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!