QBO New Features July 2024

There may be errors in spelling, grammar, and accuracy in this machine-generated transcript.

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

Alicia Katz-Pollock: And I have the privilege of collaborating with Hector Garcia, CPA, the founder of Right Tool for QuickBooks. In this week's episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, Hector [00:00:30] and I are going to break down the July in the know webinar from Intuit, where they present all of the new features. Hector, how are you doing today?

Hector Garcia: Excited? We're halfway through the year. Um, we're getting more stuff in QuickBooks online. Uh, even some inventory stuff. So that's exciting. So super pumped up for today.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Yeah, I was really happy to see some of these announcements that they're making, and I'm looking forward to the rollout for sure. All right. Let's go ahead [00:01:00] and dive in. Uh, the first one is PayPal. There are putting out a new PayPal connector that's more like the app. It let me actually say it this way. It's in the app transactions tab instead of being a bank feed connection. I haven't seen it yet, have you?

Hector Garcia: So I applied to have because when you go into the Apps Comm direct link for PayPal, it gives you an option to like apply for a beta to add it to your company file, [00:01:30] and you go through the motions. You log in, but at the very end it says beta is not available for your company file, so I'm not sure if they are enabling these betas on the back end for the people that are going to test it, so I have not seen it, but one thing I could tell you is, um, the PayPal connector in QuickBooks online has gone through maybe like 2 or 3 reinventions in the past, and there's always a philosophical discussion on do these transactions need to come in like a bank, or do they need to come in [00:02:00] like an e commerce, uh, channel where the money that's come the money that's coming in is not necessarily a deposit or a payment to an existing invoice. The money coming in, maybe it's a brand new transaction. And should the PayPal connector bring in income as if it's a brand new invoice or brand new sales receipt? So that's always been the philosophical discussion in terms of how this works. And the challenge I've had with all the iterations of this is that it's never given you [00:02:30] like the choice where you can say, okay, the way I want my PayPal connection to behave is that all the money coming in is a sales receipt, or the way I want it to come in is to come in either as a payment or a deposit. So it behaves just like bank feeds. So I hate the fact that I can't control the default. But the very last connector, it gives you the choice But the challenge is that the default choice is a sales receipt, not necessarily a match payment. So I'm [00:03:00] hoping the new connection tool gives you a little bit more flexibility to to choose how that information comes in.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Well, the way that I think about it is actually slightly different from you, because one of the things that I liked about the PayPal integration that was in the banking feed is that it did give you the choice. I mean, sure, it defaulted to just a deposit, but you had the opportunity to click show details and then actually put products in, which was different from the regular bank feeds. So it actually now to [00:03:30] me makes sense that they're going to move it to app transactions, which is where you already do something similar with Amazon and with Shopify. So moving it there makes sense. So I'm looking forward to that. I've always liked that you can turn it into a product and then it deducts the fees automatically. And so, you know, I remember gosh, my first QuickBooks connect going beelining straight to the PayPal booth and saying there's no integration with QuickBooks at all. This is impossible to do. And then, you know, it's evolved. [00:04:00] It's, you know, this will be the third iteration of the evolution of it. Now we just need Venmo. Yeah.

Hector Garcia: And if you don't mind, I want to add a little bit of context to that. Um, so when I talk about that flexibility in it coming in, I am so thinking about all my inventory clients and the fact that you can automate with the current PayPal connector, automate a deposit coming in straight into income. And like you said, it creates a product, but it doesn't match it to your inventory. It doesn't do any sort [00:04:30] of, um, inventory tie in or mapping. So if you have inventory items that you want to match to your PayPal sales, you need to either create the transaction separately and then match the payment. No. Yes. It's totally like that. The current PayPal connector I'm not talking about the beta PayPal connector will won't do any item mapping.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Um, when you click show details, it gives you the ability to go in and actually add items.

Hector Garcia: Right. The [00:05:00] description of the transaction comes in into the into the description, but it uses the default PayPal item. Uh, from that it connects through.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: But that's what I'm saying is you can go in and you can edit that. I do it write.

Hector Garcia: Edit every transaction.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: I do have to edit. You're right. Yeah. So I do have to edit every transaction because it does say PayPal, um, PayPal.

Hector Garcia: Or PayPal or PayPal sale. Yeah.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: But at least in the interface I did have, I do have that ability. Now, I don't have the, you know, I'm not running hundreds [00:05:30] of transactions every single day. I'm only running, you know, a handful. But that hasn't taken me much time. So at least the ability was there.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. The the point I want to make is there is a subindustry for third party apps like, uh, bookkeep or whatever that, that understand that there is a gap between the inventory management piece in your accounting software and the transactions, the payments that come in, and there's a whole subindustry for that. So like in the backdrop of [00:06:00] this conversation and as Alicia and I are sort of, um, you know, meeting in the middle to figure out, like, which each of our perspectives is. I hope that the new, uh, PayPal tool that that they're beta testing and that is going to come in, um, evolves to that, especially because Intuit purchased, you know, some SaaS integration companies a couple of years ago. They I think it was called one SaaS. And they also purchased a whole e-commerce solution, uh, called Tradegecko. So internally [00:06:30] they should have the knowhow to understand how to bridge these things eBay and Amazon. But sometimes PayPal is used in connector to like this really obscure sort of e-commerce apps. Or people use PayPal as their e-commerce app somehow. And what I think is that, again, we can argue both sides, you know, should your accounting software only deal with the accounting and the register and the debits and the credits and that's it, and not deal with the inventory. But [00:07:00] now that QuickBooks is trying to position themselves as a cloud based inventory solution, and they're trying to phase out QuickBooks enterprise at some point in the next 5 to 10 years and, uh, start, uh, competing with the other big boys, you know, the net suites and the sages and all that stuff. I think this is a really important piece where that QuickBooks needs to figure out, and I think that July 2024, uh, that the, the the webinar we just saw that in the no webinar is the starting [00:07:30] point for this.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Yeah, absolutely. And that's actually a perfect segue into their next announcement, which was the the general release rollout of the new inventory tools that they have been testing these for a while. I think you and I saw them at QuickBooks connect almost a year ago, where they are now, including inventory variants in the inventory connections. So what they're doing is they're making the the inventory [00:08:00] modules more robust. So this is in plus and advanced. And right now it is only in the US. They have to get it right there first before they're going to roll it out internationally. But what they're doing is making a better integration with your sales channels, especially multichannel, because the hazard, for instance, with PayPal, is if you have an e-commerce platform and they have their choice of payment, some of the payments are going to go through the payment gateway for the shopping cart, and some of them might go through PayPal. And I've [00:08:30] actually had some clients where they were pulling them in through the PayPal integration, and it was coming in through their other integration. And so we've had to kind of back that, back that out. So, um, in any case, some of the things that they are changing in the products and services is that you now have variants.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: And what a variant means is, you know, if I'm selling a t shirt, that t shirt comes in small, medium, large, extra large, XXL and triple XL, [00:09:00] and it comes in blue and red and green. Now, each of those is a variant. And traditionally when you think about these variants and you're doing inventory, you would make a matrix where you would have the product and then you would have the sizes across and the colors going down, and then you would say how much quantity you have of how many extra large t shirts do I have in blue, and how many extra large t shirts do I have in red? So it's pretty complicated, but they seem to have [00:09:30] cracked the nut on it and now they're going to. That means that your QuickBooks online is going to be able to be your single source of truth across your e-commerce platforms for inventory, so that your inventory quantities when you're selling them and your shopping carts or on Amazon actually reflects the quantities available.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, the nuts not fully cracked. They made a dent in it. They started. They're starting to pierce it. Um, the the context behind this and the [00:10:00] first misconception that most accounting pros and QuickBooks, uh, desktop people are going to have is a variance is not the same thing as units of measure because it's a really important piece, because units of measure is a really important part of e-commerce and inventory, because, you know, you're an Amazon and you sell single packs, you sell dual packs, you sell 12 packs. And that stuff changes not just the packaging, it changes the pricing. And in some cases, especially when it comes to Amazon, it [00:10:30] changes the skew, like the skew of product, it changes. But in your underlying accounting, you know, you might count in inventory all the individual units regardless of how they package. Because maybe you don't do the package. You don't pre package for inventory purposes. You package the point of sale or the point of shipping. So long story short, not a unit of measure play. This is a, um, a same category [00:11:00] of product, but multiple, uh, sub products. So this is kind of an item sub item type of deal. But the way it is organized is that and this is what you say, they are cracking this nut that you might have the same product in Amazon and Shopify, but Shopify calls it one thing. Amazon calls it another thing.

Hector Garcia: Maybe the Shopify packaging comes with a different instructions manual that the Amazon [00:11:30] packaging has just because of guidelines on, you know, like, I'll give you an example, I have a client that sends an M&M box, M&Ms, like the candy on every single thing that they ship out. Well, Amazon doesn't allow that. You can't throw the the M&M bag in there. Okay. So it's a different different concept. So when they buy directly through Shopify they add this little lighter. But through Amazon you can't because that confuses Amazon Amazon can't do this that sort of thing. So the underlying packaging of the same product can change depending [00:12:00] on which channel you sell through. But when it comes to inventory valuation, it's the same number of units. And most people are not going to have your. The Amazon version of a product and the warehouse version of your product to be different items. So this is where variants come in really handy, where you can have sort of sub versions of the item. And we're going to dedicate a whole episode to like, we're going to click on every single button and kind of break down what's available. Now. What we think, you know, should be available soon, but this is [00:12:30] where they're starting to, uh, really, really get deep into, uh, the needs of the people that are selling mostly through e-commerce. And as Alicia alluded to, multiple sales channels. Sure.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: And all of the variants themselves can have their own skew numbers. They can have different prices, they can have different costs involved because it does not. It's not just the selling, but it has the cost of goods involved in it as well. It can have pictures of the items, [00:13:00] and the idea is that you can actually set up your inventory by importing your products from your sales channels so that you have actual accurate, um, quantities. Um, or you can import by bulk upload. So you can bring them into QuickBooks and then send them out to the channels, or you can import them in from the channels. So it's nice that it's got that bidirectional.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. The one thing the one thing I do want to [00:13:30] kind of give a warning on on this is um, as Alicia mentioned, the idea is that QuickBooks is a source of truth for inventory, etc., etc.. What is not 100% clear to me and I'm going to I am going to make the jump and say it's just not available, that you could make qbo your source of truth. Create an item in Qbo and it update your product catalog at Amazon. I don't think that's available yet because I don't even see the tools to do that. Um, so what I think [00:14:00] is that it you have to load QuickBooks with your entire inventory catalog after you've loaded them in your separate channels so you can map them accordingly. But it's not going to work the other way, where Amazon knows that you don't have certain amount of items in stock that's not available yet, you need those third party tools to do that. So like QuickBooks will tell you if inside your QuickBooks you're low on inventory or you need to replenish or, [00:14:30] you know, you know, the reorder points like QuickBooks will tell you all that, But like it won't notify Amazon that you have six less or a 100 less. Like if you make an inventory adjustment in QuickBooks, it won't let Amazon know that you have more or less items. And that's where third party apps really come into play, where people, you know, spend the big bucks into web agility and and connect books and all these third party apps. Because that piece where QuickBooks is the source of truth for inventory is not [00:15:00] there yet. But this is again, this is the starting point. This is where they want to get to.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Yeah, I mean it. Eventually it will have to do that if it's going to be a standalone robust tool. So I would imagine, you know, I'm kind of surprised to hear you say that it won't update the quantities in those places. But, you know, it remains to be seen because it's still in version one in its rollout, for sure. Um, some of the other things that the tool will do is it will give you notifications when your inventory [00:15:30] is low or out of stock, it will convert to a purchase order for you. Um, it will also do live tracking of your sales orders, your product category catalog, your fulfillment status, and refunds and payouts. So and they did say real time tracking of sales orders for multiple sales channels. But I'm kind of curious about that because Qbo doesn't have sales orders. So are they doing it through estimates? Are they doing [00:16:00] it through invoices? I'll be kind of curious to see, but it looks like they're importing them as invoices so that the cost of goods and the inventory levels are tracked accurately. Yeah.

Hector Garcia: So if I want to add some context to that, and the reason why anyone with any sort of inventory and QuickBooks desktop background would hear the word sales order and go, I'm curious, is this really a sales order is because a sales order has a very specific and particular meaning to people that have been using [00:16:30] QuickBooks desktop and inventory and sales order is an actual transaction that's in your transactions database that separates the quantity on hand versus quantity available, because essentially it reserves that inventory to that sales order for a future sale. What QuickBooks online is doing is if the transaction is downloaded through one of the connected channels, so you can create a sales, you cannot create a manual sales order, but if it's downloaded through one of the connected channels, it [00:17:00] goes into this purgatory mode, sort of like the way bank feeds comes in. Transactions are just there in bank feeds. So it's sort of a bank feeds of future invoices. And if it contains an inventory item that is mapped before you convert it to an invoice, what you're eventually going to see very soon is a report that shows you your inventory on hand and minus whatever is pending on these pending sales in your e-commerce before you convert them [00:17:30] into an invoice. And that conversion to an invoice happens at shipping point, which is going to be a great segue to discuss the shipping stuff that they're adding as well. But that's the really important piece that it's pretty much a non posting transaction. It's almost like a pending invoice, but QuickBooks will recognize it the same way. It recognizes sales orders traditionally, which will retire or remove that inventory from quantity available and let you know that if you're making a manual sale or something like that, that, hey, we got all these items [00:18:00] committed in these, quote sales orders, which are these pending transactions that haven't been posted from the downloaded set of transactions in your e-commerce portion of Qbo? Yeah.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: So depending on the mechanism that they use, they they are tracking fulfillment status so that there is account for how much is is tracked for quantity on sales orders and how much is available to sell. So those fulfillment totals will be there. It'll be curious to see the mechanism that they're using for that. Um, [00:18:30] another other things about it is that the payments will be imported to mark the invoices as paid by the payment gateway, so that you don't have to do that manually. And the way that they're tracking that is that each sales channel has its own clearing account. So every time you add a shopping cart or sales channel, it will have its own clearing account so that you can see the money in and money out from each channel.

Hector Garcia: I want to add just one more thing on that. Um, and this is a discussion I had with the entire team [00:19:00] that was discussing, uh, the vision of this in the Intuit Accountant Council that I was there a couple of years ago, and their first thing was the payments are going to download from Shopify. But if the payment happened through PayPal, we're not going to download that payment. And that's a really important piece, because a lot of people use Shopify, where they allow people to pay through Shopify payments or through PayPal payments. So if you're connecting PayPal and Shopify, you [00:19:30] potentially can bring in duplicate payments, right?

Alicia Katz-Pollock: So that's what I was.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. Yeah. So the first version of this is that we'll bring in all the payments, but we won't bring the, the, the PayPal payments because you have to set up a parallel workflow for that. So I'm curious I haven't seen one that's live. I'm curious if that has changed and or if the new PayPal beta connector that we talked about earlier will take into consideration. There potentially are PayPal payments coming in through Shopify. So [00:20:00] this stuff gets super hairy when when you really like when you when you're implementing this type of stuff. You know, I've dealt with e-commerce in the past, this stuff, there's a lot of attention to detail and it's usually the payments that trip people up, the transactions are easy because those are all your sales. But it's the payments. Because payments don't come 1 to 1, they get consolidated, they get grouped together, they get they get reduced minus a fee. Sometimes they get held back, you know, for whatever reason they're holding funds back. And then there's a there's a current asset that you have to kind of run [00:20:30] through and you know, it. It isn't until you've been selling an Amazon for two years, you know, that you actually get all your funds in real time. That actually it's almost like a credit check. They want to make sure that because your items are high risk of refunds or whatever. So like this stuff gets really, really hairy, especially the payments piece, because reconciling the payments piece with the transactions has always been the most difficult nut to crack.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Yeah, that's what I was saying earlier with my clients who have that, you have to you have to figure out where [00:21:00] the PayPal payments are coming in and where are they coming in, and are they duplicated, and make sure you're excluding and and all of that. So it'll be nice to see all of this evolve. You know, five years from now, maybe they'll have it all completely streamlined, but at least they're putting all the pieces into place now. Another feature is a real time inventory count tool. So right now if you're doing an inventory quantity adjustment, you have to go in and put in the product and say how many you have on hand. But this is going [00:21:30] to be a real time inventory count that you can just open up and make adjustments and then save for later and come back and finish or save and finalize and do all of the adjustments. So they are improving the inventory quantity adjustment tool.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. So I'll add something else to that. Um, so an inventory adjustment, it's an accounting transaction and an inventory count is an operating transaction. And I know this sounds a little bit weird because [00:22:00] is it really different. Well it isn't different because when your operations when your warehouse does an inventory count, you're hoping that immediately it affects the accounting piece. However, most of the warehouse people that have ever met, number one, they don't have access to like QuickBooks generally like they won't have access to like, the books or the banks or anything like that. They're more warehouse people type. Right. And and second, um, you don't count all your inventory [00:22:30] all at once. The bigger the company, the harder it is to get that. Unless you do like the annual shutdown, count everything for two days, that sort of thing. So what ends up happening is a lot of these companies create what's called a cycle count. And a cycle count is like, you know what? Let's say you sell computers and accessories and stuff. You say on Mondays we're going to count printers and ink, and on Tuesday we're going to count screens and laptops, and on Wednesdays we're going to count CPUs, and on Thursdays we're going to do mouse and keyboards, and on Fridays we're going [00:23:00] to do everything else right.

Hector Garcia: And then basically they physically set up the warehouse in such a way, you know, whether it's with the racks or the bins or whatever, to create an environment where it's easy to cyclically get into the rhythm of counting a particular section of the warehouse or a particular type of product. And that's what the inventory count is trying to do. Like when they say real time inventory count, really what they're really saying is we're creating a system in place. So you get into the [00:23:30] habit of not counting inventory once a year, getting into a habit, doing it maybe once a week or once every two weeks or whatever. So with the inventory counts, you can save a particular group of products to be counted, and you can pull up that inventory count, do the count, and then after that count is done, convert that into an actual inventory adjustment. So the inventory count is like a worksheet, uh, prior like an estimate of prior to actually posting. So that's why I call an inventory count and operating transaction [00:24:00] versus the inventory adjustment, which we'll go hand in hand when the inventory count is finished as an accounting transaction. Um.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Well, that's really interesting about the cycle counts. I've always heard that term and not actually known what it was. And I do see in this inventory count screenshot that they do have show products that you can pick by category. So you will be able to pull up monitors and be able to just do your cycle counts on your monitors. So that's pretty cool. The [00:24:30] last of the innovations with inventory and e-commerce is that they have finally launched the Etsy Integrator. I have been waiting for this. Etsy is incredibly complicated because they have listing fees and accounting fees and advertising fees and some and other fees that I still to this day don't know exactly what they were. And so if you are already using your commerce in your QuickBooks online, there's a special workflow to turn it into [00:25:00] an inventory connection for Etsy, so I'm very happy to hear about the about the Etsy connection.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. So so let's just recount it's Amazon, Shopify, eBay and Etsy. So there's internal integrators that will work with the new inventory features and the variants and the multiple SKUs. All that stuff works with those four, and they obviously they're working on adding more things.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Right. And keep in mind [00:25:30] that the Commerce module is still different from the inventory module, that you can be using the Commerce modules to track your sales, even if you're not tracking inventory in QuickBooks online. So Simple Start gives you the ability to have the commerce insight into one channel. Uh, essentials I think is I don't have it in front of me. But as you go up the SKUs, you get more channels, more channels. Correct.

Hector Garcia: And so advance is unlimited, of course, but there's only four, there's only there's only four, [00:26:00] but advance is unlimited.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: So so I'm going to assume it's one for simple start, two for essentials, three for plus and four for advanced. But don't quote me on that. But you know, logically that makes sense.

Hector Garcia: But then I'll look.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: It up and we'll correct it. Cool. And then the inventory piece only comes into play when you're using plus and advanced. So but what the commerce integration does is just if you haven't played with it yet is you can actually see which products are selling and get sales insights right from your QuickBooks. Even [00:26:30] though those sales are not going into QuickBooks, it allows you to see your your volume and your sales products.

Hector Garcia: Here's the here's the the correction. So simple start gives you one channel. Essentials gives you three channels. And plus an advance gives you all the channels. Channels means which means all four.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Right. All right. It'll be nice to see BigCommerce and some of the other ones later on. Okay. You want to shift gears? You ready? All right.

Hector Garcia: Let's do [00:27:00] it.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Let's do it. The the next one that they talked about was organizational charts. And so this is part of the new human resources tools that are being rolled out into Qbo payroll. This tool is only available with an active Qbo payroll subscription. So if you are using third party payroll, it's not available to you. But what the organizational chart does is it allows you to assign each of your employees a manager, and then it gives you a graphical representation [00:27:30] of who is nested under who. And then that way it creates a management structure. And if somebody is a manager, you can expand it out and see all of the people underneath them. Uh, which I love, because even in my flat organization, there's still like, who's supposed to report to who? And it was nice, actually. I was playing with this yesterday, being able to say, well, these employees, Jeff and Peyton are going to report to Jamie, but zip is going to report [00:28:00] to me and be able to have everybody see that. And the super cool part is that you can see it in the workforce app, so your employees can log into their app where they can, you know, self-serve all of their address and information data, and they can see their pay stubs and track their time. Now they can also see the organizational chart, which can include email addresses and phone numbers and contact information, and even a picture of the employees.

Hector Garcia: So I [00:28:30] just want to have my initial reaction to this is as an accountant, uh, there's absolutely nothing that affects accounting. Okay. So, like, it's it's just a graphical view of all my employees and who they report to, etc., etc., etc.. At some point, what I'm hoping is that in a single place, I not just organize, uh, my organization, not just my organizational chart, is that this direct reports also become [00:29:00] the way we set up. For example, who can run payroll? Who can view their payroll, uh, who can approve, you know, transactions made from employees under them? So what I hope this gets to is that at some point in time, you'll go to one place to create your organizational chart, and at the same time, this stuff matches to all your user permissions, your transaction workflows. Like that's going to be amazing because then it affects my accounting. But for now, where [00:29:30] I see a value, where I see the biggest valuable piece for me is that employee retention is super important. And a lot of the reasons why people leave small business is the feeling that they're in a small business, right? Like, you know, there's a dead end, you know, the the owner is the manager and the CEO and the CFO. So like, I can never replace the owner.

Hector Garcia: So it's the feeling that I'm not working for a big organization. And I think that some of these businesses are growing pretty fast, you know, when they still run their paychecks [00:30:00] in this very like every Wednesday, they physically give somebody their paycheck or whatever, uh, versus people logging into a portal. And in that portal, you know, being able to see who their boss is, who their boss's boss is, who's their direct report in that portal be able to request vacations. In that portal, be able to look at their pay stubs or, you know, automatically create, um, you know, change the W-4 or whatever. So in the long term, this is going to give a lot of small businesses [00:30:30] and mid-market sized businesses the illusion and the impression to their employees that they're working for this huge corporation. And all they're doing is using QuickBooks, payroll, Online Elite or whatever it is. So like, all they're doing is paying a little bit more for payroll and creating this entire feeling of this large organization, uh, database that most employees are used to when they work for big companies. So that piece I love, even though the accounting piece doesn't feel very useful for [00:31:00] it, but I really like that piece. I at least I don't know what your thoughts are on that.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Well, I like your idea of tying this into the user permissions and being able to click on a person and saying what they can and can't do in QuickBooks. So, you know, maybe, maybe they're going in that direction, maybe not. But I think it's a cool idea. Um, I did want to follow up. There's a couple limitations I did want to let people know about. Um, one is that if you have an employee who's cross-departmental and they have more than one manager and more than one task or project, they [00:31:30] can only be listed at one. So you'll have to pick which is their their main designation. And the other one is right now there is no ability to print or export it. All you can do is take a screenshot of it.

Hector Garcia: And I'll make the assumption that there's no vertical. I mean, uh, no dotted lines either. Like everything is hierarchical, right? So the boss, the sub boss and the sub boss. And so like there isn't like, okay, this person is a dotted line to this person. Like the, the real corporate things that you get to see where [00:32:00] you have two people that have a relationship, but they're not, not necessarily under one or the other. So I'm thinking it doesn't have that yet either.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Right? I mean, I think you just kind of have to look at the parallels, like it'll have a line for the subs so that you can visually see them, but you're not going to be able to say, okay, that person over there relates to this person over here. No, not going to have that ability. All right. Ah, the third announcement that they made and I didn't even see this coming. So I was [00:32:30] blind, happily, happily blindsided is that they are now integrating ship engine inside the new invoice experience so that you can buy shipping and print shipping labels right from inside an invoice. I'm stoked personally that, you know, if somebody orders one of my books directly from us, you know, Jeff has had to go put in the order in one place and then go into Stamps.com and print the labels. And I [00:33:00] love the fact that we're going to be able to just make an invoice. And then in the drawer on the right hand side, there's the option for, um, what's it called?

Hector Garcia: The ship engine.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Um, Hector, have you seen this in action?

Hector Garcia: Yes. So I don't have it in an actual live client, but I saw some of the screenshots, and I've actually seen the screenshots prior to this being released and just in the ideation process and a couple of things. So number one, by enabling [00:33:30] shipping labels you're also going to be able to track packaging dimensions. And this is probably the single most important piece of this whole thing where your where your items are going to have, you know, height times, width times, you know, length or whatever. So you're going to be able to put that in inches and also you'll be able to put weight. And the purpose of this and again I haven't seen it live. So I don't know, you know if if it calculates correctly. But the purpose of this is that USPS and other insurance carriers [00:34:00] right now it's only going to work with USPS, but they have guidelines in terms of shipping pricing and brackets. So if you have a box that's bigger than a certain size, then it goes to the next tier. And if it's, uh, heavier than a certain weight, it goes to the next tier and so forth. The process of pricing labels right now, as Alicia alluded to, we go to Stamps.com, we enter all this stuff manually. It calculates it. We choose, you know, the priority level, print [00:34:30] the label.

Hector Garcia: That's a lot of work. So what they're trying to do here and they're using uh, Ship Engine, which is an API integrator. It's a, it's a company that only does shipping integration between systems. Right. So they're using ship engine to get the data from QuickBooks invoices. So you're going to have an invoice with 2 or 3 products in it. Each individual product is going to have dimensions and a weight. Um, and then it's going to automatically add those, add those up and figure out [00:35:00] what kind of packaging it fits in and the price. And on top of that, uh, I assume they, they made some sort of deal with USPS. I don't know if it was through ship, engine or USPS directly where they're going to have the lowest tier pricing. So as if, you know, because they're consolidating, basically, they're consolidating all of their potential QuickBooks customers into one big account. Right? So you're going to have one big USPS account, which is like QuickBooks Live USPS account with the best possible rates, and they're going to translate [00:35:30] those rates through the end user. So what end users pay for commercial shipping to ship their products out. They're going to get the same rate that the big boys do. So now small businesses can compare I mean can compete pricing wise on the shipping costs.

Hector Garcia: So that's that's the first version of this, which is an automation to go from invoice dimensions, weight into, uh, shipping label, and from within a single workflow you're going to be able to print your shipping [00:36:00] label. So that's my understanding of how is it going to work. I guess I haven't seen it live yet, but from the screenshots and all the discussions I've had, that is ultimately the goal. Now the the part that wasn't discussed yet is how does tracking work? Like will the invoice have a tracking number if If somebody opens the invoice through the, you know, the natural way that you email invoices to people, will they have a link to the tracking? Like will it be like a two way directional link? I don't know yet, but that is [00:36:30] going to be super cool if the users can track their own shipping. Because most e-commerce companies, their biggest issue, like just one of the biggest time sucks, is people asking, where's my package? Where's my package, where's my package? And then having to manually go in there, find the tracking and emailing it to people. So giving the customers self-serving for shipping status. To me, that's the ultimate goal. And that's going to be super cool when we actually see that working live.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Yeah, there's a [00:37:00] lot more detail about it too, that I can I can add in. So they talked about USPS and giving you discounts. They even said like up to 89% it right now it only works with USPS natively. But if you have a shipping account with Fedex for example, you can actually connect it as well. And so you can add your own carriers. And if you have your own discounts, those also will apply. It will. It's available from simple start all the way up through advanced The [00:37:30] way that you turn it on is by going into your settings and turning on shipping settings. And then once your shipping settings are on and you're using the new invoices, then you'll have the ability to use it. So which means you'll be able to get there. Also, through the plus new button is going to have an option to get to the shipping as well as through the invoice and from the commerce tools as well. It is only US based for US domestic packages. It the ship from address [00:38:00] is the company address that you have set up in your settings. Um, so you can't ship internationally yet. So it's got that limitation.

Hector Garcia: And you can't do drop shipments either. So like it's designed for people that that ship from their headquarters. Not necessarily, uh, drop shipping from other vendors.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Exactly, exactly. One thing that I don't know if everybody knows, but some of the carriers that have guarantees like Fedex, if their package delivery is even one minute [00:38:30] after when they said it was going to be arrive, it was going to going to arrive, you're actually entitled to a full refund on it. You just have to take the time to check the tracking and then apply for the refund. And there's a website from let me see if it's still in existence, but it was called share a refund.com that I have been turning on my um, yeah, it's still it still exists, so share a refund. Dot com has the ability to actually track for you [00:39:00] and if the package is late they'll put in for all the payments and then you get half back. They'll keep half for doing the service and you'll get half back. So that's like magic money, because you probably haven't been tracking and getting refunds on your shipping. So hey, even if it's half of it, it's still better than none.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. And I assume you're mentioning this because, um, QuickBooks is only doing USPS now, and you're making a point that some vendors, you know, will prefer to use Fedex because of those benefits. [00:39:30] So so into it, you know, make sure that we, uh, that you do negotiate, you know, the rates with Fedex and stuff like that. Um, that way we can take advantage of, you know, this, you know, big boy shipping company deals to small businesses across all the carriers. But like Alicia said, the USPS deal is if you use their sort of built in shared USB account that QuickBooks owns. But if you have your own USB account, your own Fedex account, your own UPS account, [00:40:00] because the ship engine connects to all of them, you just enter that information and then your pricing, your negotiated pricing will apply. So these up to 89% discount versus, you know, retail stamps.com type of pricing with USPS is if you create a sort of a sub account under the master QuickBooks USPS account.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Yeah. So I personally am really excited about this new feature because it definitely streamlines my entire workflow. I don't have to go out to Stamps.com [00:40:30] or go out to Fedex and manage all my packaging, all the tracking. It's all right there and it's brought to you by the new invoice experience. So, you know, if you're looking for reasons to like it, this is a good one.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. One I'm gonna make a prediction about this is there will not be a lot of training and materials that are useful for people, because these are the situations where you kind of have to have an actual e-commerce [00:41:00] sale coming in through the e-commerce channels, and you have to have an actual shipping account that you have to pay actual fees to print labels. So unless Intuit somehow is thinking that in order to get actual traction on this, that they'll add all this stuff to the sample file and print fake labels and all that stuff, unless they really think through how important it is for an e-com a real e-commerce business, to stop [00:41:30] doing whatever they do now, to try to implement this and not get bit in the butt by the previous history of trying to implement anything in Qbo. For a serious business, you have to have a full suite of testing environments for people to kind of go through the motions to see how this works prior from somebody switching their current workflow. So my prediction is that even if everybody from into even if the CEO listens to this and goes, I love that idea, let's do it, that it will probably be years [00:42:00] until we actually see a real demo of how this stuff works. Unless someone literally implements it and does it with a live file and kind of shows everybody how this works. And maybe, Alicia, maybe that's your role. Maybe, yeah. You volunteer.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: I volunteer.

Hector Garcia: There we go. Because you got your books and you're going to sell and you're going to ship through here. So. So, Alicia, that was that was a backwards way of me volunteering you to do this for for the community.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Oh, I'm happy to do this as one of my. Look what I found. And it is kind of involved. You have [00:42:30] to create a ship engine account, but you do it inside QuickBooks online, and then you do have to pre-fund it. So they have the ship engine account has its own wallet, and then you spend down your shipping money. So it is it's not print on demand. It's not labels on demand like you would at Stamps.com. You have to actually allocate some money to it. So I just wanted people to make sure that that that was on their radar too.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. And so that I think that does it for [00:43:00] the um, for the firm of the future article slash the in the no webinar. There's one look what we found type of thing that we can discuss Alicia which is that invoices now have the option for you to create what's called a not not a recurring transaction, but a subscription transaction.Oh, the invoice subscriptions.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Yeah.

Hector Garcia: Invoice subscriptions. So let's we might speculate on this a little bit because I like some files have it, some files don't have it. But [00:43:30] someone recently in our Facebook groups put a picture on this of the new subscriptions button. And essentially what allows you to do is allows you to create an invoice, mark it as a subscription invoice. Not the same thing as a recurring invoice. Although it's technically a recurring invoice, it's actually technically a recurring sales receipt. Different different layer of conversation here. But you create the invoice, you mark it as a subscription invoice. The invoice goes into purgatory [00:44:00] like some pending thing. Then your client gets an email saying, by the way, your vendor, your you know, the person that invoiced you is trying to create a subscription invoice. And then once that customer accepts it. And I haven't seen the workflow, but I assume it comes in through email, they log in, they accept it, and they put a payment information. Quickbooks will automatically create an invoice and a payment monthly until you cancel the subscription. So that's [00:44:30] really cool. Obviously super incomplete because that's all it is. And when subscriptions are a bit more complicated than that. But the vision of this is super neat, um, because prior to this and this came out maybe five years ago or six years ago and probably is one of those things that Alicia and I discussed, that it was like the one thing that made Alicia super excited about Qbo versus desktop, which is you can create a sales receipt in QuickBooks, enter the credit card information, make it recurring, and essentially create a quasi [00:45:00] subscription process inside your qbo.

Hector Garcia: And all you have to do is stop the subscription. Um, stop the subscription. I'm sorry. Stop the recurring transaction from it happening. But you could you could have this recurring revenue workflow inside Qbo without having to go to third party apps. And that was huge. And that's still huge. It still works like that. But this is really cool because this insert, this inserts a really interesting workflow, which is it makes the customer accept. So when you make the customer accept, [00:45:30] that's kind of also replacing all other tools that are out there that that are for the process of like contract accepting and subscription accepting. So this is like for for smaller businesses that want to implement a really quick and dirty. I want to charge you monthly just, you know, by you putting a credit card number. Basically it's the acceptance process. Um, I think that's great. Alicia, have you tested this or what's your thoughts?

Alicia Katz-Pollock: I've seen it. I haven't had a chance to test it out since I was on vacation. Right now, the way it looks, though, to me, is [00:46:00] it just seems like two transactions with an invoice and a payment instead of one transaction with a sales receipt. What will get me really excited is if I can do a $1,200 invoice with 12 individual $100 payments on it that fire automatically, that will make me happy.

Hector Garcia: And well, isn't that what the what? The recognized revenue recognition process is? Because this is the thing.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Revenue recognition would be if it's one lump sum that's paid up front, recognizing [00:46:30] it in in individual chunks.

Hector Garcia: Oh, okay. So it's the opposite.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: This would be having one invoice for the full year and then making 12 automatic payments against it. That's the missing piece for me. If this is the first phase of that, get this part right first, then I will be happy. Puppy.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. My general thought about this is I don't want revenue recognition to be its own thing. And, uh, recurring sales receipts [00:47:00] to be their own thing and subscription invoices to be their own thing because it's too many different workflows that you have to learn and understand. I wish what they did was to create sort of a single feature that gives you access to all these tools to go, what do you want to do? Okay, I want to invoice this client monthly. Perfect. What do you want to do? I want to invoice this client once a year but recognize it monthly. What do you want to do? This. This client contracted 12 months.

Hector Garcia: Worth of.

Hector Garcia: Services. [00:47:30] But we're going to charge them only once a month. But I want you to stop the charging in 12 months because that's the end of the contract. So I wish there was like, they'll take all these disparate, you know, separate tools that they have and create a single tool that can do all that, because I think it'll create some confusion, like there will be some genuine confusion in terms of, wait, what subscription, what revenue recognition. Like even even I got confused. And you said, Hector, look at it from these two perspectives, you know, so obviously, if power users are confused [00:48:00] about the fact that there's multiple tools, I think the end users are going to be even more confused.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Well, I'm just happy right now that they're rolling out all these options, because this is all just within the last few months, and bringing them together under one roof definitely makes sense. This is yet another feather in the cap for the invoice drawer on the right hand side, because that's what's allowing all of these innovations to happen. And so maybe they can consolidate all of these three features into one one, that one invoice draw. [00:48:30] That would be fantastic, right?

Hector Garcia: Just call it revenue management. Revenue management. It's it's both the cash flow portion and the recognition portion. Yeah. The challenge with that is that I think revenue recognition is advance only. And this, this um subscription invoices is probably going to be all the way to simple start because they actually make money on the on the merchant transactions on that and not necessarily make money on the revenue recognition piece. So that's where I am not that hopeful that all these tools will be [00:49:00] available on the one roof across all the SKUs. So unfortunately, I can hope and I can wish and I can dream, but it's probably going to be separate tools.

Hector Garcia: Yeah. Well, we.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: We can plant the seeds, you know, but they make sense as separate tools because they're completely different workflows and completely different sections of qbo. So hey, wish list.

Hector Garcia: Yeah, totally. 100%. So with that being said, Alicia, what's going on in your world?

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Well, my, uh, converting QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks online book is [00:49:30] out and published. The Kindle version should also be available by the time listeners hear this. Um, the book is only $10. I just wanted to make it available to everybody. And so it's available on Amazon if you search for my name, Alicia Katz Pollak.

Hector Garcia: Is it both.Printed and e-book or is it on the.E-book?

Alicia Katz-Pollock: It's, um, right now it's just paperback, and the e-book is about to be released as soon as I have some time to fix the table of contents.

Hector Garcia: Amazing. Awesome. [00:50:00]

Alicia Katz-Pollock: Yeah. And how about you, Hector? What's going on with you?

Hector Garcia: Well, we're recording this late July, so I'm getting excited for two things that are upcoming. One is we're going to Chicago to the BTG conference. Bridging the Gap conference. Alicia and I will be there. Maybe we'll have some chance to record something over there that. That would be fun. We'll see if we can take some equipment. So that's, uh. I believe it's July 22nd to the 24th in Rosemont, Illinois, which is right next to the O'Hare Airport in Greater Chicago. [00:50:30] And then I have a mini mini conference in Dallas, Texas, at the ADP office in the downtown Dallas area. It's called the Meta Consulting Academy, and we're, uh, teaching people how to start doing actual consulting and some of the consulting concepts and how to, you know, transition to advisory and all that stuff. It's a two day workshop, and you can check that out at reframe 2020 4.com. It's under our reframe brand. And of course, um, in [00:51:00] October, you know, still doing the prep work for the big, uh, you know, 200 person conference in Hollywood, Florida, the Fort Lauderdale area, uh, with the actual annual Reframe 2024 conference, uh, called Influential Conversations for accountants. And again, that's reframe 2024. If you want to go to any of those two events.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: All right. Excellent. I'm looking forward to them myself.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: All right. So with that being said.

Hector Garcia: With that being said, thank you very much. And we'll see you in the next one.

Alicia Katz-Pollock: See [00:51:30] you in the next one.