QuickBooks Online

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

Earmark Team · August 5, 2026 ·

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:

Switch to Intuit Accountant Suite today via the gear icon. Don’t learn under pressure on December 31st
Test Modern Reports monthly and submit feedback at quickbooks.canny.io. Features get fixed constantly
Check your certification status and consolidate multiple logins (now called “consoles,” not “realms”)
Calculate the revenue share math before assuming three years at lower percentages beat one year at 30%
Register Enterprise Suite clients by July 1st for the 30% revenue share
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 Tax-Season-Buried Accountants Need to Know About Intuit Accountant Suite Before May

Earmark Team · February 28, 2026 ·

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

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

The Pricing Timeline Confusion

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

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

What Stays Free vs. What Costs Money

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

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

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

Intuit Accountant Suite Accelerate

($149/month for your entire firm)

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

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

Books Close

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

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

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

Books Close: The Feature That Surprised Alicia

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

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

Workflow Management Built for Real Firms

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

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

Transaction Review That Catches Problems

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

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

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

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

The W-9/1099 Management Feature (Finally)

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

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

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

A Critical Limitation

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

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

This creates multiple problems:

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

Intuit support offered two workarounds:

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

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

Who Should Consider These Tools?

The value proposition varies dramatically by practice type.

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earmark Team · February 17, 2026 ·

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

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

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

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

Construction Gets Industry-Specific Tools in Enterprise Suite

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

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

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

Other construction features in development include:

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

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

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

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

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

Mailchimp Integration Powers Marketing from Your Financial Data

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

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

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

Other Mailchimp features coming soon include:

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

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

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

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

Customer Hub Becomes a Real CRM System

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

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

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

Other communication features built into Customer Hub include:

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

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

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

Bill Pay Gets Enterprise-Level Sophistication

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

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

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

Fees vary by payment speed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lending Services Leverage Your Financial Data

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

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

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

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

The Platform Evolution Continues

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

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

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

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

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

How to File 1099s Without the January Scramble

Earmark Team · February 2, 2026 ·

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

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

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

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

Understanding 1099 Compliance

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

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

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

What’s New for 2026

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

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

Who Gets a 1099?

The rules are simpler than many make them:

Send 1099s to:

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

Don’t send 1099s to:

S Corps
C Corps
Property management companies

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

The Accuracy Question

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

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

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

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

W-9 Best Practices

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

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

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

Navigating the Payment Method Maze

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

The Foundation Rule

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

Cash and checks
Online bill pay
ACH transfers
Wire transfers
Zelle

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

The Fintech Gray Zone

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

Alicia recommends asking two key questions:

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

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

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

Material Reimbursements

How contractors invoice determines the treatment:

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

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

The Reference Number Secret

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

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

Mastering QuickBooks Online’s 1099 Tools

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

The Contractors Center Hub

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

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

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

Payment Processing Options

The Contractors Center offers multiple payment methods, including:

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

The 1099 Preparation Wizard

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

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

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

Custom Reports for Analysis

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

State Filing Complications

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

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

Corrections After Filing

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

Your 1099 Action Plan

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

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

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

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.