Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast

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.

Intuit Laid Off 17% of Its Workforce — But the Real Story Is What It’s Building With the Other 83%

Earmark Team · July 7, 2026 ·

When 3,000 Intuit employees opened their inboxes at the end of May, the internet had already written the narrative for them: AI is coming for your job. But the three hosts of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, one of whom survived two rounds of Intuit layoffs during his 18-year tenure at the company, have a different story to tell about what’s actually happening and what it means for every accounting professional who builds their practice on QuickBooks.

In Episode 146, host Alicia Katz Pollock joins Dan DeLong of School of Bookkeeping and Matthew “Spot” Fulton of Parkway Business Solutions to dissect CEO Sasan Goodarzi’s announcement that Intuit cut 17% of its workforce. As Alicia explains, “All three of us came on because we were like, oh, man, how are we going to talk about this?”

They concluded that this is a cyclical restructuring that reveals where Intuit is placing its biggest bets. Accounting professionals who understand the strategy behind the cuts will be better positioned to anticipate which tools, integrations, and support channels are evolving or disappearing.

Intuit’s Cyclical Restructuring Culture

To understand what these layoffs mean for your practice, you need to understand this pattern.

Dan lived through it twice during his 18 years at Intuit, and he watched restructuring cycles come and go with predictable regularity. The timing is practically baked into Intuit’s fiscal calendar.

“Intuit’s fiscal year starts on August 1st,” Dan explains. “The fourth quarter is when decisions like this get made, and the third quarter, which was the result of what occurred and why this happened, is typically a reflection of how well or how poorly TurboTax did, because the third quarter includes the tax filing season.”

When those Q3 numbers come in, they might be better than expected or “less than desirable.” Then the fourth quarter becomes adjustment season. Since payroll is a massive line item, restructuring follows. The previous round was two years ago. Before that, four years.

“Intuit is a very eco-friendly company because they recycle employees,” Dan joked.

When Dan got caught in the 2008 restructuring, he was on vacation, driving through Arizona on the way to Mexico. His phone rang in a town called Why, Arizona. He looked up and saw a giant fork in the road: turn left for Mexico, right for California.

“It was so fitting,” he recalls. “Why is this happening? And here I am in Why, Arizona.”

But Dan didn’t lose his job. He lost that job. Intuit opened new positions as part of the restructuring. Dan applied, and he never turned in his badge. The total headcount during Dan’s tenure stayed consistent at around 8,000 employees. As Dan points out, “Intuit hired more people than they let go” doesn’t make for a compelling headline.

While 17% of the workforce received letters, Dan emphasizes it affects everyone: “Even though it’s 17% of the workforce, it affects 100% of the employees.” The people who remain have to reorganize and absorb responsibilities. He remembers the person sitting next to him in 2018 asking, “Why are they letting you go? I just started here.” That same colleague was impacted in this latest round.

Taking Care of Their People

The hosts want to make one thing clear: Intuit takes care of the people it lets go. The severance package is substantial:

16 weeks of base pay, plus two additional weeks for every year at Intuit
Continued payroll through July during the transition
Bonuses and stock vesting honored
Six months of healthcare coverage
Mental health support during transition and 60 days after
Career coaching, resume help, and job placement assistance
Immigration support for visa holders

Dan maxed out the severance formula after 18 years. “I would have volunteered at that point,” he admits. But then he catches himself, remembering a young couple behind him at the announcement meeting, sobbing. What felt like a golden parachute to a veteran felt like a catastrophe to someone just starting out.

The hosts also challenge the stigma around layoffs. Matthew shares how a friend spent 15 years moving between companies, a pattern Matthew initially warned against. But each transition expanded her knowledge and increased her income.

“There’s only so much you can do with the annual merit increase,” Dan notes. “You’re going to give yourself a raise by having a period of time with this company and then moving on.”

Reading Between the Lines of Goodarzi’s Letter

Sasan Goodarzi’s restructuring letter is a strategic roadmap. Every rationale for cuts signals a shift that will affect the tools you rely on.

The priority was reducing management layers that were “slowing the flow of information.” They’re empowering teams closer to customers to make decisions without sending everything up the chain.

Dan experienced this firsthand. He was one of the few frontline employees authorized to approve his own data service escalations. “I could either bring the knowledge to the conversation, or I could skip the line,” he explains. That’s the streamlined decision-making Intuit wants more of.

The letter also talks about focusing on “high-impact work” and reducing “coordination-heavy roles” to focus on “mission-critical work that directly impacts our customers’ prosperity.”

Matthew raises the concern many are thinking: “I’m having this challenge or that challenge within the software. And now I’m hearing that you’re laying people off. Is it going to take longer to see things getting fixed?”

The hosts interpret this as potentially more investment in programming and support, though Dan admits, “We can hope, right?”

Strategic Signals in the Closures

Intuit shut down offices in Woodland Hills, California, and Reno, Nevada. But these weren’t random real estate decisions.

“Woodland Hills is pretty close to where I live, and that’s always been the merchant processing area,” Spot confirms. Dan adds that when Intuit acquired IMS, its payment processor, it opened operations there.

Reno housed payroll operations, assisted payroll, risk, and underwriting. Dan notes you can no longer purchase assisted payroll for desktop, so these closures are product-line signals.

Meanwhile, Intuit is opening a new facility in India, where they’ve maintained a significant development presence for years. The layoff numbers are global, not just U.S.-based. That detail often gets lost in media coverage.

The Three Big Bets (and One They’re Folding)

Intuit used to have five big bets. Now they have three:

Scale their AI-native platform for “done for you” experiences. This covers QuickBooks Live and TurboTax’s assisted services. But Matthew heard unsubstantiated claims that some layoffs hit QuickBooks Live directly. Alicia adds that Live was reportedly underperforming.
Be the center of money for consumers and businesses. Between QuickBooks Payments, Bill Pay, the QuickBooks Money app, a new credit card, short-term lending, and buy-now-pay-later features, Intuit wants to be the financial system businesses never leave. “Create a platform that people live in as much as humanly possible,” Matthew explains, “and they never want to leave it because once you’re really ingrained in it, it becomes that much harder to leave.”
Accelerate their authority in the mid-market. QBO Advanced and Enterprise Suite get the investment.

“Does that mean they feel they fully won the small market?” Matthew asks. The hosts think maybe. As Alicia notes, one Enterprise client is worth a dozen Simple Starts in revenue.

The MailChimp Question

This is where things got heated. Intuit’s Q3 earnings call described MailChimp as “a drag on growth.” The company “seems open to a potential divestiture.”

“If this is saying we are reducing MailChimp, I have a problem,” Alicia says. “I have an operational problem in my business because we literally have email workflows that have been in place for ten years.”

She argues the real failure isn’t MailChimp. It’s that Intuit never properly leveraged the QBO integration. You can build email segments from purchase data, but most people don’t know that.

“Quicken is still around, right?” Dan says, offering some perspective. “They sold it off. Another company bought it, but that brand is still around.”

The earnings call also revealed acknowledged churn in the SMB segment. Customers are trying QuickBooks and leaving, though mid-market growth currently offsets those losses.

The ProAdvisor Shift

Buried in the discussion is perhaps the most important development. Alicia shares intelligence from an internal Intuit meeting indicating that the company is rethinking ProAdvisors as customers rather than just a marketing channel.

“They’re realizing we are their customer because ProAdvisors right now are looking at alternatives,” Alicia explains. “And if they don’t actually treat us like we have value, then we’re gone.”

For years, Intuit viewed ProAdvisors as a channel. For example, one ProAdvisor brings 20 clients. Now they recognize ProAdvisors have inherent value. If this shift holds, it could reshape how Intuit prioritizes support, product development, and communication with the accounting community.

What This Means for Your Practice

The headline says 17% layoffs. The reality is closer to 83% reorganization. For accounting professionals, the practical takeaways are:

Watch your MailChimp dependencies. If your practice relies heavily on MailChimp’s QBO integration, start planning. A divestiture doesn’t mean the product disappears tomorrow, but having a contingency plan is smart business.
Lean into the mid-market. With resources pouring into QBO Advanced and Enterprise Suite, this is where the platform will evolve fastest. One Enterprise client generates more revenue than a dozen Simple Starts, and Intuit is building accordingly.
Hold them to the ProAdvisor promise. If Intuit genuinely sees ProAdvisors as customers, not just a marketing channel, it’s your moment to push for better support and tools. They know you have alternatives, so make sure they hear what you need.

As Alicia concludes, “Intuit is responsible for all of us pursuing our passions and building careers that we love. We want to continue to survive and thrive together as a team.”

For the complete conversation, including Dan’s unforgettable story about getting the call at a literal fork in the road in Why, Arizona, listen to episode 146 of The 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.