Mind of Murph
Intuit announced today that ‘Advanced Certification’ will be offered for QuickBooks Online, with the ‘exam’ available in November. Training for the new certification will be offered at QuickBooks Connect, with Michelle Long teaching this course. These announcements obviously lead to some questions (at least for me) that we don’t know the answers to, yet.
For example this year, Intuit began offering the ‘2nd round’ of QuickBooks Online Certification. Prior to the new exam a QBO Certification exam had been available, but Intuit updated the exam and at the time announced that the new “certification would be for ‘one year.” That’s right the certification was for 12-months, and presumably then you would need to retake the exam, they didn’t specify if a new exam would be issued yearly. Those with the old exam certification lost their credential (after 12 months) if they didn’t take and pass the new exam.
Well this is not so different from QuickBooks (desktop) ProAdvisor certification, there is a new exam every year and if you want to remain ‘certified’ you must take the new exam, but your ProAdvisor profile still shows each year you earned certification, even if you are not current as long as you pay your ProAdvisor dues. Other Certifications, such as Enterprise or Point-of-sale show (the product versions) associated with those exams. But QBO has never displayed original or subsequent certification dates in the profile, you either were, or were not, certified.
Advanced certification for QuickBooks desktop is quite an ordeal; you must hold the 3 most-current ProAdvisor certifications to even quality to attempt the exam. That exam is a ‘doozy’ and has been the subject of much controversy over the years. Your profile shows the ‘calendar year’ in which you earned your original Advanced certification. In order to maintain Advanced status, you must maintain current certification as a ProAdvisor, and also take continuing education and pass the related test(s).
Now we are going to have QuickBooks Online Advanced Certification, and pre-certification training will be offered at QuickBooks Connect in October, but as of yet there are NO details about how this will work. For example, I would assume that you must have the current QBO ProAdvisor Certification, but could you take the current certification and then earn the new Advanced certification all in the course of a couple of months, or is there some minimum time between QBO Cert, and QBO Advanced Cert?
What about the annual QBO Certification (earn it or lose it policy, my terminology, not Intuit’s)? If you earn the new Advanced QBO Cert, do you still need to take the regular QBO Cert exam at the end of your 12-months? What happens to your Advanced Cert. if you don’t take and pass your regular certification at the end of 12-months? And how long with the new certification be good for; will you need to take it every year along with your regular QBO Certification?
If you are like me, and many of our readers are, you find yourself asking these same questions upon hearing today’s announcement regarding the new certification. We can only hope that Intuit will have more details about the new certification shortly, because many of the answers will determine the level of participation in the training, I suspect.