Dan DeLong

Intuit Finally Tackles Practice Management But Will Accountants Actually Switch?

Earmark Team · January 9, 2026 ·

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)

Earmark Team · January 7, 2026 ·

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.

When Hackers Come Knocking: Protecting Your QuickBooks Practice from Modern Security Threats

Earmark Team · November 16, 2025 ·

Here’s something that might keep you up at night: A hacker breaks into a Comcast email account and immediately creates a new Outlook.com account with an almost identical username. When they send emails through the compromised account, they set the reply-to address to redirect responses to their fake Outlook account. Most people never notice the domain switch. They see a familiar name, hit reply, and hand over sensitive information directly to the fraudster.

This real-world example comes from security expert Jamie Pollock, who joined his wife and business partner, Alicia Katz Pollock, and co-host Dan DeLong for episode 104 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast. The episode, titled “Insecurity about Security,” couldn’t be more timely. As Dan noted, accountants and ProAdvisors across various Facebook groups report compromised logins with increasing frequency, raising urgent questions about the security of the QuickBooks ecosystem.

“We as accountants are the gateway to security for our clients because we have our hands in our clients’ sensitive data,” Alicia explained. With real money movement now possible through QuickBooks Bill Pay, payments, and payroll, a single compromised accountant login can expose dozens or even hundreds of client accounts. That’s why Dan suggested bringing in Jamie, who teaches internet security courses. As Dan put it, “we need someone smarter than both of us combined.”

Passkeys: Your New Best Friend (Once You Understand Them)

Remember when accountants and clients just shared login credentials? Dan does. Back in 2013, when he worked at Intuit, this practice was so common that the company built the QuickBooks Online Accountant portal specifically to stop it. “People would get into their clients’ QuickBooks Online with their clients’ login,” Dan recalled. “And Intuit was like, that can’t be a best practice.”

Fast forward to today, and we’re on the verge of an even bigger change: replacing passwords entirely with something called passkeys.

Jamie explained this complex technology in simple terms. “A passkey is an encryption key. It’s a physical token,” he explained. “You go to the server—Intuit or Google or whoever—and say I’d like a passkey. It generates this passkey and downloads it onto your device.”

Think of it like those old war movies Dan referenced, where two people need to turn keys simultaneously to launch missiles. Your device has one key, the server has the other. When you log in, they work together to verify your identity without transmitting anything that could be stolen.

To help explain how this works, Jamie offered a comparison everyone already knows: secure websites. “If a website doesn’t have security, it’s HTTP, and if it has an SSL certificate, it’s HTTPS,” he said. When you visit a secure site, it downloads an encryption key to your browser. Any information you submit gets encrypted with that key, and only the server can unlock it. Passkeys work the same way, but for your identity instead of your data.

The technology depends on two things: password vaults that sync your passkeys across devices, and biometric authentication like fingerprints or facial recognition. “Nobody has my face or my finger,” Jamie pointed out, explaining why passkeys are so secure.

But here’s the catch: we’re in an awkward transition period. “Passkeys are meant to replace passwords,” Jamie explained. “But every company, every app, every website implements it differently.” Not everyone has biometric devices or password vaults yet, so companies like Intuit keep both systems running in parallel. Alicia estimates we’re “five or maybe ten years away” from passwords disappearing completely, since everyone needs biometric-capable devices first.

The Fraud Tactics Hitting QuickBooks Users Right Now

Integrating payment features into QuickBooks has transformed accountant credentials into what Dan calls “one point of access” for bad actors. With bill pay, QuickBooks payments, and payroll all accessible through a single login, fraudsters have shifted their focus from individual businesses to the accountants who hold the master keys.

Alicia shared a disturbing story that shows just how sophisticated these attacks have become. Someone contacted her through Facebook, asking for help with a locked QuickBooks account. She emailed the person to verify their identity, and they confirmed it was really them. But Alicia had a bad feeling, and her instincts were right. “I realized it was actually the hacker inside the email account.” The fraudster had compromised both the QuickBooks account and the email, turning normal verification into a trap.

Jamie explained how these email compromises typically work. Hackers break in and immediately create a new free account on Outlook or Gmail with a similar username. They set up forwarding rules and reply-to addresses that redirect responses to their controlled accounts. “Most people don’t notice and they answer the message,” Jamie said. “Next thing you know, they’re in the hands of the hacker.”

The recovery process itself has become a vulnerability. Dan highlighted a concerning issue: if you can’t access your phone or email, Intuit offers a third option involving photo ID submission. “It doesn’t take a whole lot. It’s not that far of a stretch to say that these bad actors can forge your documents,” Dan warned. Unlike banks that require account numbers or debit card information, Intuit’s recovery relies primarily on information that’s often publicly available.

Not all fraud stories end badly, though. Alicia shared how Intuit called one of her clients after detecting multiple unauthorized login attempts from Georgia and Florida. The investigation revealed fake invoices for $900 and $24,000 in the client’s system. While Alicia joked that creating invoices instead of expenses showed “the hacker used the software wrong,” it demonstrated both the scale of potential fraud and Intuit’s active monitoring.

A newer concern involves QuickBooks’ invoice forwarding system. The system now uses a standardized email format (companyname+expenses@assist.intuit.com) that vendors can use to submit invoices directly. “If that email address gets out, people can send you bills,” Alicia warned. “If you’re not paying attention, you might pay somebody that isn’t actually a supplier.”

Your Security Toolkit: Practical Steps You Can Take Today

The good news? You don’t need a computer science degree to protect yourself and your clients. The hosts shared several strategies any accountant can implement immediately.

First up is what Dan and Alicia call the “backdoor login” strategy. “You add yourself as a team member in your QBO using a different email address,” Alicia explained. Create a completely separate Gmail account just for this purpose, add yourself with full access to QuickBooks and all clients, and store those credentials securely. If your primary login gets compromised, you can still access everything while resolving the breach.

Password management is crucial, and Alicia shared how her firm uses 1Password. “Every employee has their own personal private vault,” she explained. “But then we have group vaults that are only by permission.” Administrative passwords stay separate from general team access, bookkeeping credentials remain isolated from other systems, and everything requires biometric authentication. “I can sit down at any of my computers and have instant access to the things that I need,” she said. “But nobody else can get in because it’s either under my personal password or literally my fingerprint.”

Jamie shared his rules of internet security. Rule one: “Know your source.” Click on the sender’s name in any email to reveal the actual address. “They can fake the name, but they can’t fake the email address,” Jamie emphasized. If something claims to be from Intuit but shows @gmail.com, you’ve spotted a fake.

Another powerful rule: “Don’t do anything. Don’t react, don’t click the link, don’t call the number, don’t reply to the text.” Most scams create artificial urgency to provoke immediate action. “If there’s urgency on their part, you should just stop,” Jamie advised. His reassuring logic? “If you owe somebody $500 through PayPal, they’ll get back to you. I guarantee it.”

Additional quick tips from the episode:

Hover over links before clicking to see the actual destination
Forward suspicious emails to fraud@intuit.com
Check security.intuit.com for current security alerts
Watch for deceptive URLs using dashes (like intuit-quickbooks-dash-fake.com)
Enable two-factor authentication despite the inconvenience

Speaking of two-factor authentication, Jamie reframed the hassle as a feature. “It’s a little bit of a hassle for you. But getting hacked and having $24,000 move around that you didn’t see? That’s a little bit more of a hassle.” Plus, unexpected authentication requests alert you to breach attempts, letting you change passwords before damage occurs.

The Road Ahead: Staying Secure in an Evolving Landscape

The transition to better security won’t happen overnight. Alicia compares computer aging to “double dog years.” By the time a computer is five years old, it’s like a 70-year-old person, and at seven years, it’s 94. Until everyone upgrades to biometric-capable devices, we’ll be managing both old and new security methods.

Security in QuickBooks is only as strong as its weakest link, which is often the recovery process. “The passkey or the way to sign in can only be as secure as the recovery process,” Dan observed. Unlike banks that require separate credentials like account numbers, Intuit’s recovery relies primarily on email and phone verification—both potentially vulnerable to compromise.

This vulnerability matters because of scale. One compromised accountant login doesn’t just expose one business; it potentially unlocks financial data for tens or hundreds of client accounts. As Dan put it, accountants have become “one point of access that a bad actor could access.”

The profession must also stay informed about evolving threats. Many accountants don’t know about resources like security.intuit.com for current alerts or that forwarding suspicious emails to fraud@intuit.com helps track fraudulent campaigns. As Alicia noted near the episode’s end, “They’re always finding new backdoors. I’m sure a year from now we’re going to have this conversation again.”

Jamie also mentioned his own services, including email cleanup and password management training. “My favorite is unread messages that are more than two years old,” he said. “You never read them two years ago, you’re not going to read them now.”

The episode ended with exciting news about Intuit actively seeking feedback. They’ve launched a new board specifically for ProAdvisors to provide actionable suggestions about banking feeds. “The developers are reading it,” Alicia emphasized. “You can have conversations with other people, we can upvote suggestions, and the developers actually join the conversation.”

Take Action: Your Security Starts Now

Security in the QuickBooks ecosystem isn’t just about protecting passwords; it’s about protecting livelihoods. Every compromised login is a potential breach of trust with clients who depend on you to safeguard their financial data.

The tools and threats will continue evolving, but your responsibility to protect client data remains constant. As Jamie’s simple rules demonstrate, effective security requires consistency and awareness. Know your source. Don’t react to urgency. Use the backdoor login strategy. Enable two-factor authentication even though it’s annoying.

Listen to the full episode for additional examples, detailed technical explanations, and Jamie’s complete security framework. The conversation includes specific guidance that could save your practice from becoming the next cautionary tale. Because in today’s digital accounting landscape, vigilance isn’t paranoia; it’s professionalism.

Inside QuickBooks Online’s Biggest Transformation Since Going Cloud-Based

Earmark Team · September 10, 2025 ·

You’re reviewing a client’s profit and loss report when you notice little sparkle icons next to several expense categories. Curious, you hover over one and get an instant explanation: “Office supplies increased 127% compared to last month due to these three transactions.” What used to require detective work across multiple screens now happens automatically, with AI explaining not just what happened, but why.

This isn’t a future vision—it’s happening right now in QuickBooks Online’s July 2025 updates. On the latest episode of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, hosts Alicia Katz Pollock from Royalwise and Dan DeLong from School of Bookkeeping break down Intuit’s massive “In the Know” session, where the company unveiled what they’re calling “QuickBooks on the Intuit platform.”

The transformation goes far beyond typical software updates. AI agents now work like digital detectives, scouring your data for patterns and anomalies. Banking feeds can automatically process PDF statements. Client communication occurs directly within QuickBooks, eliminating the spreadsheet shuffle. And those sparkle icons on reports? They’re AI-powered insights flagging unusual trends before your clients notice them.

But here’s what every accounting professional needs to understand: this isn’t an optional upgrade. By September 2025, everyone will be permanently on the new platform, with no opt-out option. The window to influence the final product closes soon.

AI Agents Become Your Digital Workforce

The heart of QuickBooks’ transformation lies in what Intuit calls “Agentic AI”—intelligent agents that actively hunt through your data for insights. Alicia explains her mental image: “I always imagine an AI bot in a detective hat, because that’s how I think about the AI is looking through the data and scouring it.”

The accounting agent, available for Essentials plans and higher, represents the biggest shift in how bookkeepers handle transactions. Instead of facing a wall of uncategorized entries, the system now identifies transactions that are “data-backed and likely to be accurate” and pre-checks them for posting. When three transactions meet this criterion, a banner appears announcing “three transactions ready to post.”

The game-changer is anomaly detection. Those sparkle icons appearing next to categories on profit and loss reports identify unusual trends automatically. Dan shares his experience: “I’ve seen it on some reports where the prior month there was a specific project that was done, and it said it right there on the screen like it went down this amount of percent because these two invoices were in the prior month.”

The categorization intelligence has evolved beyond simple pattern matching. The AI now recognizes that Shell and Arco are both gas stations, suggesting similar categories across different vendors. It scrapes bank descriptions for contextual clues and provides multiple suggestions for ambiguous transactions—offering both “meals and entertainment” and “travel meals” for restaurant charges, depending on your patterns.

Perhaps most significantly, categorization history has expanded from 12 to 24 months—a change Alicia specifically requested. This ensures annual charges can reference the previous year’s categorization, eliminating frustration with recurring yearly expenses.

Platform Integration Changes Everything

What Intuit calls “QuickBooks on the Intuit platform” represents more than rebranding—it’s the breakdown of decades-old product silos. As Dan explains, “their core offerings of TurboTax, MailChimp, and QuickBooks are getting homogenized here. And they can essentially talk to each other.”

The logic makes sense when you consider user patterns. As Alicia notes, “a lot of people use MailChimp who have never used QuickBooks. There’s a lot of people who file their taxes with TurboTax who have never used QuickBooks. So merging them all together is a natural evolution.”

The new interface features an app carousel with customer hubs, sales hubs, accounting hubs, marketing hubs, and business tax hubs. The customer hub will integrate MailChimp directly within QuickBooks, while business tax functionality brings TurboTax capabilities to the accounting workflow.

The enhanced bank feeds represent the most visible daily change. Alicia, who has been beta testing and providing daily feedback to developers, describes the evolution: “Everything that we knew and loved about the banking feeds is still there, but they kind of changed it.” The new system allows inline transaction editing, customizable column displays, and comprehensive transaction details.

The revolutionary statement import feature can process PDF bank statements and extract transactions automatically. While currently requiring human oversight—hence the two-hour processing time, at least for now—this capability could eliminate entire businesses built around transaction import services. As Alicia explains, “there’s a human being looking at it to see if it did a good job or not, and if it didn’t do it right, it’s actually going to a human being who is fixing the programming.”

Interface changes aren’t just cosmetic. The new left navigation is “brighter, it’s lighter, it’s prettier” with collapsible sections and bookmark functionality for one-click access to frequently used screens. The transformation from “Add” to “Post” in banking feeds reflects more technically accurate accounting language.

Client Communication Gets Built-In

The context gathering system eliminates the bookkeeper’s perpetual question: “What was this transaction for?” Built directly into QuickBooks, this feature threatens third-party apps by providing client communication tools within the core platform.

Alicia explains the problem this solves: “When you don’t know what something’s for, you have to go ask. And in the old days, we used to use spreadsheets for that. More recently, we’ve been using apps like Uncat, Keeper, or Financial Cents, where you can communicate with your clients right inside the app, but now you can do it right inside QBO.”

The system creates a to-do list maintained within QuickBooks, allowing bookkeepers to ask clients questions without requiring client QBO access. Clients receive emails with magic links to respond, and “it’s always the same link. And so you can just have your clients save it and bookmark it as the place to go.”

The expense forwarding feature allows anyone to send not just expenses but also income transaction directly into the system. However, this convenience introduces new risks. Alicia warns, “If you don’t have a bill approval process, you may have somebody who just goes in and pays everything without questioning anything. You actually could wind up paying bad actors who just sent random bills into your account to see if they could.” She reminds everyone to make sure they only give these email addresses to people they can trust.

The integration of Bill Pay Basic across all plans, including Simple Start, amplifies these concerns. Firms handling bill payments may want to consider upgrading clients to QBO Advanced, which includes mandatory bill approval workflows.

The September Deadline and What It Means

The timeline carries strategic implications beyond software preference. This isn’t a typical update where holdouts can postpone adoption—it’s a mandatory migration with a hard September deadline.

July offered opt-in/opt-out flexibility. August brought automatic transitions for new brand files. Crucially, all ProAdvisors’ clients were switched simultaneously. As Dan notes, “They threw accountants a bone” by ensuring firms wouldn’t juggle clients across different interfaces. September completes the mandatory transition, and by the month’s end, the new platform becomes permanent with no opt-out option.

The current period is critical for shaping the final product. As Alicia emphasizes from her beta testing: “This is the time to make sure that the platform works for us. They need your feedback.” Her daily communication with development teams resulted in interface improvements that serve real accounting workflows.

For firms considering the timeline, the choice is clear: engage now to influence the outcome, or adapt in September to whatever system emerges. The difference between being a beta participant and a forced adopter could determine whether your practice thrives or struggles.

Training and Resources Coming

Recognizing the scope of change, Intuit announced new training opportunities. Two courses are coming in October: one about understanding Agentic AI in general, and another specifically about AI agents in QuickBooks. There’s also ongoing research about what accounting professionals want to see in ProAdvisor Academy.

Alicia is completely rebuilding her training library at Royalwise. “I’ve got over 50 different courses of over 100 hours of QuickBooks Online content. So in September we are going to start over again from scratch,” she explains. Her Community and Coaching memberships will provide free entry into all webinars as she recreates content for the new platform.

Shape the Future or Be Shaped by It

The July 2025 QuickBooks updates represent the most significant transformation since moving to the cloud. AI agents are becoming the invisible workforce handling pattern recognition and routine categorization. New communication tools eliminate constant client back-and-forth. Interface changes reflect a fundamental shift toward integrated business management.

For accounting professionals, these changes represent both opportunity and risk. Those who engage now can influence the final product through feedback. As Alicia’s daily communication with developers shows, active participants can achieve solutions that serve the profession’s real needs.

But come September’s mandatory transition, the window for input closes. Firms will adapt to whatever system emerges from this beta period. The most successful professionals will view this transition as evolution—an opportunity to eliminate tedious data entry and focus on high-value advisory work.

Don’t let this transformation happen to you—be part of shaping it. The September deadline isn’t just about software—it’s about the future of the accounting profession itself.

QuickBooks Online Tags Retiring May 15: How to Migrate Your Data Now

Earmark Team · April 24, 2025 ·

QuickBooks Online users who rely on the Tags feature are facing a critical deadline. After May 15th, 2025, you’ll no longer be able to add new tags to transactions. This underused but flexible feature is being replaced by a modified Custom Fields alternative that comes with both benefits and limitations.

In a recent episode of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, hosts Alicia Katz Pollock and Dan DeLong discussed this major transition and explained what you need to know and do before the deadline.

Why Tags Are Going Away (And Why Some Users Will Miss Them)

According to Alicia and Dan, about three-quarters of QuickBooks users never used Tags at all. As Dan explains, “When they roll out a new feature, if it doesn’t get used, it could stand to be discontinued. When I worked there, typically we wouldn’t find out who used it until we stopped it… and then people would call in droves, like, ‘What are you doing? I was using that!’

But for those who discovered Tags’ flexibility, this retirement is a significant loss. Alicia shares several creative ways professionals used Tags:

Marking transactions that needed review: “I would use a tag that said ‘for review.’ And then I could pull up all the transactions that needed review, and boom, they were all right there.”
Weather tracking at a gas station: “They used tags to say what the weather was… Is it sunny? Is it raining? Because their business is lower on rainy days, and that helped them filter out weather anomalies.”
Animal categorization at a veterinary practice: “They would tag transactions with cats, dogs, birds, rodents and reptiles and then they could see who they were providing their services for.”

Tags were particularly valuable for users on lower-tier QuickBooks plans who didn’t have access to Classes or Locations features. “If you didn’t need any of the other features in Plus,” Alicia explains, “Tags allowed you to get flexible about it.”

The Migration Timeline: Act Now

The retirement process follows this timeline:

March 17, 2025: Custom Fields was expanded across all QuickBooks Online subscription levels
May 15, 2025: CRITICAL DEADLINE – After this date, Tags become read-only
May 16, 2025 – May 14, 2028: During this period, you can view historical Tags and run reports but can’t add new tags
May 15, 2028: Complete removal of Tags functionality and all historical data

How to Migrate Your Tags to Custom Fields

If you’re using Tags, here’s what you need to do before May 15th:

Step 1: Make sure all your transactions are properly tagged. Go to the gear icon, select Tags, and click “see all untagged transactions” to catch any missed items.

Step 2: Click the “migrate tags to custom fields” button in the Tags section.

Step 3: During migration, you’ll need to:

Choose which tags to include (uncheck any you don’t want to migrate)
Name your new Custom Field (it defaults to “Tags”)
Specify that the field applies to transactions (recommended)
Select which transaction types should display the field
Decide whether the field should print on customer-facing forms

Step 4: Complete the migration. Your Tags will convert to a dropdown Custom Field with up to 100 options. If you have grouped tags, they’ll appear as “Group Name: Tag Name” in the dropdown list.

Dan notes an important distinction: “The historical transactions still have the tags on them. The new transactions won’t have the tag field – they will have the custom field available to choose.”

Critical Step: Preserve Your Historical Data

This migration doesn’t transfer your historical tag data to the new Custom Field – it only creates the structure for future transactions. Your 2025 reports will be split between the two systems.

“Run your reports on all of your tags so that you have that history permanently,” Alicia emphasizes. “When you’re looking at the Tags list, every single tag group or ungroup tag has a ‘run report’ link to the right of it.”

Save these reports as PDFs with multiple date ranges. “This is the very last time you are ever going to see a P&L related to this data,” Alicia warns.

What’s Better and What’s Worse in the New System

Improvements:

Universal Availability: Custom Fields are now available across all subscription tiers.
Increased Fields: Simple Start and Essentials now have one custom field, Plus gets four, and Advanced continues with twelve.
Dropdown Functionality: The new custom field is a dropdown, which “helps eliminate data entry errors,” as Dan points out.
Form Flexibility: Unlike standard custom fields, this new one works on both sales forms AND expense forms.
Printing Options: You can choose whether to display the field on customer-facing documents.

Limitations:

No P&L Reporting: “The big heartache is that you cannot do a profit and loss report by custom field,” Alicia explains. This is a major functional loss for many users.
Banking Feed Limitations: “You cannot apply this new custom field from the banking feed,” notes Alicia. You’ll need to edit transactions after they’re created.
No Multiple Values: Unlike Tags, you can only select one value per Custom Field on a transaction.
No Bulk Assignment: Currently, there’s no way to apply Custom Fields to multiple transactions at once, though Intuit has said this feature is coming.

Recommendations for Moving Forward

If the Custom Fields approach doesn’t meet your needs, consider these options:

Consider Upgrading: “If you’re angry because your tags are gone, you probably need to be using the right tool for the job anyway,” suggests Alicia. “Classes are way more reportable… It might be worth upgrading to Plus.”

Use Multiple Custom Fields: If you’re on Plus or Advanced, you have access to more custom fields and can create separate fields for different tracking needs.

Spreadsheet Sync: Advanced users can leverage Spreadsheet Sync to manage custom field data, including retroactively applying values to past transactions.

Stay Alert for Improvements: Intuit has already announced that bulk assignment and adding Custom Fields to deposits are on their roadmap.

The Reality Check

As Dan puts it, “If you don’t use something, it is in jeopardy of going away,” bringing new meaning to “use it or lose it” in the software world.

For many users, Tags weren’t even on their radar. But for those who built creative workflows around them, this transition requires immediate action to preserve historical data and adapt to the new system.

If you need help with the migration process or want to discuss this change, you can reach out to Alicia and Dan at unofficialquickbookspodcast@gmail.com.

Listen to the full episode for more details and insights about this important transition in QuickBooks Online.