To maximize the benefits of the latest enhancements in QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA), it's essential to understand, and effectively implement, the new features designed to streamline your accounting and bookkeeping practices. Here's a guide to getting the most out of the most recent and requested updates.
Role-Based access permissions
Aptly named, role-based access permissions are now available for your clients' and your firm’s books. With this feature, you now have more granular control to separate access and permissions across firm users. You can also delegate tasks across QuickBooks to better manage various services.
Here are a few ways to consider using role-based access permissions:
Separate and assign the level of access and control employees have to your firm’s books and your client’s books.
Delegate AP/AR, bill payment, payments, and payroll tasks to firm users with predefined roles.
Decide who has permission to view, create, edit, or delete transactions.
Choose which data users can access within specific areas of sales, expenses, inventory, payroll, and other areas.
Set custom role-based access to manage creating, editing, and viewing permissions for financials, receivables, payroll, and other key reports for your firm.
Take note of how this can help your firm with compliance issues: Making sure the right firm employees have access to the right data is a solid step to staying compliant with data privacy regulations. Be sure to update any needed data privacy documentation.
Talk to your clients about these changes. Together, you can determine the right permissions for their business to instill confidence and manage risk.
Chart of Account templates
Let's talk about streamlining client setup. Setting up a chart of accounts (COA) for every new client can be rote and time consuming.
At the end of 2023, COA templates were added to QBOA to save your firm time and establish consistency across your clients. Here are three ways to help you make the most of COA templates:
New client setup: If your firm has a specific way of setting up new clients, COA templates can be particularly useful. Create a template based on how your practice prefers to organize the COA, load the template into QBOA, and use them as necessary for new clients. Don't reinvent the wheel every time!
Think about existing clients: In addition to new clients, you can also apply COA templates to existing clients. Applying a template adds new default accounts to your client's COA, but won't delete existing ones. If an account with the same name or number already exists, QuickBooks will flag it so it isn't added.
You have options: You can build templates from scratch, customize ready-made product-based or service-based business templates, or import established templates you’ve already built from your computer or Google Sheets.
Split billing
You now have more flexibility and control over who pays for your clients' QuickBooks subscriptions through a new split billing feature. Through QBOA, you can now mix and match the billing options for each QuickBooks product based on what best suits your client and your firm.
This new customization will apply to existing and new clients (coming soon) and can help your firm standardize your monthly QuickBooks invoice without the complications of variable costs.
Here are four things to note about split billing:
This is a QBOA feature. Clients cannot choose to use split billing on their own. If you will be changing the billing structure, be sure to communicate that with your clients.
Before you transfer billing to your clients, if you haven't already, make your client the primary admin of their company file. When you initiate the process to transfer the billing to your client, they will be prompted to enter their payment information if this information is not already on file. Now that your client owns the billing for the subscription, they will be able to make changes directly in their QuickBooks Online product, including upgrading, downgrading, and canceling the subscription.
The ability to split the billing per product may make it easier for your firm to recommend add-on QuickBooks products to your clients without having to manage the monthly billing and operations for subscriptions that include variable costs like Payroll, Payments, and Bill Pay.
With the launch of this new feature, you'll see a major change in the Subscriptions and billing page in QBOA. We've moved things around to make it easier to manage all of your clients' subscriptions from a single tab, where you can filter your client list based on how their subscriptions are billed: accountant-billed, client-billed, or split-billed.
Find more information on split billing, including details on ProAdvisor pricing.
By integrating these new features into your daily operations, you can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your accounting and bookkeeping services. Explore each feature and leverage them to suit your firm's and your clients' specific needs.
Debbie Shorstein
Debbie Shorstein is a Senior Marketing Manager at Intuit.
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