02.27.24 QBO Updates and FB Group Q&A

Michelle and Dan discuss some common questions that occurred in the QB Power user FB Group

QB Power Hour is a free, biweekly webinar series for accountants, ProAdvisors, CPAs, bookkeepers and QuickBooks consultants presented by Michelle Long, CPA and Dan DeLong who are very passionate about the industry, QuickBooks and apps that integrate with QuickBooks.

Watch or listen to all of the QB Power Hours at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/blog

Register for upcoming webinars at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/

Transcript

Michelle Long: 0:30

Welcome everybody to another QuickBooks Online Updates and Facebook Group Q& A today. Glad to have you joining us to another QB Power Hour. We're very glad to have you joining us today. My name is Michelle Long. I am a MBA in Entrepreneurship and the owner of Long for Success. Been a trainer for Intuit, contract trainer for Intuit since 2007. So very long, very glad to be with you today from Keystone, Colorado, where it is snowing today. We were supposed to have a blizzard with lots of snow, but it's late getting here, but we are getting snow today, so hopefully we'll get lots of fresh snow. But glad to have you joining us. Glad to be here today. Dan, where are you? And tell us a little bit about

Dan DeLong: 1:11

yourself. Yeah. My name is Dan DeLong, owner of DanWitt. I worked at Intuit for nearly 18 years, currently still in Florida seeing what that Yeah. Snowbird lifestyle is all about but we'll be heading north shortly, but we'll hopefully not before the spring, fall. A little bit about the QB power hour. Now you can go ahead and stop sharing. Michelle, if you are, we tried this new thing where we were both, we're sharing at the same time so that we could, just jump right into the power hour today. A little bit about the power hours every other Tuesday at noon Eastern, regardless of wherever we are located we've done it from the Bahamas and we've even done it on site at at scaling new heights a couple of times. So that's interesting. How we can do these things, but they're not eligible for CPE. You can always check our website for upcoming events as well as the resources at qbpowerhour. com slash resources for the podcast recordings and the slides. A little bit of the housekeeping if you have any questions about topics that we're talking about here today please put them in the Q& A as well as if you have any comments about just anything in general please put them in the chat, as well as if you have any handouts or if any, the handouts or links available there, I will put those in the comments in the chat. As well so that we can make sure that you have those handy. Some new things for 2024 that we want to talk about. We are simulcasting and that's part of our challenge that we have trying to figure out the technology of all this. But we're simulcasting inside the Facebook group. Do see some folks are joining us from there today. Already, I'm trying to see that. Yes, we have a couple people on YouTube as well as in the Facebook group, but if you are in the Facebook group and you want to be part of the conversation and you want to be want us to be able to see who you are you'll have to acknowledge or grant permission to the streaming service that we're using. And there's A little QR code to do that because the settings inside the Facebook group is private. It's set to private. It just doesn't, you have to acknowledge or allow that that service to be able to see who you are in your Facebook profile. Otherwise it'll just show up as Facebook user and we won't know who you are to be able to discuss anything on, online or during the webinar today. And the QB Power Hour is. Is a labor of love for Michelle and myself for sure. And we incur some expenses and we take those on. We sometimes can re recruit that with some app partners that we work with. But we've also decided to start a store to be able to. To keep this thing going so if you want to pick up some flag to help out Michelle and I, you certainly can. There's a QR code there, a link to it from the handouts as well. I'm trying to make things put things up there that are. Power related or time related since it's a power hour. So we have wireless chargers. We have a coffee mouse because you can recharge with coffee as well as electricity. And then maybe we'll have some clocks or Apple Watch fans or things like that. Swags that you can get there. So I appreciate if you have the time and you want to check it out, please do and all that. So our today's agenda was basically an over can't think of the word, but It's a spillover from when we had Intuit on before we were just when they were talking about the the QuickBooks tax And Live product incorporating there. And we wanted to field some questions from the, from our Facebook group. But we never got to that because we ended up talking to and do it the whole time. So we want to field those questions from the Facebook group itself as part of today. So we'll launch our first poll. There we go. Where are we now? Where's the polls? There they are. Okay. All right. I can launch it now. What percentage of your clients are in QuickBooks Online? While you're answering that, and we'll see the answers coming in. So Michelle, you're in Keystone,

Michelle Long: 5:31

Colorado. That's right, yes. We tried Hunter, New York a couple of weeks ago and didn't get good fresh powder snow there, so my husband's Okay. I want to get some fresh snow, so he's got a season pass, so he's got an epic pass, and so he wanted to try again, so here we are at Keystone, because we haven't done Keystone yet this year, and Keystone's kind of our home base, it seems for skiing, I found a place, I kept watching looking for a place to open up. And so here we are at Keystone now Still chasing the snow. We are getting snow today. So hopefully he'll get all right So

Dan DeLong: 6:02

hopefully we'll after after we're done here today, then you can hit the slope, right?

Michelle Long: 6:07

Yeah he hits the slopes and I was watching yesterday I was sitting at the mountain house and doing a little work and watching everybody ski and stuff and I remembered how much fun it is to ski and watching everybody, you know Getting on the lifts and skiing and all that and I painful it is on the knees and it's a lot of work. B all these people. And boy topics today from that fa saw Rachel here and she h So great topics today. So glad to

Dan DeLong: 6:42

be all right. So we'll go ahead and stop this poll and just talk a little bit about the power users group. We had to rename it because of some of the history of with you and Hector. You want to talk a little bit about the group itself?

Michelle Long: 6:59

Sure. Yeah. Hector and I started that a long time ago. And the intent was You know, everybody kept asking Hector and I, lots of questions, just as everybody does. Everybody always has lots of questions for each other and stuff and, everybody was asking all these questions, and it was just a great way on Facebook for people to help each other because that's what I saw when we were doing the live training events. When people would ask questions, I never knew all the answers. Nobody ever knows all the answers, but people can help each other because we all have so many vast experiences and experience with different apps, with different problems that we've encountered with clients and different situations. And so that's where the Facebook group is such an amazing resource. Because it's people helping each other. And we all have vast amounts of resources and experiences with different apps and different industries. And so you can help one another. And that's what I love about it is people helping each other. And, so there's, what is it now? 20, 000 out there. Was, maybe nine

Dan DeLong: 7:59

or active. We, yeah, we just passed 16,000 which was really cool because when you and I started it was probably half that. Yeah. And it was still a very active Facebook group. And I've seen, I've seen us mentioned, I've seen this Facebook group mentioned in the like firm of the future articles by like the top five, QuickBooks groups to be a part of so it's pretty cool to be a part of that. And one of the things that I really like about the Facebook group in general is is that people give as much as they get, as they take, a lot of people are active and they're very. Giving of their time and their knowledge and their expertise. The fact that when I was running some statistics on the group, nine thousand of the people are active, right? Typically there's a lot of people in there that just groups and then consume, right? Like they. Get some information from it and, but don't participate. The fact that we have such a high participation rate is pretty phenomenal. And what was I going to say? The the group itself is, we have some Intuit presence in there as well, but it's not as designed as a way to bypass. The support channels. I was just having a nice discussion with with someone today and talking about the, the situation that they were having with trying to deal with Intuit support and I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt and, uh, Intuit, as far as, reach out to them first. And I see a lot of people just tag, certain Intuit individuals that tend to be in there and it's not designed for that. Like it's not designed for, easy access to to somebody at Intuit, cause that's not scalable, because if if those people are doing other things and not just necessarily monitoring our group for help, but and we hear you and we certainly understand that it can be very frustrating when you have to bounce around to different people over and over again and explain your tale of woe, and that's not billable time that you can, bill back to your customer and everything. And you really want to get an answer. Really quick. And Rachel is saying, yeah, go to Dan over at school of Bookkeeping and and quick answers. That, that is the idea of of that is to circumvent needing to talk to Intuit.'cause you might be able to get your answer before you even talk to into it. But one of the things that we wanna start to implement in the Facebook group is giving back. Because some of the value some of the information that they're on there is really valuable. We are going to be starting to work with a donation marketplace so that when an issue is solved and we see that there's a, there's no way to, to tag all of these Facebook posts. That they're solved, like you can with some of these community boards and forums and things, but when we see that an issue is solved, we're going to suggest that you give back. And as it may not be, okay, we'll pay it forward, but actually paying it to a donation of your choice, right? So whatever you feel the value of that of that information is in the Facebook group, we'll ask you and. Promote you to donate. It's all totally, up to you anyway to do that. But this way we'll have people helping people and I'd love to be able to, say next year, like we, this Facebook group donated X amount of dollars or, helped with some. Some charity with regards to, our community. What do you any thoughts on that, Michelle? I just think

Michelle Long: 11:33

it's great because it's a win, and so many times, I just love it because so many times people are like, gosh, this just helped me so much. And it gives you such a good feeling. And that way you can go and help someone else as well. And just keeps, sharing that. And, so I just think this is great. Win, win, win.

Dan DeLong: 11:51

I love it. So let's let's pop into some of the more common questions that I've been seeing over the past couple months since we've done this. We try to do this quarterly or every so often to comb through some of the hot topics, right? Okay. So Desktop Pro and Premiere. This is a huge hot topic, especially for accountants who have still have desktop clients, the the chicken little end is near sky is falling insert your own Monica here. Exactly, but, this year is really interesting when it comes to what's happening with pro and premier and desktop, right? Sarah had asked, so am I missing something or the only purchase options for 2024 either enterprise or QBO? It appears that way on the website. And that's also the indication we're getting from our cloud service provider. And then they edited to add, and there's a link in the slides for to go directly to that post, but it is very confusing and puzzling about needing to purchase desktop pro and premier. So we wanted to talk a little bit about some of the things that are happening this coming year, right? If you want to purchase Pro and Premiere, you gotta call Intuit, right? Um, Intuit has painstakingly removed Pro and Premiere desktop, and this is for Mac as well as Windows, from retail establishments. You used to be able to get your Depot and, or Costco and purchase a, it was basically a download in a box, which was weird, but you buy a box. And that would give you the the license number so that you could download it in on your computer. But they've gone through the entire retail channels. You can't buy it on Amazon. You can't buy it. You can't even get it through a QuickBooks solution provider anymore. So the only way to get it is to go and call into it, which now leads the question or, leads the conversation to. Hey, have you thought about QuickBooks Online which now has a, has this problem with okay, you as an accountant or bookkeeper, accounting professional have recommended, oh the 2021 is going to sunset or service discontinuation. You gotta upgrade. And the only place to do that is by calling Intuit, but they're going to have this conversation about QuickBooks Online during that process. It is weird and it puts, you as an accounting professional and Intuit on the Opposite sides of the fence because all you're trying to do is service your clients and get them what they need. And they have to call Intuit, which Intuit's doing what Intuit does and has those conversations. And on top of that in, on 7 31, they're not gonna be selling. They're not even going to be selling new subscriptions to QuickBooks Pro Premiere Plus. There's too many P's in that sentence, right?

Michelle Long: 14:59

It's a positively perfect alliteration.

Dan DeLong: 15:03

And then they have payroll, the PPP on top of that. But on 731, they're not going to be selling any new subscriptions. In theory anybody who's on ProPremier Plus. We'll be in a subscription at that point because 2021 is the last year's version of QuickBooks desktop that you could buy a standalone product, right? There's no phone number for QuickBooks desktop sales you, you scrape through their website and you what do I got to do? It's really hard. We found I found a link to purchase QuickBooks to purchase it online. You're not purchasing QuickBooks. Online, you're purchasing QuickBooks Desktop. If I click on it, we'll see what happens here. So this is available to you. It allows you to be able to just purchase QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus, or QuickBooks Desktop Premier Plus, or QuickBooks Desktop Mac Plus, right online. Don't even have to talk to Intuit and and just give this to your client and say, Hey, if you got to upgrade and get yourself into a subscription, please do this here because you're not going to be able to do this after 731. And as long as you're in a subscription it, it, that should allow you to stay in that subscription until Intuit changes the game again. Any thoughts about that?

Michelle Long: 16:31

So Dan, can you address the how does this affect us as pro advisors? Okay. Because some people were saying wait a minute. I keep buying the pro advisor program because I need it for conversions. And I mentioned the conversion tool. So can you talk about how does this affect us as pro advisors and the pro advisor program and all of that? So can you address us specifically? And the accountant's version and everything. So you mentioned that, okay, for us buying for our clients, we can avoid calling into it by going to this link that you found and let's hope it keeps working. And I think you said that you think it, you think input to it, put that there as a response to feedback from us from accounting professionals. Because this

Dan DeLong: 17:18

is yeah, this is a link, it's, if I look at the site here, it's QuickBooks dot Intuit dot com. This is and then it's got email final desktop plus sale, right? And this is this is a way to, to be able to order it. Now, I don't know if you can get multiple seats, right? Because of this is saying, desktop pro plus, and that's 6. 49 a year, which is a one seat license. However if that's all your customer needs, they can certainly do that. And so to answer your address your question about. Pro advisors, right? So there's a premier and an accountant desktop add on that you can add to your pro advisor membership, which, was the way it was before where you paid for it. And then they started to do the QBOA accountant and there was a free member, free only. And then you had the desktop Adam. So you have this. Online only ProAdvisor, and then Premier, which is the Premier Accountant Edition. And then Enterprise, which is the Account Enterprise. Mac, they also got Mac as well as Point of Sale. But those two ships have sailed, so that's really just. Enterprise. So if you have clients that you still need to service and they're sending you your file, sending you their file back and forth, and you're doing something inside of your own version of QuickBooks, then you still want to have that desktop add on to be able to access those products. You'll have. The the current year's ver when you sign up for for that add-on, you get the current year's version and every other version that comes on after that, right? So if you sign up today, which I don't even know if you can today, right? Today. But if you sign up today you're gonna get 2024. And presumably if there is a 2025 each year that ha that has a new version, we'll. Will be automatically part of your camps account your Intuit account. So you'd be able to download that from there. So if you have those clients, you want to have, you will want to have that desktop add on. They are forcing that conversation by steadily increasing the prices of all of these. I think it's now 29 12. 99 for the Enterprise and 7. 99 for the Premier, which is a yearly commitment on, on your part. It's a yearly subscription. But it doesn't stop. If you stop the subscription, that's one of the unique things about the accountant desktop add ons and and users, if you stop your desktop add on. The versions of QuickBooks that you've already downloaded and are using will still continue to work as of today, right? Knows what happens tomorrow? But as of today, if you stop your, cancel your enterprise subscription with pro advisor desktop add on or the premier. Those will still function in perpetuity, right? Enter the service. Discontinuation is only going to affect versions that are no longer supported for additional services, online services, like payroll payments the accountants transfer service downloading, um, currency exchange rates, those types of things are only in only dealing with with that. Did that answer the question?

Michelle Long: 20:49

Yeah, I think that was very helpful. And a lot of people were saying, because I mentioned the conversions, but a lot of people were pointing out that you need to clean up desktop prior to converting. Exactly. And yes, I understand that. Some people pointed out that they like to use the list and start a fresh file and online. And I agree with that, like exporting a list from desktop, clean them up and then import the list into QBO and go from there. I understand that too. There's a lot of different options. As a matter of fact, I'm doing a session on converting from desktop to online at Scaling New Heights in June. So I hope to see you guys there, but yes, there's a lot of options. I just wanted to make you aware if you guys didn't realize it, there, there is a tool now. For converting from desktop to online. So if you don't want to buy desktop anymore, you don't have to. There is that conversion tool. You can log in remotely, use the client's file to export those lists if that's what you do and clean up the list and then use that conversion tool to do it the other way if you want to do that. So there's different ways that you can do things. So we're just making you aware of all

Dan DeLong: 21:50

these different things. Exactly. All right. And then there was this other post that we saw about what payroll service do accountants use, which I really found this really interesting because people were asking, this person, Amber was asking what payroll service do you use for your own bookkeeping accounting CPA firms? What's the cost? Payroll taxes get auto drafted, positives, negatives. Does it, it's been great. And how difficult is it to fix problems? Does it integrate with QBOA? Just don't, please elaborate. Just don't name the company. I'm in the industry. I want to know most of the vendors, right? And I found it really interesting how much people were not mentioning. QuickBooks payroll through this whole process. There was OnPay, there was Gusto, there was Patriot, there was ADP, there's people that use QuickBooks desktop payroll. But then I finally popped in and I'm like, you get it for free. I know. QBO elite payroll. When you're in QBOA it's included. And And then they commented and said, yes, we were using it. We don't want to. So here's an example. They can't give it away.

Michelle Long: 23:05

Even when it's free. Nobody wants to use it. That's bad. Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 23:10

Yeah. So I was curious and that's our next poll. Is that, did you know that elite payroll is free for QBO account? We'll go ahead and launch that. Oh, where'd it go? Oh, it's up here. Yeah, I have four monitors.

Michelle Long: 23:30

That's the problem. Do you, is your cursor a big red cursor? So you can at least find it on your four monitors,

Dan DeLong: 23:36

Dan? No, I have to. It's a Mac, so if I shake it like this, it gets big. Ah,

Michelle Long: 23:44

so see, I always make mine a big red cursor so I can find it easier. That's always helpful. But yeah, this is one of the things that always surprises me when we're doing training and stuff. Is, asking people, did you realize that as a pro advisor, this is one of your benefits is that you get payroll free and a lot of people don't realize that probably 50 percent of the people there don't realize that, but like you just pointed out, okay, of the 50 percent that realized a lot of them don't want to use it anyway. Yeah,

Dan DeLong: 24:13

that's why I wanted to ask the poll here of what is it that did you even know it was a neat was an option and if you're not using it, why aren't you using it's interesting to see some of the options in here coming through and it was it's like we're almost at full participation from the poll, but I see things yeah. I have trust, some people have trust issues when Intuit is dealing with their money. Maybe they got it's once bitten, twice shy type of thing, right? If there was a billing issue with the wholesale billing or something that they had in the past I'm going to trust them with my payroll either or something like that. So I'm going to end the poll here really quick, and I'm going to share that so people can see the see the results. 41 percent say, I knew about it's free, and I'm still not going to use it. And then some are currently using it, and then 40 percent of the folks said, it's news to me. Didn't even know it was a, was an option. But I'm interested about the, this follow up question. If you don't use elite payroll, why not? Some people don't use QBO for their books. So that's about 25%. Most of it is that you're happy with your current payroll service. So that's it's it's quite an undertaking to change your payroll service at any time of the year, especially if it's mid year. You really have to have An event in order for that to really want to really want to change that or you don't have payroll, if you don't have if you don't have employees, you don't need the payroll service. That's another option. So that was an interesting post. I just found it so intriguing that. It took a while for somebody to mention QBOA payroll, like the elite payroll service, like it was immediate, like no, no QBOA payroll, like that's the whole idea of why they're giving this stuff free, right? Like you, if you use, uh, the, your books for for your practice and you use the payroll then, uh, two things are going to happen. You're either going to like it and recommend it, or you're not going to like it and not recommend it. I think that's a case for QBO

Michelle Long: 26:19

payroll. I do want to throw one thing out there, because over the last, I don't know, year or two, I know QBO payroll has come a long way, because a lot of the complaints were, it was really difficult to void a paycheck, or correct a paycheck, or make corrections, or things like that. And I know QBO payroll has made a lot of improvements and listen to a lot of the feedback, and they have made a lot of changes and improvements in those areas. If you haven't looked at it recently, you might, give them another look and see some of the updates over the past year. Give them a shout out for listening to the feedback and making

Dan DeLong: 26:53

improvements. At least use it as a sandbox, right? So that maybe you can test things out and see if that functionality works for you or your clients. Before, truly dissuading people from it or recommending it. Alright, so moving on. This was another interesting where a journal entry was not matching. In the bank feed situation was there was a credit card charge in the bank feed. There's a journal entry for the same dollar amount on the same date. Journal entries in the bank feed seem to have this hit or miss when it kind of matches. Now, this particular person who posted this, they did put screenshots of the fine match. The transaction was posted by Bookkeep. A lot of people were asking why are you entering a a multi currency transaction on a journal entry to begin with? That's the way that BookKeep works is it sends the journal entries into QuickBooks. And what this ultimately boiled down to was the fact that it was multi currency. And Hector even tried to duplicate this issue in the comments. And That's ultimately what the, why it didn't match is because the multi currency was turned on. You could see in the screenshots that he posted that, it was, there was an exact dollar amount match. And these are one of these things that you scratch your head and go like, why not? Why does it not match? But I thought that was an interesting fallout that if you are using multi currency and journal entries are being posted those bank feeds may not match the way you wanted them to. This next one is a real big one that we want to spend a little time on. Robin unfortunately had a situation where she was doing a lot of these conversions for her clients, and inadvertently overwrote her own data the, your books data with the client data. Basically everything got wiped out because as when you when you log in or convert from desktop to online and you choose the eligible company, it's going to list all of your clients or all of the companies that, that your login is tied to that are eligible to be. Imported into. Now, the your books that's in the QBOA is one of those companies that has an extended import window. Not quite sure why, we can all theorize as to why that is. But when I was there, it was 20 years. You could import into 20 years. And I think the as I recall, The thought behind that is that you won't be able to see the clients that are eligible if the firm wasn't eligible to be brought into. So that's why they made that import window so large for the, your books. The challenge is if you inadvertently choose Use that set of books which meaning your books that you're using And this might be why people don't use your books Is you can overwrite your data and that's what happened, to this individual and unfortunately it involves um there's no restore point. The data is overwritten. And it involves an engineering escalation. And it's a long manual process. And I think she's still in this situation where it's not been rolled back. But if you are using the firm books the yearbooks for your firm and the QBO payroll it's basically over Everything's overwritten. She couldn't run payroll. She couldn't bill her clients because that data was gone, right? There is an online backup service for online advanced companies, right? Intuit acquired a company called Chrono Books some years ago.

Michelle Long: 30:52

Dan, before you move on, can we go back? Because I just want to share a story with you here. Because I didn't think this could happen. And I, I know on that post. A lot of people were saying no Anyway, so so years ago I did have this happen where a client was importing a client's books. They were converting, so they were converting from desktop to online and they had several companies that had a similar name, blue sky, that blue sky, blue sky, auto repair, blue sky, whatever. They accidentally overwrote another company of theirs, another client, and they call, they had been to one of my trainings anyway, long story short, they called me almost literally, this is a grown man, almost in tears. Because he realized what he had done and he's begging what can you do? I don't want to get sued and all this long story short Intuit, you know says they cannot do this, but Intuit was able to help this client I don't know how but they were and so they say they can't and I know it's a very rare occurrence Like they can't always But somehow they were able to.

Dan DeLong: 32:06

Yeah, you don't want to rely on this as a, as an

Michelle Long: 32:09

option. That's why, it does happen. So in this case, it was your book, but it can happen to any of us. Where we get click happy when we're converting a client file and you accidentally hit the wrong client name. So that's why, Dan, you're getting ready to talk about the backup feature. It is so critical. We don't have to back up all of our clients all the time, but if you're doing something, like converting or doing some of these things, it's a good idea to have this backup feature that you're getting ready to talk about because it can save us from a critical error because you may not be able to get it back. It's

Dan DeLong: 32:47

not, yeah, it's not perfect. And, you don't want to re you don't want to rely on the Intuit engineering escalation to roll back your books. So in, in QuickBooks online, there is a backup service for QuickBooks online advanced only. And unfortunately that doesn't. QBO accountants, even though you're on advanced, you don't get it, right? Partially because it's your QBO account accountant is a little bit different than a, than an end user subscription, right? Your client. Backup, if you're using Pax Connect or Pro Connect Pax, all those things are added caveat to the QuickBooks Online accountant experience. So there, and there was a time where they tried to turn it on and then they had to turn it off again. So you may be, you may have it available but it may not be, currently backing up for you for QBO accountants. But it's only available for QBO Advanced, which I thought was a really weird solution. Because it's redundantly backed up, right? Meaning that when you save something, when you save an invoice, it is backed up, not just in, one cloud, but also multiple clouds. The data itself is redundantly backed up in, in the online Nebula, Nebula server somewhere. But the thing about the online backup service and advanced it's restore points only and not all data is going to be backed up anyway. So if you're running payroll, it's really, it's, it's super challenging even for Intuit to back up its own data with regards to payroll. In this person's situation, if they did have this service, which they wouldn't have been able to because it was their QBOA they at least would have been able to get their financial data back up and running and and then be able to, reenter payroll, figure that out. But one of the things they do offer. With this online backup service is a copy option. So you could feasibly copy your data or copy a data file from one one to another. Again, not everything comes over, especially if you're using payroll. But it's a, the lion's share is gonna move things over. And then when we had, um, the author of the. GBO for Dummies book, he has a way of actually downloading all of this data through this this service and just utilizing it in Excel. So you can check those out, check that prior power hour as well. But what about everyone else? If you're not using, if you're on QBO accounted or if you're on Plus or Essentials, right? You're SOL when it comes to The online backup service because you can't even sign up for it even if you wanted to inside of quickbooks online, so we had a rewind on a few years back they offer a great online backup service. I do this one over the chronobooks because it Not only does it do a restore point, but it also does individual transactions. Michelle, you were talking about the people that are click happy, right? They deleted a huge invoice. You can actually go in and just restore that one transaction. So there, that's a really cool caveat to all of this. And they do have an accountant program where it's discounted for your firm five bucks. So it's only going to be their data that they're able to back up and they're going to be restricted just like Intuit's chronobooks is by the API. So if you're running payroll, they won't be able to copy the payroll data, but it is going to be the financial data that is inside of the firm and the yearbook. And one of the neat parts about their Accountant program is that you can add this as a service for your clients, right? So hey you're gonna, you're not gonna be able to back up your data or you could sign up for this service too, or I could sign it up for you as well and manage your backups in my portal. If you had 100 clients it's normally 14 a month for QuickBooks online. It could be discounted to 5. 67 per client, right? You could charge them whatever it is you want to charge them, right? Less than that, less than the 14 or what have you just to maintain that. And you'll still have, access to the, to their Their services as well. So this is a great option for QBO accounts. If you don't do anything five bucks a month to back up your QBO, QBO, a data, not a bad idea because this person could have restored all of the, all that information. At least the financial information got their payroll back up and running, by working with the elite payroll service, because that's what they're giving away. And they're on the hook for paying the taxes and filing on time. So they have a vested interest in getting that back up as well. Any thoughts or questions about that, Michelle? I was rambling on.

Michelle Long: 37:43

No, I just think it's a great idea. And some people might say, Oh it does back out payroll, so I don't want to use it. You know what, getting everything but payroll is still worth it. So you can get the payroll records from the filings and do journal entries if need be. You can recreate those and enter that manually if you had to. It's better to have a backup of a part of everything but payroll than no backup at all, when you're desperate, getting that backup is well worth five bucks a month,

Dan DeLong: 38:12

Exactly. Yeah. This other one this was an interesting post because we had into it on the talk about the QuickBooks live tax service that was that was going to, that's going to start to be being offered to you, to your clients. This was an interesting one because this was a chat that the customer. Was talking directly with an Intuit support agent. And you can see by the screenshot at the end they were done. They started pitching them on the QuickBooks live. service. So it was it's one of those, Hey, wait a minute, where'd this, where did this one come from? Because they're already connected to an accountant. They can see that by looking at their their subscription information and see all of those things. And the fact that the pro advisor is the primary admin of the subscription, but made it even more of a, more of an issue, I think for what was happening here. But, here it is, Intuit is soliciting the the, its own bookkeeping services to clients who are connected to an accountant. Something that they would say we don't do everything perfect. But somebody had it in their, I can attest, you don't add these things unless you're told to, right? Someone told this person to make sure that they're offering this on the, at the close of their chat It's in their script.

Michelle Long: 39:48

It's in their guide of what they're supposed to be doing and saying when they're doing stuff. It's in there. It is. It says you're supposed to ask them about this, unfortunately. So, the thing of it is, and this is where I have such mixed feelings about this, because yes, Intuit is competing with us, but so are all these other companies out there. And the reality is, the vast majority of us don't have the capacity to do all these tax returns anyway. We don't have the capacity for more 1040 clients and stuff like this anyway. But it's just annoying. It's annoying that Intuit does it and they say they don't do it, but they are doing it and we see them doing it, but they say, Oh no, we're not doing that. And they are, and so it's annoying that they're competing with us like this for our clients. And so

Dan DeLong: 40:37

I don't know. Linda brought up a good question. Is this solicitation perhaps from AI? Now, when I was there and I was, a chat agent, through the multitude of things that I did for Intuit, they had these things called canned responses, right? So like when you close your chat I would still have to initiate that canned response usually there's a survey or something like that, that way I don't have to type all of those things that certainly could be something that, that's part of their offloading, process and maybe the individual didn't go through the process of typing all of this stuff, or they could have just copied and pasted it from something because it does look very verbose of what they said. Oh, I'm sure.

Michelle Long: 41:24

Yes.

Dan DeLong: 41:24

Yeah.

Michelle Long: 41:28

They just hit a key and it goes out there. Yes it's, but, the thing of it is this is it's where things are going because the basic, compliance work, be it bookkeeping, be it tax, is being automated, is going to AI, and that's just what's happening with QuickBooks Live and with TurboTax Live, Intuit is actually after the data and everything, so they can train AI to automate these tax returns and automate the bookkeeping and everything with AI. And so this is, in my opinion, this is pure opinion and conjecture and speculation, but That's part of what QuickBooks Live is all about is getting all that data and training AI for their financial models so that they can automate all of that so AI can do that and that's the same thing that I think, in my opinion, they're doing with TurboTax Live and everything is the more tax returns they get and they complete, the more they can train the financial models to do The tax return and the things like that and stuff. And we're just going to see more of the basic tax returns being done by AI. And Intuit, I think, is getting that so that they can use that data for training AI to train the financial models. And, so many of us don't have the capacity. So I don't know if we should worry about these. 40 clients anyway. Somebody mentioned in the chat that we need to have a relationship with our clients to where it's a personal relationship and we're consulting with them and we're partners with them in their business and we're doing advisory and consulting and we're not worried that when Intuit comes along or anybody, whether it's Intuit or Pilot or Bench or any other competitor and comes along at a cheaper price, we should not be competing on price. If your client is going to come along and go to the next cheapest person, you're going to lose that client anyway. We don't want to compete on price.

Dan DeLong: 43:27

Somebody said in the Facebook group that I was the best cat agent ever.

Michelle Long: 43:33

Yeah, you are. Yes,

Dan DeLong: 43:35

but I didn't pitch any services.

Michelle Long: 43:38

I was so thrilled when you were like, hey, I'm available. So I was like, great. So anyway, yeah. I don't know. It's just a sore subject because they're a partner with us. As well. Yeah. So that's

Dan DeLong: 43:55

why we're going to use air quotes now for that, because I think somebody mentioned that in the chat, it was flying by that, they, we are partnered. And that partnership has taken a different course over the years. And we had we had a poll question a couple of hours ago. Do you feel into it is in direct competition with your practice? And of the people that, um, that answered almost half that it had no impact on their business. Great, that's great great to hear that it doesn't matter. The shenanigans of Intuit with regards to the QuickBooks Live or the tax services or what have you. Ha twice as many people have said, they've lost clients than they've actually gained from these services. So that was a little bit of an eyeopening to me. I saw Jeff mentioned he lost five clients from from QuickBooks to QuickBooks Live. So it is one of those things that, you know. be cast out, like Rush would say or this is where we need to evolve. Like you were mentioning, to and crawl on the land. You know what

Michelle Long: 45:03

though, just wait, cause it'll change too. You may lose five clients now and in another year or two, you may get 10 more because of it. Yeah,

Dan DeLong: 45:15

exactly. All right. This other post here is about does anybody else keep getting bumped out of QBO today? It's happened like twice in the last hour. This is one of those things that if Hector was here, he would say, this drives me bonkers getting kicked out of QuickBooks online. I really wish that there was an offline mode for for QuickBooks and QuickBooks data. So that when things happen on the internet, or you don't have an active internet connection that you can actually work in your QuickBooks file, and then when you do have an internet connection, that information gets segregated synch, synchronized. That's the word I'm looking for. But there's tons of questions in the Facebook group. Is QBO down? I'm getting kicked out. I can't log in. I have to log in. into an account on the desktop. Lots of lots of questions and lots of answers for various login posts but one of the things I did want to mention is there is, and there still is a QuickBooks online desktop app which is which could keep you logged in presumably for six months, right? So when you download the desktop app and and sign in. You don't have to keep signing in or you don't get kicked out throughout the day, right? There is a Preference inside of each company file of how long you stay signed in and you can do up to three hours Six months is a little bit longer than that, but you can access multiple companies a similar Navigation to desktop you can set up a desktop view and for those people who are more comfortable with quickbooks desktop It looks a little bit more like desktop then it does with with then QuickBooks Online. You can clear cache temporary internet files whenever anything shows up weird. You can clear cache in that. But, yeah, it's only good for QBO only. Anything that your QuickBooks needs to communicate with your computer might be a challenge to printing. Things like that. And then, of course, all of your write tool extensions. All of those we can do a square by write tool by Hector won't be accessible in in the app. There are some drawbacks to that. But, it is, if you're just dealing with getting kicked out of QBO just for inactivity. This might be a good alternative. Michelle, were you going to say something?

Michelle Long: 47:37

Yeah, one thing I did want to point out about the desktop app is if you're like me and you tried it a couple of years ago and you said, oh my god, this sucks, I hate it, I'm going back to Chrome, you might check it out again because Intuit pulled it and revamped it and did a v2 whatever and relaunched it. So this is a newer updated version that Dan is talking about here. So if you haven't checked it out lately, you In the last few months, I'd say, go give it a try again. And, if nothing else, if you're having a problem with QBO, use this. If, one afternoon you're getting kicked out all the time, use the desktop app.

Dan DeLong: 48:14

Yeah, because that's the first thing that Intuit Support is going to tell you. Did you clear your cache and cookies? Did you try another browser? That's my best Intuit support impression. But that, that's what they'll tell you first. So it's always a good idea to, beat them to the punch and say, hey, yes, I've done that already. It was a little side There was one person I was trying to help in Connecticut, and I was in their QuickBooks in Florida, and they asked me the same thing. I was like, wait a minute, we're in two different companies two, two different states, two different computers. Why would you have me clear my cache and cookies for this issue? Because they're seeing the exact same thing that I am. But, I humored them and did it anyway. All right. So let's talk a little bit. We were coming in on the end here, so we really don't have much to talk about with QBO updates. I think we'll have to table those for another power hour. But I did want to see mention that Chase bank now statement downloads are finally available inside of the bank feeds. I have a Chase bank account for my business and I tested it out and it worked. Me too. So finally, you can. You can get your case case statement in your QuickBook. So I wanted to point that out there. I did wanna have this last poll question of, in the last year, what has been your opinion of QuickBooks or Intuit? Has it increased, improved, stayed the same, decline, maybe you want to put out some other unmentionables or it

Michelle Long: 49:51

won't let me answer the poll. I will refrain from answering, but anyway, so this has been great Dan. for pulling out some great discussion topics here. Always lots of good stuff and I do appreciate everybody joining us during this busy time of year. So that's always awesome. Awesome. So I think that's great. All

Dan DeLong: 50:18

right. So next up next could be power hour. We're going to be talking about the shopify commerce integration inside of QuickBooks and also have we integrate for those of you that it doesn't work really well for. So we'll have another, great session with with the QB power hour. And it's always great to see you. So go hit the slopes, Michelle, and, or at least watch your husband go down the slopes and we'll see you next time on the QB power hour.

Michelle Long: 50:47

Thanks everybody. Thanks, Dan. Have a great day.