The weather’s hot, but we’ve got plenty of cool updates designed to make your work easier—so you can get it done and have plenty of time left over to enjoy all your favorite summer activities. Check out the information below on what is new and improved!
Industry benchmarks now available
In the past, providing industry insights to your clients required you to collect, analyze, and update internal and external data. To help you efficiently provide expert-level information to your clients, we’ve added industry benchmarks to the Business Performance Dashboard as part of QuickBooks® Online Accountant.
With the addition of industry benchmarks, you can see how your client’s business is performing, analyzing gross and net profit margin individually and in comparison to local industry peers.
New month-end review workflow
Month-end review is designed to help your firm create a consistent and best-in-class monthly process for closing your clients’ books. We combined the best practices of accountants with the power of QuickBooks to create an easy-to-follow workflow that delivers more accurate books in less time.
New Bill Pay by Melio now available for QuickBooks Online Accountant
We can’t make paying bills fun, but we can make it easier with the new Bill Pay feature by Melio—an upgraded embedded bill payment capability available to U.S. customers using
QuickBooks Online Essentials, Plus, Advanced, and now QuickBooks Online Accountant.
The new capability helps you or your clients better manage cash flow by offering the flexibility to make payments directly from QuickBooks and decide how vendors receive payments.
Business View now available to all QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Online Accountant users
Earlier this year, we introduced a new view in QuickBooks called “Business View,” designed for small business owners. This week, all QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Online Accountant users can opt in to Business View from the gear menu and easily toggle between Business View and the classic “Accountant View” in QuickBooks.
Evolving expert connections and the My Accountant tab experience
In a nutshell: We’ve made it easier than ever for small businesses to connect to their accountant or find their first match. Based on customer feedback and research, we’ve created the My Experts menu next to Help in the top navigation of QuickBooks Online. This serves as the new access point for your clients to invite you as an accountant user, and to access requests and shared documents through My Accountant. With a proven increase in the number of small businesses connecting to accountants, we’ll be releasing this new access point to the rest of our U.S. subscribers over the next few weeks.
Customizable email address for receipt and bill forwarding
Getting receipts and bills into QuickBooks is fast and easy—just forward them to receipts@quickbooks.com, but what if you’re working with multiple clients or companies? That’s when things can get a bit trickier—and you certainly don’t want to risk sending the wrong bill to the wrong company. To avoid that sort of snafu, you can now create one unique customizable email address per company, so you can make sure every receipt and bill gets forwarded to the right place.
Workflows: Invoice approvals (QuickBooks Online Advanced)
Save yourself valuable time each day by automating your invoice approval process. In QuickBooks Online Advanced, you can set the conditions in “Workflows” to approve invoices automatically—so you never have to go outside of QuickBooks with either a manual process or a third-party solution. It’s an easy way to increase your efficiency, improve accuracy, and simplify scaling.
New user productivity feature – Tasks (QuickBooks Online Advanced)
Staying on top of endless tasks, such as remembering to make a bank deposit, send invoices, and about past due invoices can be daunting and inefficient. Now you can make managing these tasks less overwhelming.
Tasks is a new tab added to the left-hand menu of QuickBooks Online Advanced that makes it faster and easier to delegate tasks by automating the process, allowing you to assign tasks to individual users automatically. Task Manager helps you keep task delegation all under one roof so you can better manage remote teams and increase collaboration. At this time, Task Manager is available for the invoice approval process.
Two new custom roles for QuickBooks Online Advanced—inventory manager and payroll manager
Have you been hesitant to add users who are only responsible for managing inventory data or payroll information into QuickBooks Online Advanced, because of the complexity of granting access to the right reports and data to get their jobs done? Check out these two new custom roles.
The custom roles drop-down menu now includes two new options: Inventory Manager and Payroll Manager. The permission set is pre-populated for these roles, so you can grant permissions for inventory and payroll management with a single click.Custom fields: Now supported in three more reports (QuickBooks Online Advanced)
With custom fields, you gain more of the power and flexibility to help your clients run their business successfully. Now, you can use custom fields in three new reports: customer contact list, vendor contact list, and unpaid bills in Detailed view. This is in addition to sales and customer detail reports and transaction list reports that already support custom fields.
New “fiscal year” option for chart creation (QuickBooks Online Advanced)
If your company operates on a fiscal year, you can now track your financial performance more quickly and efficiently. That’s because we’ve added “fiscal year” as an option in the “time period” drop-down menu.
HR services now available through QuickBooks Payroll Elite
Managing HR tasks is critical to business success, but many small business owners don’t have the time or skill set to handle HR issues effectively. In fact, 81 percent of small business owners say they’re uncomfortable performing HR tasks and 12% will eventually face an employment claim related to compliance.
Faced with this challenge, many small business owners may turn to you for help. That’s why we’ve included access to HR services in QuickBooks Payroll Premium and Elite for new customers.
Credit card next-day funding in Payments for QuickBooks Desktop
No one likes waiting to be paid. With credit card next-day funding in Payments for QuickBooks Desktop, the wait time for credit card deposits is being cut in half, from two days to one. Look for the change later this month.
Auto-reconciliation in Payments for QuickBooks Desktop
Tracking deposits just got a whole lot easier because Payments for QuickBooks Desktop now does it for you—automatically matching and recording each one.