Major product update transforms how accountants deliver value and manage clients’ books

In front of more than 4,000 accounting professionals at Accountex, Intuit unveiled the new QuickBooks Online Accountant, specially designed to help accounting professionals in the UK save time, grow their practice and transform how they communicate with and deliver value to their clients.

As SMEs become more data-driven, collaborative and mobile, their expectations of accountants are changing rapidly; practices are under pressure to continually evolve the services they provide to SMEs and the way they deliver them. QuickBooks Online Accountant ensures accountancy firms are able to take advantage of the cloud to then play a more strategic, advisory role.
QuickBooks Online Accountant is designed with a sharp focus on helping accounting professionals and their clients succeed. Reinventing the way client information is managed and shared, QuickBooks Online Accountant enables accounting professionals to collaborate with clients to gain insights like never before. More than 841,000 companies around the world subscribe to QuickBooks Online, and over 200,000 accounting professionals currently use QuickBooks Online Accountant, making it the clear number-one cloud accounting solution for small businesses and accounting professionals.

“QuickBooks Online Accountant totally redefines how accounting professionals work with their clients,” said Rich Preece, UK VP and Managing Director, Intuit. “The way SMEs work is continually shifting as they adopt new technologies, creating a major opportunity for accountants to play far more of an advisory role. With QuickBooks Online Accountant, accounting professionals can get much closer to their clients, giving them a platform to sell additional, high-value services.”

Confidently Helping Clients Succeed

The new QuickBooks Online Accountant is designed to deliver on Intuit QuickBooks’ vision to be the operating system behind small business success, while also helping accounting professionals save time and grow their practice. The new product’s core capabilities focus on three areas: seamlessly exposing tools and insights to accounting professionals, allowing them to easily work with all their employees and clients, and transforming how they grow their practice.

Seamlessly Exposes Tools and Insights to Accounting Professionals

• New Customisable Dashboard: highlights what needs attention via alerts, to-dos and recent activities. It provides one-click access to clients’ books and documents to help accounting professionals take immediate action.
• New Bookkeeping and Document Detail Tabs: allows accounting professionals to see at-a-glance reconciliation information, transactions requiring attention and due dates.
• New Accountant Toolbox: enables easy access to accountant-only tools such as batch reconciliation and re-classify transactions from within any client’s books. Also enables one-click access to any client from anywhere within QuickBooks Online Accountant.
• Enhanced Free QuickBooks Online Plus: Free subscription of QuickBooks Online Plus, included with QuickBooks Online Accountant to help accounting professionals manage firm’s books and pay employees.

Easily Work With Employees and Clients

• New Client Document Management Centre: powered by Box, the hub allows users to request and receive documents from clients directly inside QuickBooks Online Accountant. After an initial one time setup and account linkage with a free 10GB Box account, users can view all requests and documents by client and easily keep track of what is received or outstanding.
• New Permission Level Controls: designates firm roles and permissions that define the level of access (full, custom or restricted) an employee can have to clients’ books.
• New Management Reports: enables creation of customisable, professional-looking and firm-branded management reports that can be easily saved and shared with clients.

Transforms How Accounting Professionals Grow Their Practice

• Improved QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program Integrated into QuickBooks Online Accountant: allows QuickBooks ProAdvisors to access their membership details directly from within QuickBooks Online Accountant. New features will enable ProAdvisors to track certifications, the number of clients they have, view available training materials and make changes to their Find-a-ProAdvisor listing.
• Enhanced Wholesale Pricing: Through QuickBooks Online Accountant, accounting professionals can offer their clients a 50 percent off the life of their QuickBooks Online subscription (for a special limited time) and enjoy consolidated, monthly billing for all their wholesale pricing clients.

Charlie Carne of Charlie Carne & Co, Chartered Accountants added: “We’re always striving to improve the service we provide to our clients, which means we’re constantly looking for areas to add value and to work more effectively with them in order to grow our practice. The new QuickBooks Online Accountant has the power to help us achieve that by providing much better insights into our clients’ businesses. This ability to collaborate far more closely with our clients gives us the platform we need to deliver the services they demand.”