Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast

The Platform That’s Replacing QBO Accountant Goes Paid in August and Most Accounting Professionals Haven’t Logged In Yet

Earmark Team · July 7, 2026 ·

In Episode 145 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, hosts Alicia Katz Pollock and Dan DeLong break down Intuit’s May “In the Know” webinar, and the numbers they share are attention-grabbing. When Intuit polled attendees about its new Accountant Suite platform, 70% either hadn’t heard of it or hadn’t tried it yet. This is the platform that’s replacing what you log into every day, and most accounting professionals don’t even know what it does.

But before we dive into those platform changes, let’s start with Intuit’s big news: the ProAdvisor program you’ve known for nearly 30 years is getting a new name. Starting in 2027, we’ll all be “ProPartners” instead of ProAdvisors.

The ProAdvisor-to-ProPartner rebrand: What we know (and don’t know)

During the webinar, Intuit dropped this announcement with minimal fanfare. They’re rebranding the ProAdvisor program to the “Intuit ProPartner Accountants” program in 2027. They promise expanded benefits, more education, and a connected community, but specifics are thin on the ground.

“The ProAdvisor program has been around for almost 30 years, right? And that term is now no longer in their glossary of terms. And here we were just talking about being a Top ProAdvisor,” Dan said, capturing the community’s reaction perfectly.

Alicia shared her own confusion. “With all the leaning in on advisory over the last couple of years and then the push to include AI to help us do advisory, it seems like a ProAdvisor name would be more appropriate than ever.”

The hosts noted that Intuit has a habit of dropping these announcements early to let people “warm up” to changes over time. But as Dan reassured listeners, “The sky is not falling.” Intuit promises to enhance the program, not gut it. We don’t yet know exactly what the enhancement looks like.

Why Intuit Accountant Suite exists (and why 70% of you haven’t tried it)

When Intuit polled its “In the Know” attendees, which includes people who voluntarily show up for monthly product updates, here’s what they found:

13% had never heard of Intuit Accountant Suite
57% had heard of it but hadn’t tried it
25% were currently trying it
5% tried it and went back to QBO Accountant

Think about that. These are Intuit’s most engaged users, and 70% haven’t even logged in to see what’s there.

Intuit’s data explains why they built this platform. There’s been a 17% two-year decline in the accounting workforce. Firms use an average of eight different apps just to manage operations. And 70% of firms use AI without any policies to guide it.

Intuit’s solution is to build a centralized hub that reduces app switching, brings up the information you actually need, and places guardrails on AI tools to protect client data. As Dan explained, “Having it inside QuickBooks allows those guardrails to kind of be already in place. You don’t know if those free tools are learning from the information you’re feeding it.”

The free core tier: Navigation that finally makes sense

The first thing you’ll notice in Intuit Accountant Suite is the reorganized navigation. Even Alicia, who literally wrote a book on QuickBooks, calls it a “huge improvement.”

Previously, everything was crammed into one confusing flyout sidebar. Client management mixed with your own books. Work tasks bumped up against firm administration. “I had trouble navigating it myself,” Alicia admitted.

Now it’s clean and logical, with three distinct sections in the left navigation:

Clients: Your client dashboard and management tools
Work: Tasks and project management
Firm Hub: ProAdvisor certifications and team management

The flyout menu is now just for your own books. Simple.

But navigation is just the start. The real power comes from the customizable dashboards and custom fields.

Custom fields and dashboards let you organize your practice your way

One feature flying under the radar is custom fields. You can create up to 99 custom fields to tag and organize your clients however you see fit for your practice.

If you want to segment by industry, you can create fields for restaurants, e-commerce, therapists and more. To segment by service level, tag clients as Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, or Advanced. To segment by service tier, label them CAS, advisory, or audit. You could also segment by geography, tagging them as West Coast, East Coast, or wherever they are.

You can assign these fields in bulk, sort by them, search by them, and add them as columns to your dashboard. “When you’re looking at your client list on your dashboard, you have all of that custom field information right on the list,” Alicia explained.

The dashboards themselves are fully customizable. Click the Customize button, rearrange widgets, turn off what you don’t need, and turn on what you do. And keep checking back because Intuit will add new widgets regularly. Dan highlighted what’s coming, including “disconnected bank feeds, app issues, and being able to see the right from without going into each individual client.”

Multi-tab support is coming soon, so you can work in different client files simultaneously in the same browser window.

Accelerate and Books Close: For firms ready to level up

While the core tier is free for everyone, Intuit built Accelerate for larger firms that need more firepower. Starting August 1st, it costs $149 per month for your entire firm, not per user. As Dan noted, “If you have a team of five people, around $30 per person isn’t bad.”

Accelerate includes two standout features:

User groups with bulk permissions. Create functional teams (such as your AP crew, your AR team, your reviewers), set their permissions once, then assign entire teams to new clients in bulk. No more client-by-client, person-by-person permission setting.
Client Insights Dashboard. Pull KPIs from all your clients into one consolidated view, not just from QuickBooks, but from ProConnect Tax, payroll, and bill pay, too. Choose your KPIs, watch for anomalies flagged in red or green, and click the sparkle icon for AI-powered root cause analysis. Save up to 50 custom dashboard views for different client segments.

Then there’s Books Close, which 87% of webinar attendees either hadn’t heard of or hadn’t tried. It’s about $8 per client and creates a structured month-end checklist you work through without entering individual client files. It flags transactions over $2,500, new vendors needing W-9s, uncategorized transactions, missing payees, and all the stuff you check anyway, now in one place.

You can assign three roles (preparer, reviewer, director), customize the templates with your tasks in your order, and apply different templates to different client types. As Dan described it, it’s “a one-stop shop for your client work.”

The timeline you need to know

Here are the dates that matter:

Now through July 1: Free beta period for all features
June 1: Expanded weekend support hours for Silver ProAdvisors
June 8: Expanded weekend support hours for Gold/Platinum/Elite
June 30: ProAdvisor recertification deadline
August 1: Paid pricing begins ($149/month for Accelerate)
December 31: Legacy QBO Accountant discontinued

But Intuit won’t automatically charge you. Even if you opt into Accelerate now, you’ll need to confirm again before billing starts. “Can you imagine the number of refunds they would have to do?” Alicia asked. It’s a smart double opt-in system that eliminates billing surprises.

Early adoption gives you a voice

Ninety-four percent of users who switched to Intuit Accountant Suite stayed. Most found it quick and easy. Alicia even prefers it because her interface finally matches what clients see. There’s no more navigating the old black-bar design while clients use the new platform.

But the real reason to opt in now is that you can shape what it becomes. As Alicia emphasized, “If you opt in, you can give feedback while it’s in development. Whereas if you wait, then you get what they give you.”

Intuit is actively asking which KPIs to add, which features to prioritize and which problems to solve. Once development locks in, that window closes.

Your next steps

The math is simple. The workforce is shrinking. Tech stacks are fragmented. AI adoption is outpacing policy development. Intuit Accountant Suite addresses all three challenges at once if you take the time to learn it.

Go to your Settings menu today. Click “Try Intuit Accountant Suite.” Test the core features. Explore Accelerate and Books Close while they’re free. When something’s missing or broken, tell Intuit. Right now, they’re listening.

For the full conversation, including details about expanded support hours, the Workforce rebrand, Enterprise Suite updates, and what’s happening at Scaling New Heights, listen to Episode 145 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast.

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.

Mastering QuickBooks Lists: Tips from the Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast

Earmark Team · March 25, 2024 ·

If you’re a QuickBooks user, you know how important it is to keep your lists organized and up-to-date. In a recent Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast episode, hosts Hector Garcia and Alicia Katz Pollack shared their expert insights on mastering list management in QuickBooks Online, particularly after converting from QuickBooks Desktop. Let’s dive into their top tips.

Chart of Accounts

First up: the Chart of Accounts. Hector and Alicia recommend using account numbers strategically to ensure optimal reporting layout rather than relying on alphabetical order. They also advise merging duplicate accounts and inactivating unused ones to keep your COA lean and clean. Be cautious when deleting accounts with balances, as this can impact your financial statements. Lastly, sub-accounts should be employed effectively to maintain an organized hierarchy.

Products and Services

Next, let’s talk about Products and Services. After completing your data cleanup, inactivate any unused products to streamline your list. Utilize product categories for better organization, and leverage custom fields like “Income Account” for precise mapping to your COA. These steps will make your bookkeeping more efficient and your reports more accurate.

Locations and Classes

Hector and Alicia have some great advice regarding location and class tracking. Use Locations to track performance by store, department, or other relevant segmentation. Understand the differences between Locations, Classes, and Projects in QBO, and recognize that QBO has some limitations on Classes compared to Desktop. Choose the right tracking tool to get the most meaningful insights.

For more QuickBooks tips, listen to the full episode

Other list management tips from the podcast include streamlining recurring transactions (and considering bank rules as an alternative), customizing invoice terms and payment methods to match client needs, optimizing custom form styles for a professional look, and managing attachments effectively within QBO.

The benefits of list cleanup are numerous. You’ll enjoy improved reporting accuracy and efficiency, time savings for your bookkeeping team and clients, and enhanced customization and scalability of QBO. A little bit of list maintenance goes a long way!

Mastering your QBO lists is key to making the most of this powerful accounting platform. By following the expert advice from Hector and Alicia, you’ll be well on your way to a cleaner, more organized QuickBooks Online company file. For even more insights, listen to the full podcast episode.