Now Is the Time to Differentiate Yourself as a QuickBooks ProAdvisor

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QuickBooks’ recently announced subscription-based bookkeeping service is considered by many to be an existential threat to QuickBooks ProAdvisors. For years, ProAdvisors have offered their bookkeeping services to small businesses, and this new service could potentially muscle in on their territory and undercut them, depending on what price Intuit charges for it.

Nothing is set in stone as of right now. Intuit is just putting out its feelers to find out what to charge and which types of businesses would be interested in an online bookkeeping service. But the announcement alone has been enough to shake ProAdvisors’ confidence in the viability of their current business model. Even if Intuit doesn’t go through with it, the fact is that this has revealed a danger that ProAdvisors need to prepare for.

What to Do About This

You don’t have to fear. Now is the time to differentiate yourself as a QuickBooks ProAdvisor by providing additional services that your clients want. A big one is inventory management. For all of its positive qualities, QuickBooks Online leaves something to be desired when it comes to being able to manage inventory. Kitting, tracking inventory by expiration date and other criteria, item categorization, unit of measure conversions and stock alerts are just a few of the advanced features it lacks.

You can acquaint yourself with a number of inventory management solutions that integrate with QuickBooks Online and then leverage that expertise to sell them (and your supporting services) to your clients. Instead of being stuck in the mentality of only selling QuickBooks products or bookkeeping services, you can expand your field of knowledge to include many things.

New Possibilities

There are sure to be many other ways you can take advantage of this situation. You can continue to work with small businesses to make sure they have what they need in a lot of areas beyond inventory management and accounting. Those are just two of the biggest ones that small businesses need.

Intuit will likely send leads your way when potential users of their bookkeeping service fail to meet their criteria, so there’s still hope that you can continue to serve new clients in your main area of expertise. Looking to the future though, you can make yourself stand out from the crowd by doing something different and making yourself a jack of all trades instead of a one-trick pony. You don’t necessarily have to be an expert on everything you sell, but you can provide referrals to the experts and earn a commission. The point is that there is a way to make this work. It just takes flexibility and a new way of thinking about your role in your clients’ work.

For every door that closes, another one opens. Think of this as an opportunity to change and improve your offerings to clients. If you’d like to learn more about Boxstorm’s online inventory management solution and Fishbowl’s advanced inventory management and manufacturing software (which is the #1 inventory add-on for QuickBooks), click on the links above. These could be the right solutions your clients are looking for, especially since there’s a free version of Boxstorm for them to get started with. Boxstorm Forever Free eliminates the need for SMBs to manage their inventory manually on spreadsheets. Now is the time to look into your options!

Author Bio: John David King is the CEO of Fishbowl. He has been involved in sales and business management for over 24 years following several years as an attorney practicing family law and criminal defense in Texas. He came to Fishbowl in 2006 and has worked extensively in both the direct sales and channel sales departments. King has a Juris Doctorate degree and a Bachelor’s degree in Communications from Texas Tech University.