounts on the same page won’t work (though you could split them with a PDF editor). Complex statements get sent to human reviewers who typically respond within two hours, and they use your statement to improve the system for everyone.

Collaboration Without Meetings

The new collaboration feature adds a speech bubble icon to each transaction. Click it to ask questions, request documentation, or explain unusual expenses, all without scheduling a meeting. One of Alicia’s clients who previously met monthly with her bookkeeper immediately saw the value. “She is really excited to not necessarily have to meet in real time.”

The “Ready to Post” feature finds the sweet spot between automation and control. Instead of auto-adding transactions, it identifies high-confidence categorizations and presents them in a bubble at the top of your feed. As Alicia explains, “These are the transactions that we are pretty darn sure we got right.” Review them all and accept them with just two clicks.

Smarter Reconciliation and Problem Detection

The new reconciliation screen looks complex at first, but it’s actually brilliant. Upload your bank statement, and QuickBooks shows you exactly where problems hide. Not just “you’re off by $150,” but whether the difference is in deposits or payments.

Each transaction now has two rows: one showing what the statement says, another showing what QuickBooks says. Colored badges instantly communicate status. Green means matched. Blue means it’s in QuickBooks but not on your statement. Orange flags special situations like voided transactions.

The anomaly detection feature takes this further. Blue sparkles appear on reports when something breaks from normal patterns. Alicia describes her old process: “I’ve always had to run a P&L by month and physically scan all of the numbers and then drill in to go see, well, why is this one higher than usual?” Now the AI simply tells her: “You have this extra transaction for five times as much as usual.”

The Payments and Customer Agents: Growing Your Business

The payments agent analyzes your invoice history to surface potential issues. When Alicia’s system revealed “84% of your invoices last year were paid late, or not at all,” it immediately suggested adding a 2% late fee and provided the setup right there.

For each customer, it tracks payment patterns individually. Do they always pay three days late? Twenty days late? This insight helps you make smart decisions about payment terms and follow-up strategies.

The Customer Hub (currently in beta) adds full CRM capabilities to QuickBooks. It can scan your Gmail or Outlook for business conversations and turn them into leads. Track prospects through your pipeline from inquiry to close. But the real magic happens after the sale.

The system can send automatic feedback surveys after invoice payment. Happy customers (4-5 stars) get asked when they want to work together again and if they know anyone who needs similar services. These responses appear as work requests and warm referrals in your Customer Hub. As Alicia emphasizes: “That’s new business. That is money in your pocket.”

Evolution, Not Replacement

These AI agents aren’t replacing accountants; they’re freeing us from tedious work to focus on what matters. As Dan notes about modern business, “If you’re waiting for a quarterly report to be done three months ago to make a decision these days, that’s just not fast enough.”

The key is Dan’s “trust but verify” approach. The AI excels at pattern recognition but needs human judgment for context. When his payments agent incorrectly suggested late fees for on-time payments, human insight caught what the AI missed.

Alicia’s advice? Start clicking those blue sparkles. Give feedback with the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. Don’t just dismiss features because they’re in your way; actually evaluate if they’re helpful. As she puts it, “Thumbs down is ‘No, this thing is not accurate and it’s not helpful,’ not ‘I don’t want to look at it right now.'”

Ready to see these “sneaky AI agents” in action? Listen to the full episode where Alicia and Dan demonstrate each feature, share implementation strategies, and explain exactly which upgrades might be worth it for your practice. The future of accounting is here, right in your QuickBooks account.

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!