Accountant Feedback Yields Client Overview Enhancements

by

Last November (2018) Insightful Accountant gave you a 'first look' at the New QuickBooks Client Overview Feature. While the majority of accountants loved this new feature, Intuit received a lot of feedback regarding ways that it could be made better or how it could be enhanced to provide improved information. The team responsible for development of the feature has been hard at work and has taken a lot of that feedback 'to heart' and accomplished a number of changes and made several improvements.

First and foremost in my mind is the addition of functions that allow you to 'print' and/or to 'export' the information within the Overview (as illustrated in the figure shown below). I think this was probably the very first 'comment' when readers of our article last November wrote into us here at Insightful Accountant asking "Why didn't they (Intuit) give us a way to print the information in the new overview...".  Well, now you have it, your feedback submitted paid off, you can not only print the information, but export it.

If you recall, one of the primary motivators behind Client Overview was to give Accountants, Bookkeepers and ProAdvisors a tool which would allow them to more quickly diagnose a prospective client's QBO file and estimate how much work it would take to get it back on track, and to keep it there in the future. In addition to sections like 'Company Setup' that displays basic information about the QuickBooks file, payroll subscription, sales tax set-up and attached apps, the overview contains sections that provide key information related to Bank Activity (bank balance, QuickBooks balances, unaccepted, and unreconciled transactions and last reconciled dates), as well as 'Common Issues' that help you identify areas in a client's file that need attention that even the client may not be aware of like problems with undeposited funds or uncategorized transactions (two common areas of client mistakes).

But in keeping with that fundamental purpose of helping the professional evaluate the file more fully for purposes of estimating initial and on-going work and related costs, a section called 'Transaction Volume' which allows you to select different time frames (such as last 30 days, last 90 days, last 365 days, etc.) gives you better details to figure out your work load for the client in the areas of total bank transactions, total invoices, total bills and total bill payments over each time frame (as shown below).

It's like a 'snapshot of file statistics' for the time-frame you select... "how about that ProAdvisors?"

Client Overview is located at the top left corner of the Accountant menu within QBOA while accessing a Client file. Your clients can not access this information from within their own QBO data files.