Intuit News October '23

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 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 podcast, [00:00:30] we're going to start talking about some Intuit news and some of our opinion or some of the developments that are happening in QuickBooks and the Intuit ecosystem during the month of October. So this is being recorded towards the end of the month of October, and we're going to let you know what are the things that we have been observing and reading about, learning about that have been coming out this month. So, Alicia, let's get started. You got the first piece of news to share.

Alicia: Sure. One of the things that I'm actually really excited about is Intuit is doing a food truck [00:01:00] program for high schools in California and in Texas and a few places around the country. And so this is a brand new initiative where they're actually giving the school districts food trucks and wrapping them with the kind of food that the kids want to sell. And they're using their design for delight education program to help the kids actually design the wrap and come up with their menus. And then we're actually going to work with a team of proadvisors to help train the teachers and [00:01:30] train the students on how to use Qbo in the field on their iPads with QuickBooks payments to take the payments for the food.

Hector: And you said these are high school students.

Alicia: Yeah. They have I think it's five trucks that they're rolling out to start with that are going to get shared across the different school districts. And so, you know, it remains to be seen how long each truck stays at each school. But they're teaching the kids design. Economics and cooking. [00:02:00]

Hector: And is with tangible stuff because everybody relates to food and food trucks and restaurants. And what's interesting about, I would say, the food industry in general. And from an accountant's perspective, you look at almost any other industry out there, and it's actually fairly simple compared to, you know, dealing with, with, with food in general, because you have so many components in the food industry. You have, you know, you actually have inventory and you have to make the decision on whether or not you track that inventory. You have cost of goods sold some [00:02:30] of it, some of it based on stuff that you sell, some of it based on spoilage. You have tons of like purchasing, planning and forecasting because, you know, the weekends are going to be busier than than the weekdays. You have to pay employees, you have to do promotions. Sometimes you have to do coupons two for one, stuff like that. So there's also tons of potential exercises you can do on gross margin planning. There are products that are meant to be low margin, and there are products are meant to be high margin, [00:03:00] like drinks and fries and stuff like that. And you also have to play with the pricing in such a way that you can get people in, but then have the right product mix to have great overall profitability. So I think that's just a great industry to get get the kids connected into the, the, the accounting world and the business world in general.

Alicia: Yeah, I live in Portland, Oregon, and here food trucks are a way of life. I don't know if we were the first food trucks in the country, but we have embraced it where we [00:03:30] have entire food truck pods, where people, you know, a whole family will go for dinner and everybody can go get exactly what they want to eat. And I really love this as an educational program. I mean, I have a master's in teaching, and my original plan was to create alternative education. That's real skills life, real life skills based. And I'm really excited about this, especially since they put the whole project in the kids hands. The kids start by deciding what kind of food and what their menu items are going to be, [00:04:00] and what their truck name is, and then they design the wrap and then into it goes and wraps the truck for them. And then once you get into the purchasing and the the cooking and the management and then, you know, bank feeds and reconciling. I'm really excited for the students who get to participate in this.

Hector: Awesome. I love that you're involved in the project as well, because I'm sure you're going to you're going to do a great job at showing them how to use QuickBooks and all that stuff. There's another piece of news that you were telling me about because you use QuickBooks time quite [00:04:30] a bit. What's going on with QuickBooks time?

Alicia: Yeah, I got an email back in October that on November 15th they're changing the QuickBooks Time Pro program. Now, I have to actually preface this by what is Lisa talking about here? Back when QuickBooks time was t sheets whole separate app from a whole separate company, they had their own partner program that had its own affiliate program. And so when you signed up your clients for QuickBooks time, you got a revenue share. And so that went on for years. But now [00:05:00] that QuickBooks, now that T sheets is part of QuickBooks time, and now that they're moving the interface for QuickBooks time right into Kboa, they've had to do away with that revenue share program. So if any of you are completely old school and you actually did sign up for clients, sign up your clients with t sheets. They are going to pay you out for any residuals through December. And then they're changing the QuickBooks time sign ups to be part of the revenue share program, [00:05:30] which is still relatively new in and of itself, where when you go up to your gear and go to your subscriptions and billing, you can sign up clients where they're paying for their own software, but you get a 30% revenue share. And so they are going to move QuickBooks time into that program.

Hector: Yeah. So so to be clear, the customer pays full price. Maybe they get the the three month 50% discount on Qvo and then the ProAdvisor gets 30%. That's the ProAdvisor revenue [00:06:00] sharing program. What they're saying here is that if you also sell QuickBooks time in the process, you can include it. The big question would be what if you sell QuickBooks time by itself and not as an attachment to QuickBooks online? I guess that's yet to be seen on whether or not the standalone product will be there, or if they're going to add just a standalone QuickBooks Payroll Plus QuickBooks time as a standalone Commissionable product. So I guess we'll be waiting for that. There's no no [00:06:30] documentation on whether or not that's the direction that they're going with.

Alicia: Well, I think you nailed it with what the use case is, is when QuickBooks time is standalone. Because if you're running QuickBooks payroll, QuickBooks time is part of the Premium and Elite. But there's times when you're running when you're running payroll from different providers, but you can still use QuickBooks time. So now this allows you to get a little bit of a residual for making those recommendations.

Hector: So you got that in an email announcement. And [00:07:00] I got an interesting email announcement that a client of mine forwarded to me. And it says urgent notice. Your care plan for QuickBooks desktop is being discontinued. And then a bunch of stuff, and then it says, call this number to discuss other care plan options such as QuickBooks online and then the phone number. What in the world is this email? My customer called me and goes, Hector, what is my care plan for QuickBooks desktop being discontinued? What the hell? What the heck [00:07:30] does that mean? And also because there's so much talk about replacing QuickBooks desktop, you know, my customer initially thought that their QuickBooks desktop account was being canceled or discontinued, so that caused some confusion. What is the QuickBooks Desktop Care plan? Alicia, are you familiar with that?

Alicia: I was going to put that question to you. I mean, what I would make up about it is that there was a support package that you could purchase as an add on to your QuickBooks subscription, but I have never [00:08:00] dealt with those. Have you?

Hector: So what I know is that when you bought QuickBooks desktop in the past, this is prior to subscription you bought. You buy it from Office Depot or Amazon or whatever. You bought the box. You only got 90 days of support. Now, what's interesting is that if you have problems installing it a year later or two years later, they would still support it because the support period was supposed to be sunsetted three years in the X amount of months. You know, by May of the third year after you bought that year edition. So [00:08:30] QuickBooks desktop was always, quote, supported for about three years after you bought it. This is back in the pre subscription days. And when they switched over to two plus with the QuickBooks Desktop Plus where it was an annual subscription, this is prior for everybody having to move to two plus one plus was an option. The big thing about plus was hey, updates and upgrades are included every year and support is included. Premium support is included. So what I'm [00:09:00] thinking the care plan was support plans that were sold to people that were still on a non subscription version of desktop, which was 2021 or 2022, I believe was the last version year that you that you can do that with. And they basically facing those out as well. That's the only thing I could I could infer from this.

Alicia: Well, I think that actually makes perfect sense because now that it's subscription based, you don't need a care plan because you are constantly paying for those services built into the subscription. [00:09:30] So in that case, it makes absolutely complete sense to me that they would discontinue a care plan because on the more current versions, it's not needed. Which is why they got that urgent notice, because now there's going to be a little bit of incentive for people who are pre 2021 to upgrade to 2021 or 2023 now and.

Hector: 2024 actually.

Alicia: 2024. There you go. Yeah. And and also a great marketing opportunity [00:10:00] for them to say, hey you could go to QuickBooks online. So I think they're taking advantage of the change in structure to push it as marketing.

Hector: Well, I'm going to I'm going to go out on my limb and say that if you call the 800 number and you tell them, hey, I got my email about the the care plan, the first thing they're going to tell you is you should switch to Qbo. I don't think they're going to say, by the way, if you subscribe to the new version of QuickBooks desktop 2024, which has all these new features, whatever, [00:10:30] you will have the care plan built in because it's a subscription, even though there should be an incentive for you to move somebody from a non subscription to a subscription, but keeping them in desktop, I assume that the first sort of line of attack here is going to be, hey, you should switch to Qbo because care is included. But what what also make the the part that makes it this is getting really muddy I think in my opinion is and we had an earlier episode where we talked about the $50 extra a month that people can pay that they're testing out to get this more [00:11:00] premium support is support for for QuickBooks in general is a very hard thing. That's why there's an entire ecosystem of Proadvisors providing support. This is what most of us do for a living is support people on their own QuickBooks.

Hector: And yes, some of them will do bookkeeping and kind of close the gap on reconciling and closing the books. But for the most part, we're supporting the anxiety and the issues that the end users are having because they're clicking on things and things are not working their way. In [00:11:30] the world of, like, QuickBooks support, there's a fine line between a problem with the software and a problem with the user not understanding how to use the software, and then take it one step further. A problem with the user not understanding accounting fundamentals required to know how to book a transaction, which causes them to think that there's a problem with the software and there's no problem with the software. So that that in itself is so complex, very difficult to explain and very difficult to market. So. How do you bridge the gap between whatever the [00:12:00] care planning QuickBooks desktop was, which I don't know if it was, you know, what type of support it was, again, because it's very muddy. What is the 90 day support include? What did the three year sunset include? What what is this care plan include and then how this all stuff translates to the stuff they're doing in QuickBooks online. So like my suggestion for Intuit is to have a clear landing page that says, hey, this is what support includes.

Hector: This is what it doesn't include. This is where you would need premium support or whatever they're calling their expert [00:12:30] support, expert bookkeeper support or whatever. This is what QuickBooks Live does. And this is where you would need an accountant, a third party. Proadvisor I think they have not done a really good job at communicating what support means. From their perspective. The part of the customer needs to put like what's their responsibility? The customers need to educate themselves as well, and when they need a third party professional, none of this stuff has been really well explained, and this is why it becomes confusing for every client calling into it for support. And then they come back and say, [00:13:00] oh, Intuit support is the worst and look. And granted, in some cases it is the worst. But in other cases it's actually great. It's just the user doesn't know what they don't even know how to ask the question correctly. So like Intuit needs to be get much better at communications because again, even this client of mine got this email email urgent notice and they thought that their QuickBooks was going away. So, so like like I don't know, maybe I'm just ranting off, but Alicia is there is there a solution for for this whole mess?

Alicia: Well, what [00:13:30] you said actually just made me think about something in a whole different way that I've never thought about it before, but how many? In a way, us pro advisors are doing both software support as well as financial advisory. And how many other software packages are there out there that have a whole universe of literally thousands of professionals building their careers around supporting the software, not just doing the bookkeeping, but providing [00:14:00] that training and help and all the things that it needs. Because you are absolutely right that when people complain about about Intuit support, I actually get really good support when I call. I mean, yeah, I've got the elite level, you know, when you pass your advanced certification and if you're looking for a reason to pass your advanced certification, the higher level support you get is great. But when people are complaining about how it doesn't, how it's not working, most of that is user error because we have [00:14:30] this bridge between business owners not understanding the business and the bookkeeping, and then having to use software at the same time.

Hector: You know, I'm going to say something that just needs to be said. And you're absolutely right, Alicia. There's an entire ecosystem of people that build careers around helping people support with QuickBooks. And you can always argue. You can argue both ways. Quickbooks could argue you have a career because of a great software. And then we can say you have customers [00:15:00] because of how great we are supporting your software. So yeah, you can put it. You could make an argument on either side. You could be the devil's advocate on either side. But the big challenge that I have now, just with Intuit in general, is for a very long time for for the entire 15 years that I've been, you know, close knit working with Intuit and QuickBooks and all this stuff, it's felt like QuickBooks wants us to succeed. They want ProAdvisor. They want they want a vibrant community of proadvisors. [00:15:30] They want us to know the software better than they do so we can deploy it to our clients. They want us to get clients of Xero or of a spreadsheet of competing solutions, and put them into QuickBooks. They want us to move our QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks online. I mean, they want a lot from us, and we get a lot from them because we get free education. We get the ProAdvisor certification for for free at the desktop stuff, even even though you have to pay for it, it's a great deal. We get QuickBooks connect, which is, yeah, you [00:16:00] pay a thousand bucks to go.

Alicia: There and pay for it. We used to get it as a benefit.

Hector: Yeah, but but in either case, the conference is incredibly subsidized. You get tons of value for what you pay for. So Intuit does give us a lot. It gives us a lot. I mean, accountants should not be complaining, complaining regardless of the specific examples they can give. They should not be complaining about Intuit's involving on helping accountants get better using their software. However, with QuickBooks Live with this enhanced support, with [00:16:30] this cracking down on people using the word expert and QuickBooks at the same time with all this is starting to feel that the industry of supporting QuickBooks is something that Intuit wants to control 100%, not the industry of accounting. It'll be impossible for QuickBooks to also or for Intuit to control accounting, although, you know, with TurboTax verified professionals and with, you know, bringing more proadvisors on board in the QuickBooks Live program, it [00:17:00] feels, you know, there's a little bit of a uberization of the industry, but but for the most part, there won't be able to reach what a true like on the field accountant can do for their customers personal relationships. You know, the locality. There's many things that Inter will never be able to to do compared to us. But it does feel that at least the first point of contact that somebody should have when they have an issue with QuickBooks should be one 800 QuickBooks and one 800 QuickBooks figures out how to help them, whether it's whether you know [00:17:30] free support with their premium paid support with QuickBooks Live and eventually with Uberized. You know, bring a third party ProAdvisor into their support system. I think that's where they're heading. I don't particularly like that, but that just seems to be the reality.

Alicia: Yeah, I mean, they spend probably ten years really buffing up the ProAdvisor program, knowing that we were their main marketing channel. We would bring in the business clients, we would hook them up with their software, and then boom, they had the finances. Then they realized that if they [00:18:00] actually own that process, they can make even more revenue off of it. So I think a lot of this is really coming from the bottom line. But when I look at what's happening, when I read posts on social media, that and the constant price changes, like I think they jumped the shark a little bit with their recent price changes and people are now looking at alternatives, and I think they need to kind of go take a step back at what really was working, what built the company was the ProAdvisor enthusiasm, [00:18:30] and they really need to kind of pay attention to us again. And some of it was swag and conferences and treating us well. Some of it was support, some of it was training, but they seem to have stepped away from us as their primary. And I think in the long run that's going to shoot them in the foot.

Hector: Totally, especially with the support for the desktop Pro advisors. Like they're putting tons of money on Qvo support. But, [00:19:00] you know, the desktop support, people that were supporting pro advisors, there's less and less in the company and they're getting less and less training. So like the people still using desktop that have issues still have to jump through a lot of hoops to find the few remnant, you know, at Intuit that have any experience and the context of like dealing with desktop. And I get it, you know, supporting desktop is a nightmare. And if I was into it, I would want to I would want to pass that page where they no longer have to deal with desktop, period. But it's just too difficult. There's still a lot of people using and [00:19:30] loving desktop, and they've been too slow at upgrading QuickBooks online to have more features. Like, they've been really fast at adding random things that nobody's asked for and changing. The pages, changes to the pages and changes to the to the HTML code and stuff that we've suffered over at right tool quite a bit. Having to recode and recode all the all the features because they change. They change so many things in and they add new things and things that like people are not expecting and the timing of it and there's no announcements.

Hector: So [00:20:00] yeah, internet needs to get back to the roots, make the software better, ask accountants what they need, give the tools to accountants, and we'll have a different episode where we'll talk about your feedback in action, which is going to be a really interesting one too, because there's some really, really a big glimmer of hope in that area. But yeah, that's the challenge that we've had. And I'm still bullish for Intuit. I think Intuit is a great company. It's got great people working in it. They have great vision. The product people are truly, truly interested on making the product better, but [00:20:30] I think they've forgotten the essence of what the ProAdvisor community meant for for into it. I don't know. I don't know if it's a leadership thing. I don't know if it's, you know, AI coming into play and changing, you know, scrambling everybody's minds. I mean, I really don't know what what caused this change in direction. But regardless, it happened. I mean, Alicia and I are still pro QuickBooks people. We I'm not even looking or bothering for alternatives to QuickBooks, even though a lot of people are asking for them. But but if they continue to push the pro out [00:21:00] or make not make them feel that they're part of the plan, then people will start looking for alternatives.

Alicia: Here that Intuit show us the love.

Hector: Yeah. Anyway, let's wrap it up with a new segment. We're going to make up a new segment called called reporting from our Facebook groups. So we're going to grab some chatter that we've had from our Facebook group. So I have a Facebook group called the Power Users Facebook Group. Alicia has a Facebook group called What's Your Facebook Group called Alicia. [00:21:30]

Alicia: Training for QuickBooks users. So this is kind of like our social media version of listener mail. Just we're listening to you.

Hector: Exactly. And we have three reporters out there which are like our fellow colleagues talking about it. So there were two big things that were there was a lot of chatter in our Facebook groups. One, it was the audit log redesign. So it looks like somehow randomly, they redesigned the audit log. All the filters are there, but it just looks and feels different. And the problem I think the main problem [00:22:00] was that this all happened like late September, early October. And like the worst thing you can do to an accountant is just change anything in front of them during the busy season. So have you seen this new audit log redesign?

Alicia: Yeah, I have seen it. And the thing that I noticed is that what I have always used is the compare feature, where I would have two of them side by side and show what's different, and it's not quite as robust as it was. I can still see the changes, but I can't do the side by sides.

Hector: Yeah, it's [00:22:30] the feature is there, but it's like nested under little menus and submenus. So it just takes multiple clicks, which used to be like to have like the bird's eye view where we could see, you know, the before and after. So, so we generally don't like or at least from the, from the chatter. And Alicia and I agree on this. We don't like, you know, when they nest, some of the information in there and you have to dig in to find it. Also the old audit log had the ability for you to pick multiple filters. Like I want to look at this filter, this filter, that filter where [00:23:00] the new one, you can only pick one filter. So that to me is something that that I don't like. And people are still worried that in the audit log, whenever you have a user that invites an external accountant, any changes that any team members from that external accountant do shows up from the user's perspective as just an external accountant you invited. That makes sense. That's logical. But the the challenge is that the accountants don't [00:23:30] have the ability to see which team members change something. And that was that's a really important management tool that we need, and it doesn't seem to be brought into the audit log, the new audit log anyway.

Alicia: Yeah. So I'm going to, you know, put on my detective hat and go talk to a few people and find out what the thought was behind this. And if it's something that is necessary because of the reprograming on the internal side, or if they really thought they were bringing us improvements, in which case I would just want to say, just roll that back, please.

Hector: Exactly. [00:24:00] My general thought is if you're going to improve something, don't take things away. I know you can improve the look of something or the speed of something, because I know that's what Kubo is doing. I've noticed QuickBooks online faster in general, like the pages load faster. So I've seen some really cool things, some some performance things on the improvements, but they take away features or they hide features and it's kind of a challenge. The second one, Alicia and I think we talked about it pre show. I didn't have any of my files have [00:24:30] this feature. And I think none of your files had. But we had a few screenshots of this new thing called duplicate transactions. And essentially it looked like for a couple of days people were getting this snapshot of like potentially duplicate transactions inside the reconcile screen before they go reconcile sort of as a, as a helper to go, hey, by the way, when you go reconcile these things could be an issue. But the problem the problem was, is that they were reporting that the transactions were from a different account altogether. So it's completely [00:25:00] irrelevant. And none of them were actually duplicates. Like it didn't show you the two transactions next to each other as duplicates. It just showed one transaction. And from there you could view it or delete it or whatever. But it was just like the screen itself, almost like came out for a few people to be tested because only a few people got it. And I never I didn't hear anybody say, this new thing came out, and it's awesome and useful. It was all the opposite. And it felt and Alicia, yeah.

Alicia: I think they tried it and pulled it immediately. That what it was considering as [00:25:30] a duplicate was if the date and the dollar amount was the same. And the reason my my logic for why. It wasn't just in that one account is they were probably trying to find duplicate transactions, like maybe it got categorized to the wrong account, and it's really over here and trying to show you that you have these two transactions that could potentially be the same thing, but the results weren't good enough and useful enough. And everybody went, well, nothing here was actually [00:26:00] valuable. And so my suspicion is they just pulled it. Kind of like in our first episode or second episode, we were talking about what the standard feed was in the banking feed, and my theory was that it was a programing error. And it turns out I was right because it disappeared. I think this is a feature that they are trying out. They got bad feedback. They pulled it back. But actually but if anybody out there is actually still seeing this duplicate transactions, if you would head over to either [00:26:30] Hector's or my group mines training for QuickBooks users. Yours. What's the name of your group again?

Hector: Qb power users.

Alicia: Head into either one of those and show us your screenshots again because we would love to see more.

Hector: Yeah for sure I'm going to end it with a mini rant and general.

Alicia: Mini mini.

Hector: Mini mini into it. You need paid beta testers, okay? You need to release these features into paid beta testers [00:27:00] that have real customers, real situations where they can test these things and report back to you whether it works or not. The problem is that when she develops a new tool, their internal people tested with test data, which is not realistic and I don't know who or how they ask people, does this work? I think this is how they do it. They just release it to random people, see how people feel, read the feedback and then pull it back. I love the innovative nature of Intuit. I love the fact that they want to always create and make new things. [00:27:30] I love the fact that the release is an MVP and get the feedback. What I don't love is that accountants do not like this stuff. They don't like change. They don't like being the guinea pigs. They don't like knowing they're in a beta experiment without being told they're in a beta experiment. So I make a really big deal and I tell them, hey, if you're going to release something, call it beta, put a big thing up there, call it beta, and have a little button where you can just turn it off, even if you want to just show it up so people can test it, have a little button, but you can turn it off when you have something [00:28:00] in the screen and you don't call it beta and you can't turn it off.

Hector: It drives people crazy when it doesn't work the way you want it to work. And the reality is, nothing's ever going to work the way you want it to work until it gets tested. That's how software development works, I can tell you from personal experience, is I will have an idea about how something should work, and it isn't until we release it and people give us feedback that they tell us. But we always tell people it's a beta. We tell people it's a beta, it's a beta, and people give you feedback with a smile on their face [00:28:30] when you call it a beta. But when you don't call it a beta, then it's an error. It's a problem. It's a, like you say, a programing error. So something as simple as communicating the fact that you're testing this will change the world from the perspective of the person that's using it. So that's my mini rant. Mini rant over.

Alicia: I just want to follow up on your mini rant that we were just talking about how to make your your proadvisors feel valued, and a lot of proadvisors are like me, we actually love testing features and trying them out and giving feedback and [00:29:00] making recommendations. And I'm, you know, honored that I have a relationship with a lot of the project managers. And I get to kind of put some of these through their paces. But I think this is an opportunity for Intuit to improve their profile by instead of doing live testing of features. You know, I talked about this in a previous episode, lean back in on QuickBooks labs. Let people who use the features choose to turn them on, test them out, give you feedback, and then [00:29:30] turn it back off again. And then you can take that feedback and improve the features. I think there's a huge opportunity here for Intuit to change how they're improving the software and make everybody happy, instead of constantly stressed out by everything changing all the time.

Hector: Totally. So that went a lot longer than than planned. We thought it was going to be a short episode is a testament of how much fun of how much fun Alicia and I have doing these things recently. You [00:30:00] know, we were commenting off each other in DMs. We were like, hey, I listened to the last episode, we're really working. We're we're working really well together. And I agree 100%. Alicia, I feel so blessed that we that we had a chance to get together and do this and like, this is so much fun and hopefully you guys, the audience are having fun as well. We would like to ask you guys to send us your email questions, your email comments, going to your podcast app and add reviews. Obviously, [00:30:30] we're going to ask for a five star review, nothing less. So, you know, give us your reviews, tell the world about it. You know, I think there's a lot of QuickBooks users out there that are just not. Fully informed on the stuff that we talked about, and I think this stuff would be useful to all the QuickBooks accountants out there. So with that being said, we'll see you on the next one. See you in the next one.