QBO New Features: February 2024

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

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

Hector Garcia: In this episode of the unofficial QuickBooks [00:00:30] accountants podcast, we're going to talk about new features released in February 2024. According to the Firm of the Future What's New article and the EndNote webinar that was published in the middle of February 2024. Hey, Alicia, how are you?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, I survived January and I'm looking forward to March.

Hector Garcia: Absolutely. So let's just go down the list of all the things that have been announced in February as new features to QuickBooks online, and I'll let Alicia drive because she's the expert in [00:01:00] QuickBooks Online Payroll and QuickBooks time. But there are eventually three things related to payroll and QuickBooks time that have been announced. One is you can now manage your clients QuickBooks time inside the Qbo accountant portal two, they've added a new simplified wizard style setup process for QuickBooks time, which is much needed. Um, because it wasn't really that that easy to know how to set up QuickBooks time in the first place. And [00:01:30] the third one is you can share documents with an employee inside Qbo payroll. So, Alicia, take it away. Add your comments to this.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. Yeah. So I've been spending a lot of time with QuickBooks time. I just taught a course about it recently. That's in the portal at Learn Royal Comm, and I also just did a session about it for Insightful Accountant for their cube-e talks. So if you want more information, those are good places to go. But they've been making a lot of strides [00:02:00] towards integrating what used to be Tsheets into Qbo. And in the last few months, it's really now shown up as a native app inside Qbo. And so what they're highlighting here are some of the finer details about what's changed and what you have available to you. So the first one is that if you are an accountant user, you can now get into QuickBooks time through your clients, um, subscriptions. You know, when you just change [00:02:30] to their file, you no longer have to go out to Tsheets to do their time management. So now you have insight, you have control, you have the ability to make those changes.

Hector Garcia: So it's kind of technically not a new feature. It's just more convenient to stay inside Qbo and then have to go to the what used to be the Tsheets website, the Tsheets portal, as a separate place. I love that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Exactly. And there were some also some things that you didn't have permissions to change for security reasons. And so they've they've sorted that out as [00:03:00] well. Okay. The second change is that it because some of the features are still in the original classic what used to be Tsheets portal and some of them are now in Qbo. There's kind of a like hunt and peck to go find where the different features are to turn them on and off. So what they've done is they've taken the the time overview page and turned that into a checklist, which means that when [00:03:30] you are setting up time for the first time, whether it's because you're setting up Qbo payroll for the first time, or you're using Qbi time as a standalone app, you now have a step by step guide to make sure that you go through all of the steps. So it's customizing your time sheet fields. It's setting up the mobile app or an on site kiosk. It's inviting your employees, which could be employees and also could be contractors, but you're now inviting them to the workforce app so they can tap [00:04:00] in and out of their time sheets.

Alicia Katz Pollock: It's setting up the permissions. Can employees change their time sheets? Do they have to be approved by managers? Who is what's the workflow for monitoring them? And then also features for actually going into the kiosk and setting up the kiosk. And what the kiosk is, is using an iPad that when your employees come in on site, they can tap in for their time. And it actually takes a picture of their face, which means that it has to be them and you can't [00:04:30] have somebody else clocking in for another employee. So it's pretty slick. I have a few clients who were using it. You can also, um, establish break rules and, you know, our breaks automatically included in the time. Do they have to start and stop? Is there a time limit, all of those kinds of things. And I also really like that you can assign different employees or contractors to different clients and different jobs and projects, which [00:05:00] means that they don't see all of your clients. They can only see the ones that you assigned to them. All of these settings are now part of the checklist.

Hector Garcia: Awesome. I love that most of the times you have to like, go trial and error to figure out what QuickBooks time could do. Like now it's actually walking you through the process, and I'm sure that you sit down with a client and a new setup. It's a great sort of advisory opportunity, right? Because you could really transform the way somebody operates if you change how you track, [00:05:30] uh, people's time or what you're tracking and what you're not tracking. And many times people are paying for the extra, uh, services in payroll premium and Elite, but they're not even using QuickBooks time because, you know, maybe they don't need to track time, but sometimes there's an opportunity to do something maybe not focused on tracking time, but focused on managing the employee itself. And via the time tracking module, you just basically trigger those actions or behaviors. So I [00:06:00] like the fact that more and more people using QuickBooks time will actually reach out to their accountant or their advisor and say, hey, I saw that this thing is in there, a break rule. You know, I never had a break rule before or something like that. So I like the premise of what this could do with the advisor, accountant and small business owner relationship.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Right? It's also really good for analyzing your data and doing labor costing by using QuickBooks time and actually assigning the different jobs and tasks and products and services [00:06:30] to each of your time cards. You can then run additional time costing reports in the project center and really see, are you profiting from a particular customer job? You know, how many times have you thought you had a client who was a cash cow, but then you realized that they're high maintenance and you have to baby them? And now all of a sudden, all your time has been sucked up by that client, and your actual profit margin was really, really small. And that's the analysis options that QuickBooks time brings to the table now.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, [00:07:00] the the big drawbacks always been, you know, the additional time and effort and emotion that it takes to actually track all these things versus the actual benefit you get from the analysis. And Alicia, there was one third feature in QuickBooks Online Payroll, which is the ability to share documents. This is not just add documents to an employee profile, share documents with an employee via QuickBooks Online Payroll. What's that all about?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, [00:07:30] pretty much just summed it up right there that you can put their employment contract in there. You can put in your employee handbook in there. You can any documents, their I-9 forms, their W-4 forms, any of the documents that you store for their performance reviews could all be now attached to the client as well. So instead of having them on a G drive or in a filing cabinet, you can get to all of their performance reviews for the last five years. All right. Through this documents [00:08:00] tab. If you start using it. And the employees can also get to them through the workforce app right on their phones.

Hector Garcia: And since you mentioned the employee handbook, we were having a side conversation before we recorded the podcast about an announcement that Intuit made that they seem to be changing their HR partners. So before they used to use a company, what was the name of the old mammoth?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Was the original company that was.

Hector Garcia: The original company mammoth. And was the new one called?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Um. I don't have it in front of me.

Hector Garcia: Mineral. [00:08:30]

Alicia Katz Pollock: Mineral? That's right.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And, you know, I myself have not been taking advantage of those tools. And so I'm looking forward to going in and seeing what they offer. I did use mammoth to create my employee handbook because I had never had one before. And I went through their wizard and put together a what it did is exported a word document that's now available to all of my employees. So when they have questions about our time off procedures, for example, I can just point them back to the source document [00:09:00] instead of explaining it over and over again. I'll look forward to seeing what the what mineral brings to the table. I've heard of mineral more than I've heard of mammoth. Hopefully this is a great strategic partnership and brings us some additional tools.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, and the backdrop of this for some reference, we recently got an email from Intuit announcing that on March 18th, 2024, the QuickBooks air experience will be quote, upgraded quote to Mineral Platform. [00:09:30] Right? So they're not going to say we changed partners because the other one didn't work out. Of course they're going to say it's been upgraded. The reality is that we don't really know exactly what that upgraded means in terms of comparing it to a mammoth used to used to do, to be fair, like Alicia said, I never really used that solution too much. So I really don't don't have a, um, a comparison point, but it's going to be a matter of time, you know, maybe in the March episode or the April episode where we get a chance to play with the new [00:10:00] air tools that Mineral Platform brings, we can discuss it. I know that traditionally you have to be on the middle version or the high end version of Payroll on Premium or Elite to get the additional air tools. So I'm going to make the assumption that QuickBooks Online Core is not going to have access to this new mineral platform, which is called QuickBooks air. Right? So it's been sort of rebranded to QuickBooks air. So we are going to wait for that. And, and [00:10:30] uh, and report on that when we actually see it live. I know that in that same email that QuickBooks sent, they send some links to live, uh, webinars in March. So hopefully they'll be instructing us about, you know, what, what we're expecting to see out of this mineral QuickBooks partnership. And if there's something worth reporting, we will be reporting it. You can you can count on us for that.

Alicia Katz Pollock: There are two things in the email that they sent that I do find interesting. One is that that employee handbook that I mentioned is now going to be a [00:11:00] quote unquote smart employee handbook where you can get real time policy notifications and in platform updates, which I think instead of exporting it to a word document, which then became a static document in mammoth, maybe this is now a little more, you know, a little more automated so the employee can log in and see the up to date one, instead of you having to distribute it and then send out notifications when you change it. The other thing in the email is also [00:11:30] that they're going to have a learning management system with an e-learning course catalog. What I would believe that that means is that there's going to be articles in there about employee management and job success, so that either your employees can get some training or you can get some training. As a manager, I'll be interested to see what they come up with for that.

Hector Garcia: That's that's weird because, you know, you're going to have one generic training for every type of business out there, you know, like so there's going to be what generic sexual harassment training, [00:12:00] generic, you know, anti-bullying at the job type of stuff. Like I'm not sure what type of e-learning you can have or that's across the board for all employees, unless the e-learning just means e learn how to use the mineral platform, which I assume that's what it is. But how much? How much? I mean, if the platform is so complex that it needs to know its own e-learning system, then you think anybody's even going to use these type of platforms?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, I hope you're actually dead on with sexual harassment [00:12:30] policies and Dei training. And there's a lot of training that, you know, you use the Tum generic, but it's less generic than it is just management skills and human resources skills. And I'll be curious to see what's actually in there. But I know that, you know, I could use some training on, you know, growing my employee base. So hopefully there's some things in there.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. So we're fantasizing about what what we're expecting to see there. All right. So let's move on. So we're [00:13:00] done with payroll QuickBooks time stuff. The next uh, thing that was mentioned in the it wasn't mentioned on the, on the in the note webinar, but it was listed in the list of new features in the firm of the future article, which is, quote, assign more tasks with custom roles in QuickBooks Online Advanced. And I do not want to get into this at all, because every single time I log in to QuickBooks online Advanced permission systems, something may seem to have changed. And it's not always an upgrade. It's more of like them. Learning about [00:13:30] dependencies. Like you turn on one thing, but then that thing affected some of the things. So then they removed the capacity to turn this one off and on, and now it just turns on and off a whole bunch of things at the same time. I mean, unfortunately, unfortunately, QuickBooks Live advance continues to pretend to be QuickBooks enterprise with permission structures, but it's nowhere close. But the good news is, every time they announce something, it feels like they're chipping away at it, that we're getting closer and closer to it. So both Alicia and I are going to wait [00:14:00] until we feel that the customers permissions is is stable enough that we can do a whole episode walking you through what it can do, what it can't do. So we're going to wait for an episode just for that. Alicia, what are your thoughts?

Alicia Katz Pollock: I'm really looking forward to them continuing to develop this, because my experience has been that even though it's supposed to be granular and comparable to enterprise, I'll give an employee a level. And there's like one thing that they can't do. And so we have to give them full [00:14:30] access to that entire range because of that one little screen that they can't access. So I'm hoping that they're just getting more granular and granular with what screens not functions, but actual what screens they can go into and not go into.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, it's gonna be awesome when you can also change what aspects of the screen they can change. So this employee cannot change tags. This employee cannot change the shipping address. This employee cannot change location, whatever it is. That would [00:15:00] be interesting if it ever gets to that level. Now the next thing that they announce is and this is funny because let me remind you, is 2024 and the largest bank in America, the most common bank that QuickBooks online users are likely to be connecting to. Finally, can do bank statement imports via QuickBooks online bank feeds. That's huge. I love it a little bit late to the game, but better late than never, right? Um, I have tons of clients that use Chase, [00:15:30] so I haven't. I haven't yet seen it work live. Actually, I think during QuickBooks connect they discussed sort of a partnership with Chase, and I assume this is like the first fruit of that partnership. Hey, we finally got the the banks to send us, uh, statements. They don't mention whether you can see check images or, or deposit slips yet. They only announced, um, monthly statements and they show up in your reconcile screen when you're about to reconcile. [00:16:00] So that's a good, good step forward, I think.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Chase used to be one of the most robust. It was one of the first integrations. It was one of the most robust integrations. And then Chase made some back end changes on their website. And it got kind of funky with QuickBooks online. But it's definitely coming back and it's still one of the banks I recommend.

Hector Garcia: And the next thing they announce, which is something that Alicia and I may have mentioned on the forecasting the new Financial Forecasting feature episode where they killed it seems [00:16:30] like they killed cash flow projections in the article, which was published February 6th, says that on February 2nd. So this is actually already four days late into it. They've, uh, no longer have, uh, cash flow projections. And that's the same thing as financial projections or financial forecast. This is within the cash flow screen. The projections no longer work for QuickBooks online. You still be able to see the historical, but you won't be able to create new projections. Which is [00:17:00] weird because one of Alicia's comments was this seemed to be like the one thing that was working really well in QuickBooks online. Um, and Alicia liked it quite a bit, and I never really got to use it with a live client. I played with it and actually never really, truly made a video in YouTube, which is interesting because I never got into it. And that's probably the reason why it's just not enough. People either understood it or or even tried using it. So what are your thoughts about this?

Alicia Katz Pollock: I really think it's an adoption issue that in order to make the cash flow projections [00:17:30] work, it did look at your history and pull it forward, but you had to, for example, take an invoice that was overdue and then put in a date due for when you expected to see it so that it would pull forward. And the same with bills. Like, when did you when do you expect to pay your bills? In other words, in order to use it, you had to sit down and dedicate some time. And then it was still a one time exercise. And you know who's got time for that? I think that's why it didn't have that [00:18:00] much, uh, that much traction and why they're killing it. It was cool. I just recorded a course in my in my QuickBooks checking and cash flow, but now I'm going to have to go hide those videos.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah.

Hector Garcia: This is the life of a QuickBooks trainer, right? Exactly. It literally always like, you know, I what I believe now is that if I want them to kill something in QuickBooks, I should make a course about it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Absolutely.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Record a video and.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Then it'll be gone.

Hector Garcia: So I'm pretty sure that somebody. At last we're [00:18:30] going to get to in detail. Somebody last month created a video about how awesome QuickBooks transfers in bank feeds was. And and as a consequence of that, they're now starting to make a fix into transfer. So I'm pretty sure they did it just to rain on whoever's parade was. But now we know the strategy. If you don't want QuickBooks to continue with a particular feature, make a really nice, detailed video on course about it and they'll kill it the next month. Anyway.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You're killing me, Hector. That's going to put me completely.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Out of business.

Hector Garcia: Absolutely. The [00:19:00] other thing they announce and we could discuss it. I'm not sure how much we can get into it. Is direct deposit transactions match in QuickBooks Online Payroll? Apparently. And maybe you haven't noticed that some people, when they had QuickBooks Online Payroll with direct deposit when the bank fees was downloaded, I guess the the checks were not matching and they seemed to have announced that they've fixed that. Or maybe they're automatically matching it for you. Maybe just in case there's two paychecks with the same dollar amount and they're matching it with the [00:19:30] right one. I'm not sure. What do you think? What do you think this is?

Alicia Katz Pollock: I think that you hit it on the head when you said that. It's kind of a refinement. I personally have never had any trouble with my direct deposit checks not coming in as a match, with the exception of people who had the same pay rate, or one of my employees who splits half to two different checking accounts. I think what this is then doing is actually mapping behind the scenes to the actual payroll, which is definitely an enhancement, especially [00:20:00] if you pay all your employees the same salary rate. You probably have a different experience than I am, so this will be a nice little subtle enhancement. You might not notice it mostly in the in the image. They say that instead of just saying match in the green box, it says automatic match.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's right. Yeah. And there's a.

Hector Garcia: And there's a tiny what seems that is almost feels like an Easter egg. If you go into the categorized tab in bank feed. So not the for review the categorize tag. And you click on the on on [00:20:30] the little gear on the on the small gear on top of the table of the transactions, you see the page size, uh, options. So you can have 50, 75, 100 lines, uh, in the screen. There's now a toggle in the bottom that says automatic matching for QuickBooks payments. And uh, which is not the same thing technically as, uh, QuickBooks payments, not the same thing as direct deposit. So I'm not sure exactly what this means, but there's a little checkbox there and it says you can turn off and on that toggle. So I wonder if that automatic [00:21:00] matching, uh, toggle now works for both QuickBooks payments and QuickBooks Payroll direct deposits. But the articles specifically says that you can turn this off like it actually says. You can turn this off if you want to, if you prefer manual matching. So I'm not sure exactly where you would turn that off. That's the only toggle I've seen in QuickBooks online where you can toggle anything with the word automatic matching in it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So that's actually got me curious if what they mean by this is that it's not just going to put it on the review tab, [00:21:30] but if they're going to automatically categorize them and take them off of for review and move them to the categorize tab for you, I'll be curious to see.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's what I suspect.

Hector Garcia: That's that's what I suspect. I suspect, I suspect that the toggle for automatic matching, which again, I'm not sure if it's only for QuickBooks payments or QuickBooks payments and uh, and payroll is going to move them off for your review and match them automatically. You're not going to create new transactions. It's not an auto add situation. It's just an auto match situation, which is [00:22:00] auto match is a different concept that actually we've never really had in QuickBooks bank feeds ever. Like we've had matching and it shows you that it's match. But this concept of auto matching and removing it from your list of things to do, it's a brand new concept, so I suspect yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That's an auto.

Hector Garcia: It's going to be interesting. Well. It's an automatic rule which is different than auto add. Like an auto add rule will create a new transaction for you. Remove it from your review. This is an auto match. This would be a kind of an auto match rule. [00:22:30] Again, it's a new concept that we've never seen an autumn. We've seen automatic transaction creation, but we've never seen automatic matching and removing it from the list for us.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. Hey, Hector.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You and I are geeks.

Alicia Katz Pollock: We're very geeks, right?

Hector Garcia: That's why this bug, that's why this podcast exists. Because sometimes we walk around life wanting to tell a stranger about this. And we know that if we do this, that we will be reported and we put in a mental institution immediately.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Hey, [00:23:00] I want to I want to say one more thing about these payroll matches for because payroll is sensitive information, all of the pay checks are no longer going to actually have people's names on them in the bank feeds. It's just going to appear as Intuit and say that it's payroll. But you're anybody who is not supposed to have access to employee names for payroll will not be exposed.

Hector Garcia: So I do have a question about that because I actually haven't seen this live. So will the QuickBooks [00:23:30] online business owner or administrator, like with the person with the most permission, be able to see the employees names in bank feeds, and anyone that doesn't have payroll permission will not see the QuickBooks employees naming bank feeds? Or are they just hiding the names across the board for every single user in Qbo to prevent the security breach?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, I won't, we can't tell from the article what they're doing. I mean, I'm sure they're honoring the people who don't have permission, have the ability [00:24:00] to see payroll. If you do have the ability to see payroll, I'll be curious if there's still masking it or not. One thing to watch out for, by the way, with that masking is that if in any way you have the employees name in the memo that does still expose that information, that's just kind of in general.

Hector Garcia: So that would be if if you manually added the employee names in the memo prior to doing a direct deposit.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, maybe if you have a third party payroll and you import the paychecks, sometimes you'll see that. [00:24:30]

Hector Garcia: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So forget about third party payroll for a second. We're discussing QuickBooks Online Payroll, specifically QuickBooks Online Payroll will will hide the employee name from the bank feeds visuals whenever it's a direct deposit, if it's a physical check and the employee reconciling the bank has access to check images, you know you can't hide that. But we're talking about the list of transactions that show up in bank feeds. Yes, the next thing that they added that they talked about it, and they did [00:25:00] mention this in the, uh, in the In the Know webinar is uh, in, in Pro Connect, I'm not sure how many people, how many people that listen to this actually use Pro Connect. But in Pro Connect Tax, you can now import, uh, your taxpayer's information from an old 1040. So if you're bringing a brand new customer and you're doing their personal 1040 tax return in Pro Connect, you can now sort of scan and import, let's say the 2022 tax return. That may be a different preparer date. And now it's going to bring in uh names [00:25:30] Social Security address. So you're saving or saving a couple of a couple of steps, uh, along the way. So I thought that was interesting.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I really liked the idea that they have the now the OCR to scrape the 1040 and pull in all of that information and fill in all the the client information automatically. It's going to save a lot of time, especially since it includes dependents and different summary values. So it gives you a good starting point without having to start from scratch.

Hector Garcia: That's right. So. And that's it. That's everything [00:26:00] they announced in the in the note webinar and the firm of the future new features article. There's one Easter egg that they've added in February which we're going to save for another episode. So you can have to wait one more week for this. And you really going to like this. Basically, they're restructuring how QuickBooks manages transfers, and they're also adding batch editing in the categorized tab in QuickBooks Online Banking. And also, [00:26:30] I have befriended somebody at Intuit that actually listens to my advice regarding bank feeds. So has Alicia. So we are going to publicly make announce that that and explain the details. And we're also going to discuss our wish list for what are the other things that we wish, uh, bank fees had in an entirely different episode. So, uh, you know, definitely, you know, watch out for that. So that being said, Alicia, what's going on in your world?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, I'm about to become the host of Cube-e Talks with Insightful Accountant, which [00:27:00] I'm really excited about. And they are also putting together a new LMS training portal powered by Royal Wise Videos. And also on top of that, all of the videos that they want to make available. So that's some exciting news. And that's my immediate project that we're rolling out. How about you right now?

Hector Garcia: What's occupying my heart and my mind is, uh, our new conference company called reframe. We are having an event in New [00:27:30] York City on April 17th, Reframe 2020 4.com. That is going to be a summary, a one day event that is going to summarize the event that we had in Miami last year called Creative Business Models for accountants. So we had so many. I had so many DMs from people that were FOMO and they they missed the conference and they said, hey, I'm definitely going last year. I'm looking forward to it. And I had to tell them, hey, next year is a different theme, different concepts. Um, so I [00:28:00] had enough people saying, hey, I want this. And I grabbed the biggest city in America and said, I'll go there and I'll see how many people want to see a one day version of this. So April 17th at the, uh, Penn Station ADP office, uh, ADP, the competitor of QuickBooks for payroll, actually opened up their office. And they said, Hector, you can you can do it in our place. And of course, ADP wants to always bring accountants in to come hang out and talk to ADP employees. So they're sponsoring the event by opening up [00:28:30] their sales office to us. So I'm actively selling tickets for that event is $475. Go to reframe 2020 4.com. If you want to come spend a day with me and my brother Carlos.

Hector Garcia: My brother is actually coming as well. And we're going to teach you the concept of creative business models for accountants that we taught last year in Miami. And of course, we're going to have, again, a conference in South Florida in October, which is part two of this story, which is now called Influential Conversations [00:29:00] for accountants. That's a much bigger thing. That's a two and a half day event. It's going to be at a beach property. There's going to be, you know, also the after party and the drinking and all that stuff that happens in, in conferences as well. Uh, but uh, that's kind of what the idea is. We're going to present one big topic here in South Florida, close to my house every year. And then if if that's popular, it will grab the most popular components of that and try to tour, um, around the country the following year so we can catch all these people that couldn't travel in a smaller scale [00:29:30] event. So that's the new thing. Reframe is the new thing. And this is how I want to, um, educate and hang out with my fellow accounting professionals so we can together rebrand the accounting industry to be seen as the most creative, uh, innovative and forward looking industry out of all of them. So join me and, uh, join the movement Reframe 2020 4.com.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And I will see you in Miami for sure.

Hector Garcia: For sure. All right everybody, thank you very much. And we'll see you in [00:30:00] the next one. See you in the next one.