Using QBO Accountant Practice Management

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Practice management tools are a must – but they are not all equal. Some are beefy, while others are lean. Trying to get everyone to agree on the best tool is as difficult as trying to get everyone to agree on the same pizza toppings.

Thick or thin? New York or Chicago? What toppings do you want? Sound familiar? Nobody can agree, right? 

It's just like Practice Manager – the choices are endless. 

Well, Intuit has given us another choice, and it looks like they're going to keep adding the goodies as time goes by.

But if you look at the goal of Intuit and the reasons it created its version of a Practice Management tool, it might help you gain some insight as to if it's the right practice manager for you.

Intuit realized the biggest drivers of accountant/bookkeeper work are tasks, and for this they created a Task Tool.

Intuit’s Focus was on an accountants’ biggest pains:

  1. Deadlines – such as Payroll, Reconciliation and End of Year   
  2. Tools and Processes for each Client
  3. Management (maintenance) of Tools and People

Intuit has released Version I of the QuickBooks Online – Accountant Practice Management tool. Currently, it's designed for a one- to four-person firm and addresses their need for efficiency and productivity by allowing everyone to stay connected to QBO and each other.

QBOA Practice Management Version 1

  • Free – Like Free, and appears to always be Free
  • Located on the QBOA and QBO Navigation bar
  • Communication Management – Accountant and client (visual cues of statues plus stamped timeline of activity) – Love it
  • Document Management – storage
  • Phone App – "Let's you manage on the go"
  • 30-day View
  • Progress Status of Jobs
  • Assign Tasks to Team Members

Plus, there are promises to add more. "What could that be?" you ask?

  • Recurring Work Templates
  • Integration to third-party apps such as T-sheets (time management), Google Calendar and possibly document storage apps.

Get Started Using QBO-A Practice Manager

How to Access Practice Manager from QBO-A

From the QuickBooks Online – Accountant Navigation Bar, select Work:

Work Dashboard – When and What You Do

  1. Sort your tasks by
  2. Client
  3. Accounting Team Member 

QBO-APM can suggest jobs by predicting tasks such as Payroll duties:

Create a Job

Create the Job Name; select your Client; Set the Due Date; Assign Team Member(s); and select Status (as shown in 1 below). Provide other details, as appropriate:

Add a Task

(As shown above 2) you can add a Task,including Task Name, Due Date, Task assignment, Status and Details.

Creating Client Requests

Need information from a client, send them a 'client request'.  Describe the request, select your client, assign them a due date to respond, track the status, and provide details as needed (as seen in 1 below).

You can even attach documents (2) above, and when you're ready, publish your request to your client's QBO using the 'green button' shown in (3) above. You can even send them an Email notification (as seen below).

When the request is published in the client's QBO, it shows up under the new "My Accountant" feature that was pushed out last week:

You can even view the client collaboration at a glance:

My Take Away

It’s free – like, you can’t beat free.

Tracking when and how to do tasks is an important part of the accounting/bookkeeping firm, so a Practice Management tool is a must.

The QBOA Practice Management tool is easy to get started since there's no integration setup. The Dashboard is clean and simple to understand and by clicking on the job you can view levels of desired detail.  

So, the question is, do you already have a practice management tool? Is it this easy? Do you need to track time within your practice management tool? Or, do you have lots of recurring work?

If you answered "yes" to any of the above questions you might hang tight to see what’s to come. But know these issues are on the horizon for the QBO-A Practice Management tool.

On the other hand, no matter how you like your pizza, you might go ahead and try a slice of QBO-A Practice Management.

Special thanks to Intuit, and Intuit employees James Helms, Director of Experience Design, and Harsha Jagadish, Product Manager for QuickBooks Online Accountant, for the webinars they presented on this new product.

Special thanks to the "QB Power Hour" (Michelle Long and Hector Garcia) and the Woodard Network (Joe Woodard) for sponsoring webinars on this topic, from which I was able to gleam so much great material.

If you'd like more information, I suggest you watch the "QB Power Hour"'s Youtube on this feature, and enjoy a slice or two of your favorite pizza while watching.