During the Accountant Keynote from Day 2 of QuickBooks Connect Virtual, Intuit Accountant Leader Ted Callaghan introduced Books Review as one of the ways QuickBooks is adapting to help ProAdvisors and QuickBooks Online Accountant users “Scale their Impact” with clients. Books Review is an expanded version of “Month-End Review,” which previously was added to QuickBooks Online Accountant.
While Month-End Review was just that—a workflow explicitly designed for workflow—ProAdvisor and QBO-Accountant users told Intuit they wanted to use the tools of transaction review, account reconciliation and final review more frequently. In fact, they envisioned the need for the tool to become an end-to-end workflow that allows users to manage a client’s books from the beginning of setup, all the way to preparing comprehensive reporting to the client after each financial period.
As a result, Intuit added a new “Setup” and “Wrap-up” phase to the Books Review. But there is one more feature on tap that is going to vastly improve your “Transaction review” phase—something called “Transaction Collaboration.”
The new “Setup” phase of the Books Review tool allows users to:
(1) Begin with a review of the existing Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss Reports to identify irregularities in the prior setup
(2) Review and adjust, or enter opening balances to accounts you identify as needing adjustments
(3) Identify and resolve issues with various irregularities to accounts within the chart of accounts, including:
- Bank accounts that haven’t been connected to bank feeds
- Account redundancies,
- Inappropriately classified account types,
- Missing standard accounts
- And other issues that later complicate financial review
So, while we are working our way from Set-up to Wrap-up, we all know about the Transaction review, Account Reconciliation and Final review. But I mentioned something new that is coming for Transaction review—the “Transaction Collaboration,” which is designed to help resolve the headaches associated with missing client information.
- When you find you are missing critical data, or cannot find or figure out the answer to an existing transaction, you will be able to request information from your client right from within your QBO-Accountant workflow.
- When your clients open their QuickBooks, they will receive a notification and see the transaction collaboration request in the “My Accountant” tab (as shown below). As a result, they can open the request and provide the information without leaving QuickBooks. [Note: The graphic below shows the client’s QuickBooks Online “My Accountant” tab open with the Transaction Collaboration displayed and the client’s responses to the accountant’s question(s).]
- After the client responds to your questions via Transaction Collaboration, you will see the responses when you open their books in QuickBooks Online-Accountant (as shown below). Note that the submitted questions—in this case, 3 of 3—were all answered (only two of the three are displayed below with a green box around the Answered confirmation).
- Now you have the information you need to finalize your review of their books.
You have not even had to leave your QuickBooks workflow to use other third party tools to seek out the answers because Transaction Collaboration makes it easier to do the work associated with your end-of-month or end-of-year reviews. Stay tuned for more information and updates.
With the new “Wrap-up” phase added to the Books Review tool, users can generate and deliver valuable customized reports that provide clients with insights into their business. In addition, the tool makes it easy to edit, customize and package a variety of reports into comprehensive financial presentations, allowing the ProAdvisor or Accountant to easily transition into the role of trusted advisor and assist their clients with strategic information upon which they can make critical business decisions.
With this tool, users can:
(1) Prepare a report package of monthly financial data and business performance details for their client.
(2) Send (email) the report package to their client.
(3) Close the books for the accounting period.
(4) They also can keep track of other tasks they may want to complete every month and add those to their wrap-up workflow by including a link to each item in their own checklist.
While some aspects of Books Review still are in Beta, most of this new functionality is live right now. But it is still being rolled out to QuickBooks Online Accountant users, so it may take a little time before every QBO-Accountant sees these enhancements. More great features within QuickBooks Online Accountant were announced at QuickBooks Connect that are currently being rolled out or soon will be.
Either Liz or I will be shouting these out to you very soon.