New "Little Things" in QBO

Warning: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding!

Hector: Welcome to the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast. I am joined by my good friend Alicia Katz Pollock, the original, the one and only Qbo Rockstar CEO and founder of Royal White Solutions.

Alicia: And I have the privilege of collaborating with Hector Garcia, CPA, the founder of Right Tool for QuickBooks.

Hector: In this episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants [00:00:30] podcast, we're going to be talking about the little things that we've seen in QuickBooks online as of November of 2023. Hi, Alicia, how are you?

Alicia: Hey. I'm great. This is a fun episode for me because these little changes are what I thrive on.

Hector: Yeah, true. I mean, like, sometimes Intuit doesn't understand that it's the little things that really get get us a lot more excited than the big flashy things. The first one is sort of kind of a bummer, bad news. And this hasn't been like officially announced by [00:01:00] Intuit or anything like that. But this is what we've been seeing on the forums. It seems like a lot of accountants are telling us that some of their clients no longer have access to the classic search. So to give you some context, the classic search was the first version of search in QuickBooks online. You basically start by giving it parameters like, you know, search this specific transaction type or search by an amount, or search by a name. And then as you search, you can add more parameters or more filters [00:01:30] for the lack of a better time. And you go through that sort of motion, sometimes progressively, sometimes all in one shot. But it's always worked really well. Like we've we've learned like they tweaked out all the issues with it. As accounting professionals and power users, we learn how to use the classic search. And I would say about a year ago they introduced the enhanced search or the new advanced search. I'm not sure what the exact name to give.

Alicia: Advanced search.

Hector: Advanced search and the new advanced search has a better design, that's [00:02:00] for sure. Um, you know, it has one big box to search, uh, details like amounts, memo reference numbers. So you don't have to, like, specifically choose the field or the criteria that you want to search. It has more of this like sort of boolean free type type of search. And then it has some some filters that you can that you can use. So you can use okay, this product type or this transaction type. What we found though, the problem with the new advanced search is that it doesn't do [00:02:30] really well at searching inside transactions. Like sometimes when you're searching through a memo, it does really well at searching the memo of the overall transaction, like the memo of the invoice or memo of the check or whatever. But if you have specific line items, you know, specific details. It has a tough time searching through those descriptions, and we haven't found a workaround for that. And it's frustrating people because sometimes we are searching inside these descriptions. So. I don't have any of my files of mine [00:03:00] and my client files in which the classic search has been taken away. Um, but I could certainly be. You see how it could be totally frustrated with not being able to access the classic search. So that's sort of a weird announcement to make. It's just like users telling us that they don't have access to that. And we're hoping that Intuit reverses that until the new advanced search covers all the bases. Any experience with that? Uh, Alicia?

Alicia: Yeah, well, my file still says go to advanced classic [00:03:30] advanced search. So it hasn't gone away for me. And other than the fact that it doesn't seem to be searching descriptions, there's a lot of things that I actually really like about it. And actually mine is searching descriptions. So I'm wondering if they have managed to fix that because I'm like, right now as we're recording, I'm trying things out and it does look like some of that's working. Um, the things that I like is about advanced search is that it has the multi fields, like you can very easily [00:04:00] do a multi multiple criteria search just by filling them all in all at the same time. And a lot of people are missing the additional filters button. There's a gray additional filters button up on the right where you can instantly search for a particular product and just instantly pull up all the transactions involving that one product or that one class. So if you haven't clicked that little gray button, you're going to be you're going to love it. It even does your custom fields as well.

Hector: Yeah. So it actually turns out that it does search. It [00:04:30] does search within uh, the, the descriptions, but it doesn't show it in the search results. So that's probably why accountants are feeling that, you know, you put something in the search. This is on the new the new advanced search, not the classic search, but you put something in the search and it shows you the transactions, but it doesn't show you like the actual column of the description field where you can see what you're looking at. And, and maybe that's the issue. That's, that's, that's been happening that maybe doesn't show up automatically [00:05:00] or it truncates, you know, like I totally understand, um, why people would get frustrated over that. Because when you search something, you want to see it in the in the results that you're searching so you contextually can understand if you found what you were looking for. So my only suggestion to intuit is, hey, don't kill the classic search until, uh, and and the problem is, this is the big problem is that until they kill it or they take it away, when they start listening, when they start hearing what the problems are. So that's the challenge that they have is [00:05:30] that they remove it. And we don't really get to like, react to it until we don't have it anymore. I mean.

Alicia: In a way, it kind of makes sense because that allows them to filter out things that are just opinion versus things that are really, truly happening. So yeah, but then once you don't have the option anymore, then the feedback that you're getting are things that it really can't do, not the things that you are afraid that it can't do.

Hector: Yeah, but the thing is that accountants are different than the average user, whereas the minute you take something away, the level of anxiety that we get [00:06:00] is so high already in an industry where everything makes us anxious and everything makes us worried. So like it's it's like for Intuit to do this live on people, for them to find out what's wrong with it. It makes us feel like they're beta testing on us. So like, that's the only thing you got to be very careful with that. I do have good news. Um, you know, I spoke, so I spoke to, uh, one of the product, one of the product managers that managed the shadow bank feed stuff. And I gave him a bunch of suggestions, and I. And two of the suggestions I gave [00:06:30] him that was very frustrating, is when you upload a manual CSV file that you got from the bank, not a shadow file or not a direct connection where you put your user ID and password and transactions download automatically. It's what you download a CSV file of your transactions and manually upload it into Qbo. Prior to this change, you could only upload three fields date, description and amount.

Hector: So they now added the ability to do transaction numbers. So check numbers. So [00:07:00] finally, if you have a manual CSV file that you upload into QuickBooks online bank feeds, and it contains a fourth column with a check number that comes in finally. So that's huge. And at the same time simultaneously part of the same feedback. Sometimes you'll download something from the bank where the positives will be negatives, and the negatives will be positives again, because the bank gives you a CSV, not thinking of how QuickBooks online wants it, and you would upload that file and then all of a sudden your deposits come in as expenses or expenses come in as deposits or credit [00:07:30] card charges with credit card credits or whatever. So prior to this up, uh, this this little update, you had to, like, manually change it in, in, in Excel, you have to go in there and say equals negative of this and then copy and paste values. And it was just like an extra 10 minutes or 5 minutes or whatever that you didn't have to waste.

Alicia: American Express was classic for that.

Hector: Yeah, absolutely. American Express did it all the time. So now when you upload the file and you notice that the negatives are positives. Is a simple little checkbox where you go reverse amounts [00:08:00] and it does the reverse for you so you don't have to fix it in Excel prior. That takes away a huge frustration. And there was one more thing. Um, and this is difficult to discern, but if the file came in and it wasn't formatted, where in the negatives, where where the negatives were actual negative signs and the negatives were parentheses. But when you looked at it, you know, because our mind knows that our parentheses are negative and you uploaded it to QuickBooks prior to this change, [00:08:30] every you saw everything as positive. Like like it ignored parentheses as a negative. Now it recognizes parentheses as a negative. So again small small thing. But it's huge because it saves us our frustration to go what what what just happened here. Um, and sometimes when you have like a special type of formatting and the dollar sign was built into the dollar amount, it would also sort of crap out on the upload. So now it's it's being smarter about removing those, um, those dollar signs. So that's that's good news on not sure [00:09:00] how to categorize this as good or bad.

Hector: But now when you run reports you get a little warning that says warning. As of December 14th. And this is around the time that this episode is going to be, uh, uploaded. But around December 14th, some reports and this is the wording, some reports will not be available on Classic View, but it doesn't tell you which reports. And I got to tell you something, just coming off the heels of QuickBooks connect and teaching the Advanced Reports class at QuickBooks connect and hearing people's opinions and [00:09:30] thoughts and feelings towards the new enhanced reports or modernized reports, whatever you want to call it. Uh, it's not getting really, really a lot of love. It's weird because classic reports in Qvo were always horrible, like horrible, especially compared to desktop. And all of a sudden they're like, oh, they were amazing, you know, because now there's there's a new change. So I'm really worried that. Intuit said some reports will not be available on Classic View without telling us which reports they are. I think that's a total miscommunication. [00:10:00] Um, and also it's too early, too early to get rid of classic view. Um, but I know, Alicia, you're starting to dig, um, the reports and you're seeing improvements on that. So any thoughts on that? Yeah.

Alicia: Um, several. So a lot of the reports are already labeled with new enhanced experience. And those are the list reports. So not the ones doing a whole lot of calculations, but the ones that are just lists of lists of things, contact lists, deposit details, sales [00:10:30] by customer detail where it's just a long list of things. Um, those reports are working fairly well because all you really need to do is do you want to turn on or off and see the columns or not? And you're not doing comparatives, you're not comparing to previous periods. You don't need to exclude the zeros. You know, some of the things that the reports don't do yet. So I think they're kind of using those as the, the next phase in of the reports. Um, I did notice [00:11:00] some very big changes to it that I'm really happy about with these new reports that the complaint that I always had was just the real estate, the amount of screen space that it takes up, that every row was really wide and then had a line between it had a hard rule between each one of them. And just today I was working on the new reports chapter for my new book, and those were not there. I was like prepared to start writing about that, and they weren't [00:11:30] there. The rows were narrower, the header rows were blue, um, less white space, no hard line. And the negatives and positives are in color so you can instantly see them. So a lot of the reports are still way too long. Like you have to scroll off to the right to go see them. But as far as verticality goes, and also with that little collapse button that's hidden up under the three dots next to the reports name, they've actually just crossed off four of my five complaints [00:12:00] about the reports. So now if we can just do something about the the columns resizing, then I'll be happy puppy.

Hector: The reports right now, like if you run the transaction detail by account report, which is probably one of the the the most detailed, most amount of transactions, you see that report immediately when you open it. You have to scroll to the right. And that should never be the case. Like when you press a button and say, I want to see a report, your very first interaction with that report should [00:12:30] not be scrolling, especially to the right. I get scrolling down to find maybe the bottom line or something. I totally get that, but scrolling to the right is shouldn't be. And I know why it looks like this. It looks like this because classic reports have always been criticized for the fund being too small. So what they did was with enhanced reports, they make the fund bigger. But then this is the drawback, right? If you make the fund bigger, you have less space to put stuff. So like the ultimate solution for this would [00:13:00] be if Intuit were to give us the ability to control the default font size and for us to have maybe, you know, smaller screens or maybe even bigger screens or better eyesight or whatever you want to call it, that we could pick and choose what font size to get immediately. And for some of us, having a smaller font size would mean immediately getting the first report. Not not to be something you have to scroll to the right because side scrolling is so like like scrolling up and down is something that, okay, we get it. Like, you [00:13:30] know, like not a whole page fits in a in a widescreen monitor. But side scrolling is just like like it just it gives me so much anxiety to side scroll.

Alicia: Well, one of the things that I've noticed is, for instance, in that transaction detail by account report, they're including a lot more columns now that were not included by default before in the classic version. So I kind of feel like they're showing us all the different things that you can do by putting them all front and center, even if they're [00:14:00] not things that we're used to doing. Kind of like a couple of years ago when they rolled out that chart of accounts that was three pages long, because they wanted to make sure that you knew that all these accounts existed. And of course, showing us all the possibilities for every possible account you could have was drastic overkill. I kind of feel like they're doing the same thing here, with the reports that I was just working on the same report that I'd been working on in the in the classic version, and it had literally eight more columns showing than were in [00:14:30] the other version. So I had to go and uncheck them all. So if you are feeling like you're not liking these reports, first of all, give them a chance this week. They're different than they were last week, and take a look and see if you learn something new about the possibilities of the things that you can do with these reports, with these extra columns, then just go turn them off and go save your own version of it. If you don't like what you don't like the change.

Hector: But if I don't like the change and I [00:15:00] don't have the classic view option, that's going to drive me crazy. So like, that's the problem that we're having right now. That again, December 14th comes along. Some reports go away on Classic View. I don't know which reports is going to be. That's going to be some complaints well into it. Say okay thank you. We took it off on purpose. So we know what the real problem is like. You know that's going to give us some anxiety. But well, I agree with you. The reports are looking better for sure.

Alicia: Yeah, they're looking better. And you know, I don't know if it's just because I'm [00:15:30] the eternal optimist, but I'm looking at this report that is definitely wait 6 or 8 columns wider than it was before, but it's like, oh, I didn't even think about. I could include posting on this report. Boom. That's actually useful. So I think this is an opportunity for us to kind of reexamine the way that we operate with our reports. And maybe there's some new possibilities here as well.

Hector: Yeah. And there was one more thing you wanted to talk about that you discovered, um, on, uh, the customer [00:16:00] payment screen with the KB box. That was pretty interesting.

Alicia: So I had a client who's using QuickBooks payments, and they were having trouble that the CVV number was not sticking, that they were getting an error message saying, well, you have to put in the CVV code, but there was no box for the CVV code. So I kind of ran it up the chain. And it turns out that when you are entering in credit card information using QuickBooks payments, and if you have the checkbox on at the bottom that says save this information [00:16:30] before you filled it out, the CVV box disappears. But if you uncheck that box, the CVV code appears. So if you're not seeing the code where you put the three digit code from the back of your card, uncheck the auto. The auto save by default, put in your credit card information, then check the mark to save it. So is that is.

Hector: That a bug fix or what exactly is it like?

Alicia: I think [00:17:00] it's a security measure, because if you're going to save the information, you're supposed to have it all masked, so it's getting masked before you've entered it. So it is a bug, but it's a security bug.

Hector: A security bug. I love that total spin over a security bug. Yeah. That's awesome. So we're going to keep this. We're going to do a couple of episodes that are short because we've we've started getting, uh, I guess uh, started getting 30 minutes, 40 minutes into episodes. We're going to tell you.

Alicia: We can talk forever. [00:17:30]

Hector: We can talk. That's that's the problem. Like, Alicia, Alicia and I were a bad pairing. From that perspective, we're not very efficient. But there was one more thing you wanted to add.

Alicia: Yeah, there was one more thing that I discovered, and I don't think it's new, but it just kind of smacked me in the face the other day that, uh, when you are setting up the the option to email your receipts in so you can make an email address, something at qbo. Docs.com. It used to be that it was a one time shot. It was permanent. And whatever [00:18:00] you put in you had to live with, even if you put a typo in it. But I have noticed that now you can change that email address. So if you need to for any reason you're not locked in, you can update it. And don't miss the fact that there's also options to manage your employees so that you can turn on and off which employees with logins can actually send in their receipts. And so that's it's a really subtle little button toggle there. But make sure that you play with that so that you can turn [00:18:30] on your employees to send in their their emails.

Hector: That's awesome. So those are the little things that we saw, um, through the month of November, through the end, through the end of the month of November. This episode should be released somewhere in December. Alicia, what's going on in your world?

Alicia: Well, I'm gearing up to go to the digital CPA conference, the CPA. Um, so I'm back in Las Vegas two weeks after I was just there. And I'm looking forward to it because I'm in the process of field [00:19:00] testing my new, what we call the quest portal, where we're offering qbo training to accounting firms. That's all CPA authorized. And so we're kind of running this through people to see if they like the layout, if they like the service, if it's something that they could be using. So I'm looking forward to it, not just for my own, um, tax education, but also so that we can explore the possibilities on how to bring qbo training to CPA firms.

Hector: And and from your understanding, digital CPA versus [00:19:30] QuickBooks connect versus scaling new heights, which is probably where most of our listeners go to QuickBooks connect, scaling new heights, maybe not digital CPA or Dcpa what's what's different about what's different about this conference, or what do you think is it's going to be the difference between this and the other ones?

Alicia: Well, first of all, since it's CPA based and it's an offshoot of the AICPA, it is tax heavy. It's more about um, tax and not the bookkeeping piece that scaling new heights and QuickBooks connect [00:20:00] mostly focus on. The other thing that I've noticed is that don't seem to be as many parties I haven't heard. Instead of having like three different parties to go to every single night. So far I haven't heard about any. And either it's because I'm not on the mailing list, which, because it's new to me, might be the case, but I kind of get a feeling that it's a different crowd of people.

Hector: Uh, maybe it's like kind of like a old boys club type of thing where, you know, everybody has their own group and their own niche, and they're not really parties. They just kind of hang on, hang out by themselves, I'm pretty sure. Look, one [00:20:30] thing I think is universal all accountants, after a conference, they want to sit down and drink and, and and just talk shop. But from the perspective of like an app sponsor, pay for all the drinks type of thing, which is more common in a scaling new heights QuickBooks connect type of thing. You're right, maybe that's not going to be there, but it is Las Vegas, so I'm sure. Um, have you seen the sponsor list? Are there any of the sponsors that we that we know another.

Alicia: Cpa earmark is a sponsor.

Hector: Earmark is a sponsor, but earmark doesn't really throw [00:21:00] parties with, uh, open bars, do they?

Alicia: Uh, remains to be seen. I heard a rumor about earmarks having a party at the sphere, so. Oh, nice. That's what I get to go follow up with.

Hector: All right.

Alicia: Very good. Get in on that.

Hector: Yeah. That's cool. So good luck with that, Alicia. Um, in my world, nothing really is changing that much. Um, as you as you may know, we had a conference in Miami in October. It was really good success. Uh, great things about it. Yeah. Thank you. Alicia, [00:21:30] you couldn't come because you had a conflict of interest. Hopefully we'll get to see you, uh, next year. We don't have any announcements in terms of dates or venue or anything like that, but we will have 1 in 2024. But at QuickBooks connect, we had a we had a get together of uh, quick, uh, I mean, right tool users and right tools is the app that I developed with with my partner Mark. And we received tons of feedback on the things that people wanted to see, like more basically more things that they wanted. Right tool [00:22:00] to to to do. So we'll talk I'll talk about briefly what we added in the newest version that's being released end of November, early early December. So the first thing that we added was we have a little button in in the new enhanced reports called All Dates. The current enhanced reports allows you to choose the dynamic date range and a custom date range, but they don't have an old date button. So what we did is we added a little button that says all dates, and basically it puts the beginning date at one one 1900 and the ending date at [00:22:30] 1231, 20, 99 or whatever. So we basically make shifted our own old dates macro in there. So that's the first thing that we released.

Alicia: I'm really happy you did that, because that was one of my complaints about the new interface. Right.

Hector: And in in QuickBooks connect, what I was teaching, um, the Advanced Reports class, that was the common thing. That was the common thing is like, where's my old dates? Where's my old dates? So, so so we added that, um, the other thing that we added was and this is kind of version one is called, [00:23:00] uh, convert payee type. So like if you create a customer and it's supposed to be a vendor instead, if you press a little button and whatever you created that whatever information you have for that customer name, last name, email or whatever, it creates a duplicate version as a, as a vendor and and vice versa. Now, that's not really that useful if you have a bunch of transactions under the old customer. Uh, but you can use an existing feature with the batch edit in the register to change those payees. So that's kind of step one. So [00:23:30] um, that was people got people got really excited about that because apparently. A common problem that people have is that their clients would create a customer in, like in bank feeds while they're categorizing stuff, and then when they're categorizing bank feeds and they create this, um, this, this customers as vendors, basically, they start filling out the customer list with a bunch of vendors, and then it's like kind of a manual process to identify those and to change them and that, sort of that sort of stuff. [00:24:00]

Hector: Uh, the third feature that we added is, um, something called find product for inactivate inactivating accounts. So what ends up happening is if you try to make an account inactive and there's a whole bunch of like, products and services tied to that account, you don't get like a good information in terms of where should we go check to see which. Of those products and services are tied to specific accounts. So now when you turn that feature on and you try to inactivate [00:24:30] an account that has a whole bunch of products and services attached to it, and you press a button, find them, we actually generate a report for you of all the products and services that are using that account, and you can click on each one to edit each one and maybe change the account or something. So it's no longer tied or mapped. So you can make that account inactive.

Alicia: Yeah, that's a really nice feature because right now what I wind up doing is going over to my products and services screen, and then I use the baby gear just above the grid to turn on the income and expense categories. And [00:25:00] then I sort those, and that allows me to find the one that has the that is attached to the account. I'm trying to inactivate, but I love the idea of having a quick link or a quick report through rate tool.

Hector: Yeah, and those are all pro features that you have to have the, the paid version of, of of right tool. And there's one feature that we added to the free version which we're calling clean category names. And maybe, maybe we could change the name of that. But essentially when you go into bank feeds and you have this long chart of accounts that have like a parent and [00:25:30] sub account and sub account and sub account, sometimes on the first initial screen, it truncates the account name because it's so long and your column is, is, is is a limit of how wide it can be. So when you turn that on, we actually remove the entire account path and only put basically the last functional account in there. Now I could totally view how that's not beneficial. So like it's a toggle, you could turn it off or turn it on. But I've had like my chart of accounts. Alicia [00:26:00] actually has three parent accounts on the expenses. It has, uh, payroll, uh, sales and sales and marketing and uh, admin and uh, and overhead and that's it. I only have like the one that I like to use only has three parent accounts. So if you think on that dimension, you know, every expense account is going to be three layers deep. So when you start thinking about how big this chart of account names are in a single line, they almost always get truncated. And [00:26:30] it was a part of point of contention with my clients that they're like, hey, this long chart of accounts you gave me, I can't even see what the account name that I'm categorizing things until I click on it and look at the dropdown menu. So by removing the parent names, it makes it a little easier for the user to like. Identify the account.

Alicia: Right. That was an option in desktop that you could only see the the smallest level account.

Hector: Exactly. It was inspired by desktop, but this is only in bank feed. So not not across the the product but only in bank feeds. So that's it. That's the only like sort [00:27:00] of new things that we've been adding to to right tool. And there's really nothing else in my world other than adding new things to right tool.

Alicia: And we're grateful that you do.

Hector: So with that being said, uh, you know, thank you for attending this week's episode and we'll see you in the next one.

Alicia: See you in the next one.