At QuickBooks Connect this week, QuickBooks UK announced several product updates, including one exclusive to the UK. Not all of the product improvements are available yet. They should appear in the current calendar year, though.
These improvements to its digital products will help both accountants and small businesses to improve efficiency and scale their organisations.
Nick Williams, UK Product Director, commented, “Accounting and bookkeeping professionals help drive small business success, and we’re committed to prioritising investment in our solutions they need to provide that same excellent service.
“The burden of admin can be an unnecessary drain on time and resources. We’re making it our mission to provide tools that shoulder as much of the basic tasks as possible, all while providing unmatched data insights – freeing up time for growth and informing the strategic advice that underpins excellent client service.”
Enterprise Times spoke to Williams at the event to clarify details on some of the announcements
QB Practice Management
QB Practice Management is a new tool, and according to Williams, not the same as that already available in the US. QB Practice Management will become available in the second half of 2023. It provides accountants with a centralised solution to manage their client interactions. It will manage client interactions, reduce admin by automating recurring tasks, streamline workflows, increase consistency across operating procedures and manage workload across their teams.
The solution includes automation that will add tasks to client task lists, including month-end filing, VAT filing and year-end tasks. It will also bring all client information together in a single location. According to Williams, there is an integration with Companies House as well as anti-money laundering checks and validations for onboarding. The AML checks leverage Xama, and customers will need a separate account which will integrate with QB Practice Management
Accountants are also provided with a view into clients’ books, similar to the Client Overview tab in the US version. Williams commented, “It surfaces, any outstanding items of work that needs to be done, anything overdue. Any notifications or tasks that either you’ve assigned to your client or to your employees.
“I’m talking in the context of being the firm owner here. You can see all of that. Then we pull all of that together to give an even greater holistic view, which looks at all of the clients in a firm’s pipeline, and time spent tasks overview.”
How much will this cost?
“There will be a cost for it. We’re still evaluating what their costs would be like. At this stage, now in beta, we’re in the process of just getting that feedback from our accountant and bookkeeping partners, but watch this space.”
Williams also sees the solution as coopetitive in nature with other practice management products in the market, such as IRIS Software. He acknowledged that firms have different applications to manage their business, and the intent is to integrate with those solutions.
Adding AI Insights
QB Practice Management will also leverage AI-driven insights. I asked Williams what these were. He answered.
“The first is error checking, error anomalies, things that may not look right. The second thing is about matching and correction. That looks at things like train QB, which is surfaced in our core product. The third one we’re looking to explore within practice management and build-out is workflows. Any insights that can be brought from how workflows are being managed, how long is it taking on a workflow, etc.
“Where we go from workflows if you drop down now into our core QBO product, some of the AI capabilities that we will surface for those insights will be things like VAT forecasting and income tax estimations. So at the time you submit your VAT filing, AI models can look at and adjust to say, well, we believe over the next quarter, your VAT liability could look like X. “
On the workflow side, is QuickBooks benchmarking within an organization’s data set or across all data sets?
“For this first phase, it’s just currently within. In the future, could we take this beyond and understand how things can be benchmarked at a more industry level but not initially.”
QB Advanced
QB Advanced, the solution targeted at more complex organisations from Intuit, has added Revenue Recognition. For organisations turning to subscription-based business models, this is vital. The new component will support accrual accounting and automate the recognition of revenue on a monthly basis.
QB Accounting was launched in September 2022. Williams noted that the solution is for those organisations growing out of QBO or QBO+. Those organisations with between 10-100 people or more complex workflow requirements. Williams noted that Intuit is seeing a high product uptake from product-based businesses, professional services, businesses, and construction businesses.
I asked Williams whether the product targets net new logos yet. He answered, “It’s a three-phased approach. What we’re doing is we’re supporting any customers that have grown out of QuickBooks Online. The second area is we have a lot of interest from desktop migration coming into QuickBooks advanced. We’re supporting all those customers. Third, to your point, at the appropriate time, we will explore how we can help non-QuickBooks mid-market customers leverage our platform.”
There are several other features that the company has recently added to QuickBooks Advanced; these include:
- An all-new Spreadsheet Sync allows spreadsheet users to push data to and from QuickBooks, with built-in templates and automatic syncing.
- Batch Transactions allows users to create, edit and delete sales receipts and invoices in bulk.
- Chart View allows users to transform a custom report into a chart for greater insights through visual representations of complex data.
QuickBooks Online Accountant
The Workpapers product within QuickBooks Online Accountant has added a new feature, Books to Tax. The feature enables accountants to prepare, check and file Annual Accounts and Corporation Tax to Companies House and HMRC. It also has an auditor feature that can highlight potential errors on CT600 forms.
Workpapers is available across the core markets of the US, Canada, Australia and the UK. It is not available to the rest of the world.
Workpapers helps accountants to complete the annual accounts for firms. It brings together the required documents and makes the process even more efficient with this latest automation feature.
Bureau Payroll
In a first for the UK, QuickBooks is to launch a new cloud payroll platform. The product is initially available in the UK only. When I asked Williams whether it would be available elsewhere, he replied, “We haven’t anything planned as yet for that. We’re just solely focusing on the UK launch.“
The solution will integrate with other financial management software solutions, not just QuickBooks. It will enable organisations to scale from one employee to thousands across multiple clients. It will be available for a flat fee and enable organisations to efficiently run Payroll services for multiple organisations.
Effectively it will add as a hub, enabling Accountants to manage Payroll services for multiple clients using multiple solutions. I asked Williams what integrations would be supported. He replied, “This will integrate with our competitors’ Financial Management Software, such as Sage, Xero, Freshbooks & FreeAgent.”
Proskills
Launched on 28th February, the ProSkills programme is a set of modules across marketing, training and product. This is part of the ProAdvisors ecosystem. ProAdvisors must pass three courses to attain a ProSkills badge. This gamification encourages consultants to learn more and achieve a higher Proadvisor status. The badges deliver recognition that can help in marketing and internal review processes.
What are some of the courses available?
“ProSkills is broken down into 3 key areas, Marketing, Training and Product. Within the marketing area, there are assets around Branding and SEO, (product) training includes Workpapers and payroll, with the product area encouraging you to practice what you have learned.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Despite Intuit being US-based, QuickBooks Connect always has product announcements that apply to attendees. In many cases, they are the launch of products previously based in the US. The year, QuickBooks delivered announcements unique to the UK, demonstrating the importance of the market and its direction.
The development of QuickBooks Advanced is especially interesting. It signals the challenge of retaining customers that outgrow QBO. What will be interesting to see is how it develops the solution in the future as it enters the bottom end of the mid-market.
One of the reasons organisations move to mid-market solutions is that they need specialist features for their industry, such as manufacturing. What direction will QuickBooks take QBA, and when will some of these industry features emerge? If they don’t deliver on these features, they may retain some customers, but not for long.
