QuickBooks

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

Earmark Team · August 4, 2026 ·

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

Earmark Team · August 3, 2026 ·

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.

What Losing Your Best Bookkeeper Reveals About How You Price Yourself

Earmark Team · June 1, 2026 ·

Alicia Katz Pollock, founder of Royalwise, published author, and host of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, spent two years training a bookkeeper named Brenda. It started as a coaching relationship, but ended up with Brenda earning $10,000 a month and giving notice because she’d outgrown Alicia’s “tiny little clients.”

That’s absolutely a success story. But when Alicia shared this story with Questian Telka and Nancy McClelland on a special crossover episode between The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast and She Counts, they heard something Alicia hadn’t noticed.

“Oh my God, I’m undervaluing myself,” Alicia admitted. “But it wasn’t part of my narrative, and I wasn’t thinking about it that way at all.”

That moment of recognition became the foundation for a brutally honest conversation. Three experienced professionals with decades of combined expertise discovered they all struggle with the same thing: chronically underpricing themselves. As a result, Alicia decided to build a paid bookkeeper incubator that turns her expertise into a scalable training model.

The episode dug into the invisible forces that cap the growth of technically brilliant professionals who can untangle any set of books but can’t bring themselves to charge what that skill is worth. As Alicia put it, “The ability to expand really happens when you step into your own worth.”

When Your Best Employee Outgrows You

Brenda’s journey from a coaching client to a $10,000-a-month earner unfolded gradually over two years. She asked insightful questions during Alicia’s coaching sessions. Then she began handling Alicia’s smaller bookkeeping clients. She bought a few personal finance accounts from Alicia’s book of business. She landed her own clients. Finally, a church hired her for $4,000 a month.

“Hey, Alicia, I need to give you notice,” Brenda said. “I can’t do your tiny little clients anymore.”

Alicia’s first reaction was panic. “What am I going to do now? Am I going to take these back and do them myself? Am I going to sell off my book of business?”

Nancy, who’s run a Chicago CPA firm for 25 years, had her own parallel story. Her first employee left without warning to start a competing firm after Nancy trained her from scratch. “I taught her everything she knew,” Nancy said. “And she didn’t tell me that’s what she was doing.”

When Nancy shared her frustration with Hector Garcia, he offered another perspective: “Yeah, but what if you don’t teach them everything they need to know and they stay?”

Questian, founder of a fractional CFO firm focused on nonprofits, cut through the emotion. “When that takes place, it forces us to realize the value of what we’ve built.”

That’s the mirror moment. When someone you’ve trained walks away making more than you charged for the same work, it stops being a staffing problem. It becomes a pricing problem.

Rather than shrinking after Brenda’s departure, Alicia asked herself, “If it worked for Brenda, can I repeat the success? If it works for one person, can I scale it?”

Why We Undervalue Ourselves

When Questian asked why technically excellent bookkeepers undervalue themselves, Alicia’s answer was immediate: “Human beings are wired for insecurity.”

Nancy wanted that line as a promotional clip. But the conversation identified three specific patterns that keep even accomplished accounting professionals from charging what they should.

Poverty consciousness hits hard

When Alicia calculated her incubator program’s value at roughly $19,000 a year, her first thought was “Who the heck is going to pay $19,000 to be part of this?” The discomfort was physical. “Everybody wants to spend a minimum amount of money,” she said. She worried about being seen as greedy.

She’s not alone. Nancy’s husband jokes she’ll eventually come home with a live chicken from bartering with clients who can’t pay. Then one client actually started raising backyard chickens and gave them eggs. Alicia’s husband trades Apple training for eggs, too. Someone recently told Questian she “runs her business like a nonprofit.”

“It’s not entirely untrue,” she admits.

Helper mentality runs deep

When your identity centers on serving others, asking for significant money feels wrong. Alicia genuinely worried that some clients would only do bookkeeping if she kept prices at rock-bottom levels. Nancy confessed she hasn’t embraced value pricing “at all.” The instinct to help can override business sense.

The expertise blind spot might be worst

Nancy explained it perfectly. “Oh yeah, I know how to do that. It only takes me ten minutes.” When years of expertise compress complex tasks into quick execution, experts discount the outcome’s value because the effort felt minimal. But clients aren’t paying for your ten minutes. They’re paying for the decade that made ten minutes possible.

Reading Blair Enns’s book The Four Conversations at Hector Garcia’s Reframe conference, Alicia encountered the expert’s mantra: “I am the expert. I am the prize. I am on a mission to help. I can only do that if you let me lead. I accept that not all will follow.”

“My value is not me being able to untangle complicated books,” Alicia realized. “That’s what I do. And it has value, but that’s not my value.” Her real value includes a master’s in teaching, two decades of QuickBooks expertise, practice management knowledge, and industry relationships so deep she can text Intuit product managers directly.

Nancy connected this to value pricing. “When everything depends on you and your hands and your knowledge, your time fills up, and there’s a cap. But when you multiply your expertise through others, your impact expands.”

Building the Incubator

Alicia did something most business owners wouldn’t dare. She asked her community whether her idea was any good.

At a Royalwise OWLS membership meeting, with Brenda present to tell her own story, Alicia asked, “Is this a good idea or a stupid idea?” The response was immediate. Members wanted hands-on experience with real clients because “every single one is different.”

The training model follows a deliberate progression. In month one, Alicia does the bookkeeping while interns watch. In month two and beyond, interns do the bookkeeping while Alicia talks them through it. By month five or six, they work independently, with Alicia only reviewing.

But the incubator goes beyond bookkeeping mechanics. She’s enrolling interns in Mariette Martinez’s accounting lifecycle course. She set up a roundtable with business coach Richard Roppa-Roberts without Alicia present so interns have a safe space for support or, as Alicia put it, “a grievance panel if it’s needed.” Everyone takes her hands-on QuickBooks training course built from her published textbook.

The financial structure makes it work for everyone. Interns earn 60% of client fees as salaried employees. Her lawyer insisted on employee classification, which meant Alicia unexpectedly doubled her company’s size and had to navigate employment registrations across multiple states. “Some of them were like twice as much,” she said about certain states’ requirements. “But for me, that’s exciting because I’m learning something new.”

She secured sponsorship from Double and converted it entirely into scholarships. She offered payment tiers and prorated fees for existing members.

The pricing felt right when she considered Brenda’s trajectory. If working with Alicia can lead to $10,000 in monthly income, then $19,000 annually is a clear investment.

Behind the incubator sits strategy. With 10 to 15 years until retirement, Alicia wants something she can sell. “Right now, Royalwise is based on Jamie and me. We are the product. But that’s not something you can sell.”

She’s also thinking about the profession. With outsourcing and AI reducing opportunities for US-based bookkeepers, the incubator invests in domestic talent. “We need to have talented people here.”

This is explicitly a pilot program. “We are building this together,” she told her cohort. Her exit strategy is still up in the air. It might continue with new cohorts, become permanent staff, or scale differently.

Questian, navigating her own business transformation, offered the episode’s emotional core. “I’m on the right track because I am absolutely terrified.”

Nancy pushed back against advice to “not be afraid.” Fear is human. Your brain is protecting you. The answer is to act anyway. “Be afraid,” Nancy said. “And do it anyway.”

You Get What You Have the Courage to Ask For

Three successful women in accounting discovered (again) that even people others admire struggle with insecurities. Alicia didn’t realize she was undervaluing herself until Questian and Nancy reflected her story back to her. Nancy still catches herself working for free. Questian is navigating changes she’s not ready to name publicly.

None have figured it out. All are moving forward anyway.

Here’s what their conversation teaches us:

Your best employee leaving is data, not a disaster. When someone you’ve trained outgrows your practice, it reveals what you’ve built and whether you’re pricing accordingly.
Technical mastery isn’t business authority. Knowing QuickBooks doesn’t mean you know how to price services or lead others. Those require separate skills, community, and practice.
Undervaluation has specific causes. Poverty consciousness, helper mentality, and the expertise blind spot are patterns, not flaws. You can interrupt patterns once you see them.
Scaling expertise multiplies impact. Training others creates value for clients, team members, the profession, and yourself.
Fear is a compass, not a stop sign. If the next step terrifies you, you’re probably headed in the right direction.

The accounting profession faces change. Outsourcing and AI are reshaping US-based bookkeeping. Professionals investing in domestic talent, including Alicia’s incubator, are investing in the industry’s future.

But these breakthroughs didn’t happen alone. Every pivot came from honesty about fears, mistakes, or unknowns. Community and vulnerability are business strategies.

The episode closed with Oprah Winfrey’s quote, “You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.”

So ask. Ask for fees reflecting your expertise. Ask your community about your ideas. Ask for help building what you can’t build alone.

Listen to the full episode and share your own undervaluation story in the Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast LinkedIn group. When you undervalued yourself, what helped you move past it?

If you’re thinking “who would pay me for what I know,” you’re in good company. Three experts had the same thought, caught themselves, and chose to charge anyway.

What Happens When Your Best Employee Outgrows You?

Earmark Team · May 31, 2026 ·

Alicia Katz Pollock teaches thousands of accounting professionals how to use QuickBooks. She’s built a training empire at Royalwise, published textbooks, and earned the unofficial title of “QuickBooks Queen.” So when she joined the hosts of She Counts for a special crossover episode, she thought she knew exactly what story she was telling.

She was wrong.

“Oh my God, I’m undervaluing myself,” Alicia said after hosts Questian Telka and Nancy McClelland reflected what they heard. “It wasn’t part of my narrative. And I wasn’t thinking about it that way at all.”

This crossover episode brings together She Counts and the Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast for a conversation that digs into why technically brilliant bookkeepers chronically sell themselves short, and what it takes to finally stop.

When Success Becomes a Mirror

Alicia’s story starts with a bookkeeper she calls Brenda. Brenda was a coaching client in Alicia’s Royalwise On-Demand Web-based Learning Solutions (OWLS) program who had the quality Alicia prizes most: curiosity.

“I could tell she was thinking about the material,” Alicia explained. “Even if she didn’t know what to do, she knew there was something that needed to be done.”

At the time, Alicia was running a small bookkeeping practice alongside her training business. She had about 30 clients, mostly micro businesses, solopreneurs, and therapists. They’re the kind of clients who say, “I don’t need a bookkeeper” or “I can’t afford a bookkeeper,” even though they really need someone to handle monthly reconciliations.

So Alicia brought Brenda on to help. For two years, they developed systems together: Slack communication, technology processes and review protocols. Brenda got better and better. Then she started growing beyond Alicia’s small clients. She bought a couple of Alicia’s personal-books clients that didn’t fit the Royalwise model. She picked up her own $400-a-month client, then a $1,000-a-month client. Finally, a church hired her for $4,000 a month for bookkeeping and administration.

“All of a sudden, she found herself making $10,000 a month,” Alicia said. “And she’s like, ‘Hey, Alicia, I need to give you notice. I can’t do your tiny little clients anymore.'”

Nancy’s reaction captured what everyone listening probably felt. “Two completely opposing feelings at the same time. On the one hand, a huge freaking success story. On the other hand, you taught her everything she knows, and now she’s leaving.”

This wasn’t abstract for Nancy. Her own long-time employee of eight years gave notice just two days before recording. “I feel left behind. I feel trapped,” Nancy admitted.

But then Nancy shared wisdom from Hector Garcia that helped her reframe the problem. When she complained about training someone who left, Hector responded: “Yeah, but what if you don’t teach them everything they need to know and they stay?”

That’s the real mirror moment. As Questian observed, “It forces us to realize the value of what we’ve built.”

From Loss to Expansion

Faced with losing Brenda, Alicia had safe options. She could take the clients back herself, sell the book of business, or drop bookkeeping entirely. She chose none of them.

“If it worked for Brenda, can I repeat the success?” she asked herself. “Can I scale it?”

Showing remarkable vulnerability, Alicia went to her Royalwise OWLS members (the people who pay her for coaching). She asked point-blank, “Is this a good idea or is this a stupid idea?” Brenda was actually there to tell her own story.

The response was enthusiastic. Members said things like “I would love to study under you” and “I would love hands-on experience in real bookkeeping scenarios because every single one is different.”

So Alicia built something ambitious. The incubator model works like this: First, trainees watch while she does the bookkeeping. Then they do it while she talks them through it. After five or six months, they work independently while she reviews.

Beyond bookkeeping, the program includes:

Mariette Martinez’s accounting lifecycle course (because knowing QuickBooks isn’t the same as running a practice)
Richard Roppa-Roberts Roundtable Labs for peer support
Alicia’s intensive hands-on QuickBooks training
A grievance space where trainees can discuss problems without Alicia present

“I love that you created a space for grievances,” Questian said.

The $19,000 Question

When Alicia calculated what all these components would cost if purchased separately, the number came to roughly $19,000 per year.

“Who the heck is going to pay $19,000 to be part of this?” was her first thought.

Questian pushed, “How did it make you feel at that number?”

“I was distinctly uncomfortable with asking anybody for that,” Alicia admitted.

Nancy dug deeper. Was it fear of being seen as greedy? Alicia identified multiple layers, including poverty consciousness, a desire not to price anyone out, and the tension between the need for fair compensation and the need to keep opportunities accessible.

But the trainees are paid employees earning 60% of client fees for their work. When Alicia’s lawyer said they had to be employees rather than contractors, she suddenly found herself hiring five part-time salaried employees, effectively doubling her company overnight.

She also secured sponsorship from Dext to create scholarships, offered payment plans with discounts, and gave credits to existing members. People signed up across all payment options.

What ultimately justified the price was Brenda’s success. “The demonstrated outcome of working with me is somebody who is pulling in $10,000 a month,” Alicia reasoned. “$19,000 a year is a valuable investment to be able to get to that place.”

Why We Can’t See Our Own Worth

A notable pattern emerged during this conversation: None of the hosts could see their own blind spots without help.

Alicia didn’t recognize her burnout until hearing a She Counts episode. She didn’t see her undervaluation until Questian pointed it out. Nancy admitted she’d still be doing every webinar for free if Questian hadn’t pushed her to charge. And someone recently told Questian she runs her business like a nonprofit.

“Human beings are wired for insecurity,” Alicia said simply.

“You can look at the QuickBooks Queen herself right here struggling with undervaluing herself,” Nancy said, putting the conversation in perspective. “To me, that says I’m not alone.”

The conversation also brought up a critical distinction. Technical mastery doesn’t equal business leadership. As Nancy said, “Technical mastery of something doesn’t prepare us for stepping into authority and leadership.”

Alicia drew the parallel. “People think that because they know how to use QuickBooks, they know how to do bookkeeping. They’re not the same.”

Do It Anyway

What makes this story powerful is that Alicia is building her pilot program publicly, in real-time, with complete transparency about not having all the answers.

“I got the idea two months ago,” she said. “Asked my folks six weeks ago. Got the yeses and have been actively putting it in place.”

She doesn’t yet know whether there will be a new cohort next year or whether trainees will become permanent staff or become trainers themselves. “I don’t know what next year is going to hold,” Alicia said.

This level of public uncertainty would terrify most people. But as Questian shared about her own business transition, “I’m on the right track because I am absolutely terrified.”

Nancy pushed back against toxic positivity. “Don’t tell somebody not to be afraid. Of course we are afraid. Our brains are trying to protect us.” The point isn’t to eliminate fear. It’s to act despite it.

“The ability to expand really happens when you step into your own worth,” Alicia said, connecting every thread.

Your Turn to Look in the Mirror

This conversation between three accomplished women in accounting proves we all have blind spots about our value, and we need community to see them clearly.

Alicia’s story shows that when someone you’ve trained outgrows you, it’s not a failure; it’s proof of the value you create. The question is, are you capturing the value you clearly know how to build?

Listen to the full episode to hear all the vulnerability, specific numbers, and moments where the hosts surprised themselves with their own revelations.

Then ask yourself: What’s an example of when you’ve undervalued yourself, and how did you move past it? Share your answer on the She Counts LinkedIn page or in the Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast LinkedIn group to keep this conversation going.

Because if the QuickBooks Queen can have this blind spot, you’re allowed to have yours too. The difference is what you do once someone helps you see it.