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175 fixes and a fresh sales pitch: What to verify before you trust Intuit’s promises

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Watch the recent In the Know! session, and you’ll see Intuit believes it’s turned over a new leaf. The company now wants to treat accountants as customers rather than as a sales channel. That’s a big claim. And as any good accountant knows, a claim is only as good as the evidence behind it.

In this “Now You Know” recap on The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, hosts Alicia Katz Pollock and Matthew “Spot” Fulton walk through that In the Know session. They cover QuickBooks performance fixes, updated Expert Services, and the features rolling out in Intuit Accountant Suite in August. They view every promise as a claim to verify, not a gift to accept. They welcome the fixes, but Intuit still hasn’t published the changelog that would prove the headline number. The new Expert Services guardrails leave open questions about Intuit’s human reviewers touching client files, and pricing barely came up at all.

 

175 improvements, but where’s the receipt?

Stacey Blanchard, Product Marketing Lead at Intuit, opened with a poll about speed. She asked how often listeners wished a page, workflow, or report would load faster. Only 11% said they never notice it. Thirty percent said rarely, 40% said at least once a week, and 20% said almost every single time they log into QBO.

Alicia offered a reality check. Before you blame QuickBooks, consider when’s the last time you actually unplugged your router for a minute. A clogged connection may be the real culprit. Matthew observed that pages often load, flash, and reload before they settle. So count “one, two, three Mississippi” before you click that gear icon.

Intuit claims they’ve made 175 “meaningful improvements.” The team framed it with the line, “building new things is only half the job—the other half is listening.”

Several of the fixes are genuinely useful. For example:

  • Duplicate-transaction warnings now appear before you post instead of after
  • Suggested bank-feed matches carry confidence icons—a green check when QuickBooks is sure, an orange alert when it’s guessing
  • Categorization is meant to learn from your own file first, reaching the broader database only when your file offers no pattern
  • Conflicting bank rules now get surfaced, so you can pick the right one and clean up duplicates
  • A cleaner dashboard with resizable, reorderable widgets, more than 100 keyboard shortcuts, over 50 report fixes so columns aren’t cut off and pages print as they appear, and extended sign-in timeouts

But Matthew notes, “I would love an actual list of those 175 meaningful improvements, please.” Alicia shared a simple fix: use that empty notification bell in the upper-right corner to post a running changelog. “I think that would go a long way towards consumer confidence.”

For now, she recommends restarting your router before you blame QBO. And if a tab looks timed out but another QBO tab is still active, just refresh. You’re still signed in. And keep asking Intuit for the changelog.

Accountant as customer, or accountant’s lane invaded?

The bigger story is what Intuit now says it believes about you.

Liron Zighelnic, Director of Product, AI-Powered Agents at Intuit, framed her team as “AI plus HI” (human intelligence). Her larger message is that accountants are “our customer, not a sales channel,” and the center of the client relationship.

The Expert Services changes carry weight. Intuit setup experts will coach new business owners for 90 days instead of 30. Intuit Intelligence builds a dynamic “setup hub” shaped around the client’s stated priorities, rather than a static checklist. And a step in the setup flow lets clients attach their accountant’s firm information directly.

Then come the guardrails. A new “Intuit Experts Services” toggle is off by default when an accountant user is attached. Self-serve clients who explore it get a pop-up encouraging them to talk to you first. If they turn it on, you’re notified. And firm-billed files stay off until you enable them.

But Matthew is skeptical. “I thought this is how it was supposed to be the entire time,” he said. And open questions remain. If a client starts their own file with the toggle on and attaches you later, does it flip off? Alicia’s believes it should, “because otherwise none of this has any meaning.”

The August bank-feed change is thornier still. AI takes the first categorization pass. High-confidence transactions post, uncertain ones get flagged to the owner, and a human Intuit expert reviews in the background. As Alicia said, “It means they’re going into our files unauthorized.” Is that a paid service, or free labor that trains the model? Matthew noted, “One thing that never came up during the entire presentation was anything to do with pricing.”

Before you trust any of it:

  • Confirm the default-off behavior in your own client files
  • Ask who pays for the human-review layer and whether it’s AI training or a billed service
  • Press for pricing before you lean on the setup hub

That same verify-before-you-adopt logic applies to what’s coming in Accountant Suite.

The August toolkit: tabs, a unified inbox, and portfolio insights

Adoption is climbing. Alicia noted a real shift since May. Attendees who answer, “Haven’t heard of it,” dropped into the single digits, and the majority are now using it.

Multi-client tabs

These are in Core (free) through August. Keep your Accountant Suite portal open, plus up to five client files in separate browser tabs. Click a transaction in Books Close and the client file opens alongside it. Matthew shared the perfect use case scenario: you’re mid-project when another client calls, so you pop their file open, answer, close it, and get back to work without opening an incognito window.

The unified inbox

This replaces the limited requests area. It gathers requests, receipts, messages, and reminders across every client into one place, reachable from a new inbox button in the upper-right corner. You can filter by client, send email or text reminders, and request information from QBO users, firm team members, or outside contacts who join through a free portal without a paid seat. Smart templates feed Intuit Intelligence, which in one demo caught a mismatch. The transaction was $58, and the uploaded receipt was $25. But Matthew pointed out this will need “tiered levels of control and accessibility, or visibility.”

Accelerate

The higher tier delivers cross-client portfolio insights. Ask Intuit Intelligence to identify which clients had a transaction-volume increase of more than 25% last quarter, and you have a pricing review, capacity plan, or advisory conversation without opening a single file. Version one is high-level KPIs only. There’s no transaction drilldown yet, although it suggests follow-up questions. Accelerate is free until January 2027. Books Close stays separate at $8 per client, with no firm start date for billing.

Start your testing with multi-client tabs, since they’re free and low-risk. Demand Intuit provides clear inbox permissions before inviting outside contacts, and use the free Accelerate window to judge real value before they announce pricing.

Do the homework (or take Intuit’s word for it)

Intuit is asking the profession to believe it has changed. The performance fixes, the “accountant as customer” framing, the new toggle, and the Accountant Suite rollout are all evidence, but evidence a good accountant tests before accepting.

Healthy skepticism is professional diligence. Verify the guardrails in your own client files. Ask the pricing and data-access questions. Hold Intuit to the transparency it hasn’t yet delivered. Do that work, and these tools can free up serious capacity and grow your advisory line. Skip it, and you’re just taking Intuit’s word for it.

So restart your router, then hit play. Listen to the full episode with Alicia and Matthew for every guardrail, open question, and August rollout detail. Then decide which changes actually earn a place in your workflow.

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

The colleague who masters AI will surpass you (not the machine)

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In 2015, at her second QuickBooks Connect, Alicia Katz Pollock spent an entire conference hunting for one woman. She’d just published her first book, QuickBooks Online from Setup to Tax Time, and she wanted into the Intuit Trainer Writer Network. Seth David and Eric Greenspan had given her Alison Ball’s name. So Alicia asked everyone. Where is she? Who is she? No luck.

Then she sat down at a main stage session and noticed the woman in the row in front of her, tweeting furiously about everything happening on stage. Alicia glanced at the screen, saw the name “Alison Ball,” and realized her quarry had been right in front of her the whole time. One tap on the shoulder launched a friendship that’s now a decade deep.

That story is the whole thesis in miniature. On Episode 151 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, Alicia sat down with the longtime Intuit veteran, now of B dot All Consulting, to trace a career that spans nearly 16 years inside Intuit, three job transitions, and a front-row seat to the AI wave. The through-line is how practitioners respond when the ground shifts beneath them. Relationships (not software) open the doors that matter. The tools worth embracing solve real problems, grow out of communities where accountants “learn, teach, learn,” and eventually fade into invisible infrastructure, as email and cloud computing already have. The blunt takeaway is that AI won’t make you obsolete, but colleagues who use it well will surpass those who refuse to start using it.

Here we’ll walk through four threads from that conversation, including how a community built careers, how relationships rescued Alison through upheaval, how technology should be built and adopted, and what the near future holds for apps and tax prep.

The network that built careers

The Intuit Trainer Writer Network was never really about content. It was connective tissue. Alison and Al Polizzi started it in late 2004 by gathering QuickBooks experts who could teach, speak, write training materials, and answer users’ questions online. Joe Woodard was TWN member number one. It began Desktop-focused and evolved alongside QuickBooks Online, the cloud, and every product that followed.

The bar was high. You had to know the product, but you also had to teach and speak, or credibly create beautiful training materials. Alicia was, in Alison’s words, a “triple threat” who could do all three, which is why she skipped the usual audition and simply handed over her book. Over time, existing members ran auditions at the major conferences, because Alison had learned the best judges of a TWN member were other TWN members.

What made the network matter wasn’t just career-building. When Intuit shipped a change, TWN members supplied the why. “Nobody likes change,” Alicia noted. “It’s instantly frustrating.” But give people the background and the bigger picture, and they could get their heads around it. Members dispelled false information and corrected misunderstandings that spread when people react without the full picture.

Both hosts still mourn its disbanding. “I will go on record saying I don’t understand why Intuit did that,” Alison said. Alicia believes Intuit may not have grasped the network’s impact on public perception. These were the cheerleaders and influencers. The people who smoothed the learning curve.

“If it wasn’t for the Intuit Trainer Writer Network,” Alicia said, “I don’t know that I would be doing what I’m doing.” “You would,” Alison says. “You’d just be doing it very differently. It would just be a different path.”

When the ground shifts

The network helped build Alison’s career, but it also caught her when her career was upended.

In 2020, after almost 16 years, Alison was laid off from Intuit. She’s blunt that Intuit does these transitions humanely. Where other tech companies had walked her out the same day, unable to even fill a prescription, Intuit gave her two months. The first month was “pitcher-catcher.” She handed TWN off to Mindy King, making sure Mindy knew where everything lived. The second month kept her on salary while she interviewed internally or externally.

She had internal options. But after almost 16 years, she wanted to know what else was out there. Joe introduced her to Chris Farrell at Liscio, and she “fell in love with the problem”  of helping firms give clients a great experience and move documents faster. Three years later, she left for Bookkeep because she fell in love with that problem. When a reorg at Bookkeep laid her off again, she made a lifestyle move back to Canada and started independent consulting. “This is again,” she said, “the power of the network.”

That’s the lesson under the résumé. The doors opened through people, from an introduction here to a relationship built over years there. Intuit’s more recent 3,000-person layoff came with generous severance packages, but severance doesn’t open the next door; relationships do. Build them before you need them.

Building and adopting tech around the real problem

Those same relationships shape how technology should be built and where founders go wrong.

Alison’s number-one critique of accounting tech companies is they don’t involve accountants and bookkeepers early enough. Founders fall in love with a solution before they deeply understand the customer’s problem, then assume that if they build it, users will come. She invokes Einstein’s advice when you have an hour, spend 55 minutes understanding the problem and 5 on the solution.

The practitioner’s reality makes this urgent. There’s a proliferation of apps and only so many hours in a day. 

Enter Blake Oliver’s framework, delivered as a keynote at a Client Hub summit. Don’t point AI at getting data in faster first, Blake argues. Faster data just slams into a downstream bottleneck and you throw more stuff at the jam without clearing it. Point AI at the bottleneck itself. “But the bottleneck is me,” Alicia said. Alison recommended she “peel the onion.” How many decisions land on your desk, and do they need to? She points to Terrell Turner’s decision-list idea: define which decisions must reach you, route everything else to others, and you create autonomy instead of a pile-up at your door.

Her last tip is pointedly relevant to podcast listeners: use conferences with intention. Clear your calendar. Do zero client work that week. Go in with specific questions and specific things to solve, and learn from peers about what actually works.

Learn, teach, learn

Solving bottlenecks is technical. But AI can’t replace human connection.

Is the profession getting more collaborative or more fragmented? Alison thinks the jury’s out. She firmly believes a solo practitioner could silo behind a stack of AI agents and run the whole show alone, “but I don’t think that would meet that person’s human needs.”

Alicia’s own community proves the point. When she built Royalwise OWLS, it was content, content, content. She offered as much deep QuickBooks training as she could deliver. Then she listened to members, and what they valued most wasn’t access to training but access to each other. So, in her “Ask Alicia Anything” sessions, she now deliberately sits back and lets members answer each other’s questions, shifting the focus from content to community. That listen-and-shift approach helped Royalwise earn a BDO Alliance Growth Strategy award.

There’s a reason she does it. “The best way of learning something yourself is to teach it,” Alicia said. “And by sharing your knowledge, I’m elevating everybody in the group.” Alison recognized the pattern instantly. “There’s actual science behind that. At Intuit, we used to call it learn, teach, learn.” You learn something, you teach it, and in teaching it you learn it better. It lifts the whole group.

She sees the same openness across markets. She says Canadian accounting pros are “incredibly open,” helpful, inclusive, and collaborative. Different tax structure, same instinct to help. Connection is central everywhere.

The future is invisible

If community is what endures, what happens to the tools? Alison sees them disappearing.

The winning ones will fade into invisible infrastructure. Remember how miraculous email felt? Alicia does. She was building a database at Santa Fe Community College, wishing she could just “shoot a note” to a colleague across the building instead of having to hoof it across campus, and two weeks later she heard the announcement about “this new thing called email.” The cloud went the same way. Now you only notice it when the Wi-Fi drops.

Alison predicts the apps that fail will be the ones that never understood their customers’ problem. Watch for the tell-tale pivot, or the sudden “we’re not doing this anymore, we’re doing that.” But the real transformation is how practitioners organize workflows to focus on value-adding work instead of manual entry. She’s been chasing this since her early Intuit days and the “never enter data twice” (NED) principle. Back then she was one of the tiny voices asking why we had to enter data at all. The bank already knew. Now, of course, bank feeds do exactly that.

Tax is next. Alicia cited a chart pegging the cost of processing U.S. taxes at $300 to $500 billion a year. We prepare everything, submit it, and the government tells us we were off by $42. If they already knew, why do it at all? The UK answered that in 2011 with Making Tax Digital and PAYE. Most wage earners never file a return; the government sends a simple year-end calculation and a small, accurate refund. The U.S. can’t replicate that quickly because of massive tech debt. Fall into the cracks at the IRS and you wait months, sometimes years. But basic 1040-style prep will likely head the UK’s direction, while complex, cross-border, business, and specialized work stays firmly human.

The only barrier is willingness

So here’s the blunt warning that closes the conversation. Accountants and bookkeepers won’t become obsolete. But professionals who refuse to adopt AI will be eclipsed by those who use it well. “There will be people that are using AI, and they will eclipse you.”

Alison’s advice for getting started is to first, name your feelings. If you’re anxious, burned out, or overwhelmed, say it out loud, and know you’re not alone. Technology is moving at a hurtling speed none of us has seen before. Then isolate one bottleneck, lean on trusted peers and thought leaders instead of trying to master every tool alone, and start. And if you think age is your excuse, consider Alison’s godmother. In her 80s, she’s using ChatGPT to write her family’s history, right down to traveling with reindeer. If she can jump right in, the barrier isn’t age or aptitude. It’s willingness.

A few takeaways to carry into your own practice:

  • Build your professional network before you need it. It’s what opens doors when the ground shifts.
  • Point AI at your downstream bottleneck, not at faster data intake. Faster data just hits the jam.
  • Use conferences with intention. Clear the calendar, do no client work, bring specific questions.
  • Teach what you learn. It deepens your own expertise and lifts your whole community.
  • Don’t try to master every tool alone. Find your trusted guides and start small.

Listen to the full episode for Alison’s complete career arc, Blake’s bottleneck framework, and the reindeer story in her own words. 

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! 

QuickBooks Online Accountant Retires December 31. Are You Ready to Make the Switch?

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There’s a countdown clock ticking, and most accounting professionals haven’t looked up at it yet.

In Episode 149 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, host Alicia Katz Pollock and guest host Dan DeLong break down the June 17th ProAdvisor In the Know session hosted by Arti Patel Martinez. Two different accountants at Scaling New Heights told Alicia these recaps are their favorites. It’s like getting the CliffsNotes version plus expert commentary on what matters for your firm.

Highlights from the session included:

  • The retirement of QuickBooks Online Accountant on December 31, 2026
  • The reports engine you’ve used for a decade is being rebuilt from scratch
  • The 30-year-old ProAdvisor program is transforming into something entirely new

This is no routine update. It’s a complete foundation replacement while we’re all still working in the building.

Before diving into the changes, Alicia announced that Intuit now sponsors The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast. As she emphasized, she remains fiercely independent. Intuit won’t review her content. But after listening for two and a half years, Intuit considers her the “ProAdvisor whisperer,” translating between their intentions and what practitioners actually think.

 

Your Familiar Interface Goes Away in 18 Months

The first issue to clear up is that the ProAdvisor program isn’t disappearing. QuickBooks Online Accountant (that familiar black bar on the left side of your screen) is going away as of December 31, 2026.

Its replacement is Intuit Accountant Suite (IAS), which already has all the same tools. Plus, it matches what your clients see, and that’s where Intuit loads every new feature. You can switch right now through the gear icon. As Dan pointed out, don’t wait until the last day of the year and force yourself to learn under pressure. “Give yourself that runway so you and your team can get familiar with where everything moved.”

The pricing stays simple. IAS Core, where you switch between clients, is still free. IAS Accelerate, the $149 tier for teams, helps you manage staff and clients through dashboards. That pricing kicks in around July or August. Intuit developed seven ProAdvisor Academy courses to walk you through everything.

Modern Reports

Subhanan Sahoo, Intuit’s Senior Staff Product Manager, has worked extensively on reports. He opened with a revealing poll: only 18% use Modern Reports “almost always.” Another 38% switch between modern and classic depending on the task. A full 29% still use only the classic version, and 13% don’t even notice which version they’re using.

So why force the change? Classic Reports was built on what Subhanan called “monolithic” technology. One outage could break reports for every customer at once. After 10-plus years of data accumulation, performance started failing. Large transaction volumes would bog down or break completely. The static tables blocked any chance of dashboards, pivot tables, or custom formulas. Even small changes took months of engineering work to ship.

“If you’ve ever had to print out a general ledger for the entire year, you’ve seen the ‘load more… load more… can’t load more’ at the bottom,” Dan said, capturing the pain perfectly. That’s exactly what Modern Reports fixes. And the kicker is, QuickBooks Online never deletes old data. Alicia has clients with 25 years of transactions because they never condensed before migrating from desktop.

As of June 15th, all standard reports became modern-only. Between June 15th and August 15th, your saved custom reports will open in modern by default, but you can still switch back. After August 15th, everything goes modern-only with no rollback option.

Some Fixes You Might Have Missed

Alicia recommends that if you tested something months ago and decided it didn’t work, go back and check it again. “Things that didn’t work, they fix. But if you don’t actually go back and try it again, you never know that it’s actually working.”

The fixes already shipped are substantial:

  • Choose whether the company name or the report name appears on top
  • Toggle dashes on or off for blank cells
  • New “Apply Changes” button to make multiple customizations without constant refreshing
  • Add banded rows, grid lines and even column colors
  • Auto-refresh when you edit a transaction from within a report
  • Balance sheet discrepancies between modern and classic are fixed
  • New collapse levels for subcategories
  • Exports now include formulas, not static numbers
  • Accountants can share custom reports within their firm only
  • Right-click and control-click support added
  • Transaction IDs are now available in the detailed reports

As Dan noted, he appreciates that Intuit makes these changes optional. “If you like the dashes, you can keep the dashes. They’re not just eliminating them because someone complained.”

Your feedback mechanism is quickbooks.canny.io. The developers actually respond, asking for company IDs, screenshots, and videos. You can upvote issues others have raised. It’s community-based, and it works.

Enterprise Suite Tackles the Complex Stuff

Likith Lanka presented complex consolidations, a topic so dense that both hosts said you need to watch the recording to fully grasp it. When asked about their most complex consolidation use cases, 48% handle simple one-level hierarchies, 15% work with multi-level hierarchies and consolidations, and 23% deal with eliminations.

Enterprise Suite now offers transactional eliminations and three consolidation methods, each with granular controls. You get options for intercompany journal entries, allocations, sales, and cross-company bill payments. Alicia highlighted one standout feature: a “smart complete” button that auto-fills all the due-to/due-from entries across companies based on your initial entry.

The Early Access program lets you beta-test features like manufacturing and assemblies, cross-company bill payments, and recurring intercompany transactions. This prompted Dan to wonder hopefully if QuickBooks Labs might make a comeback.

Alicia’s own experience validates the platform. “I just moved one of my clients onto Enterprise Suite, and they are so excited,” Alicia said. After nearly two years, IES has “come into its own” as a legitimate solution for growing, complex businesses.

The ProAdvisor Program Gets a 30-Year Overhaul

Jaclyn Anku, who leads the new Pro Partner Accountants program, didn’t mince words about why change is needed. ProAdvisors are overwhelmed by AI adoption, talent shortages, and the push toward advisory services. The 30-year-old partner program simply wasn’t built for today’s challenges.

The new program launches in 2027, but preparation starts now. It’s open to everyone from solo practitioners to top-100 firms. You keep your existing benefits, including 30% ProAdvisor preferred pricing on QuickBooks Workforce (the new name for payroll and time), Bill Pay, and the client discount for 12 months. You still get QBO Advanced with Bill Pay Elite, plus free payroll and time tracking through My Books.

What’s new addresses existing pain points. Customer support expands to Saturdays, with Sunday hours at higher tiers. More importantly, support staff will have actual accounting knowledge.

The revenue share math requires careful calculation. It stretches from one to three years, but scales from 10% to 25% based on your tier. Compare that to today’s flat 30% for one year. Both hosts emphasized it’s essential to do the math. Dan also warned about a hidden penalty. If clients don’t enter billing info within one day of assignment, they’re kicked out of revenue share, and you get nothing.

The big carrot is that when you reach the highest tier, IAS Accelerate is free. That’s $149 in monthly value.

Five Tiers and Your Path Forward

The tiers are straightforward:

  • Member: Just sign up
  • Partner: Pass one certification, have one client
  • Preferred, Premier, Elite: Criteria coming fall 2026

New educational offerings include CAS (Client Advisory Services) training to turn data into recommendations and AI for Accountants courses co-written by Jan Haugo. A training manager lets you track your team’s certifications and assign courses.

Intuit’s also tackling the talent shortage with a five-year goal to upskill one million accounting students, connecting them to firms through mentorship programs. Alicia’s already received an invitation to mentor, a natural fit given her new bookkeeping incubator program with five interns.

The closing poll was sobering. Forty percent of attendees haven’t transitioned to IAS or gotten certified yet. As Alicia said, seeing that “only 60% have even touched IAS and certifications” was a wake-up call. “We still have work to do.”

Your Move-Now Action List

Intuit is rebuilding every system you touch daily, and deadlines are set. Here’s what to do:

  1. Switch to Intuit Accountant Suite today via the gear icon. Don’t learn under pressure on December 31st
  2. Test Modern Reports monthly and submit feedback at quickbooks.canny.io. Features get fixed constantly
  3. Check your certification status and consolidate multiple logins (now called “consoles,” not “realms”)
  4. Calculate the revenue share math before assuming three years at lower percentages beat one year at 30%
  5. Register Enterprise Suite clients by July 1st for the 30% revenue share
  6. Explore the free training in CAS and AI to build advisory skills

For the complete breakdown with all the details, poll results, and candid commentary from Alicia and Dan, listen to the full episode. These changes affect every accountant using QuickBooks, so don’t let the deadlines sneak up on you.

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

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

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

Three hands went up. One of them was hers.

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

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

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

 

Where Intuit’s Money Comes From

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

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

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

QuickBooks: The $3.3 Billion Growth Engine

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Money Is in Payments and Payroll

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mid-Market and Enterprise Show The Fastest Growth

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

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

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

AI Is Already Here and Processing 50 Million Transactions Weekly

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

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

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

The August Pricing Reality Check

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

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

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

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

What’s Happening Beyond QuickBooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bottom Line for Your Practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real Benefits Worth Having

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

Five New Tiers

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

Three-Year Revenue Share

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

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

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

Free Premium Tools

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

Expanded Support Hours

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

Silver-level hours:

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

Gold, Platinum, Elite hours:

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

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

The Directory Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Value

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What November Means

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

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

Two more programs require at least Partner level:

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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