QB Live Assisted Updates

Dan and Michelle discuss the recent announcements in Intuit's QB Live Offering and unpack the Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.

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

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0:06

You are listening to the audio portion of the QB Power Hour webinar series. The QB Power Hour is a free, bi weekly webinar series for accounting professionals presented by Michelle Long and Dan DeLong, who are very passionate about the industry, QuickBooks, and apps that integrate with QuickBooks. You can find out all the details about the webinar series at qbpowerhour. com. So without further ado, here's Michelle and Dan.

Dan DeLong 0:30

So welcome to off the cuff this panel discussion of the QB Power Hour. We're going to be just sharing our thoughts and not a presentation today. So Michelle and I are joined by Matt Fulton and Will English. There they are. And Will's joining us from space looks like today. How can you breathe up there, Will?

William English 0:54

Got oxygen.

Dan DeLong 0:56

They're very good. Very good. So we are just going to go around and introduce ourselves and then we'll jump right into the topic and just take it from there. My name is Dan DeLong owner of the and School Bookkeeping and, we used to work at into it for 18 years. So we're just, pleased to have you here. Michelle, go ahead and introduce yourself.

Michelle Long 1:18

Hi, everyone, I'm Michelle Long, owner of Long for Success, and very glad to be here and just want to give Matt and Will time. Matt, or go ahead.

Matthew Fulton 1:26

Hey, everybody, Matthew Fulton. I'm with Parkway Business Solutions and QB Community Live, the Facebook group. Honored to be a part of this discussion today. Thank you so much. so much.

William English 1:40

Yeah. So actually worked for Intuit 93 to 96, had my own business and I sold that. I got bored with retirement. So Intuit offered opportunities. So I joined them and

Dan DeLong 1:55

here we are. And thank you both for joining us in your time today in this, pretty hot topic of what we're going to be discussing today. And It's, if you look at the four of us here we really have, some unique, different perspectives of the QB live offering and the announcement that we're going to be, unpacking here today. I started at Intuit and left in 2018 Will seems to have a revolving door, started at Intuit for a couple of years, went to his own practice and is now back. And is actually one of the team leads for the QB live assisted service that we're going to be talking today. So we almost have like different or almost opposing not opposing, but, just different tracks journeys that we have. And then Michelle, you have an interesting tie into the QB live. You want to talk about that a little bit?

Michelle Long 2:51

Yeah, so my tie in to Intuit and then as well to the QV Live. So I started as one of the contract trainers for Intuit back in late oh seven on the What's New Tour for 2008. So I was a contract trainer for Intuit and had that relationship for Intuit for what, 16 years or so. But then my son, who is a CPA and had gosh, about three or four years, maybe five years of experience before he went. To QB live, but when they were first starting QB live in Boise, he was one of the first people that they hired as the team of QB live. So he is a CPA. He did have experience and everything, but he was one of the first team up in Boise when they first started it and kicked it off and everything. So he did work for QB live as one of the bookkeepers probably for three to four years before he quit. And got married and started gallivanting all around South America for a number of years. And with QB life, you have to work in the U. S. You cannot work outside of the U. S. And so that is why he quit. And I get a little sensitive when everybody's like, Oh, all the QB life, and I imagine Will does too. All the QB life people are terrible and they don't know what the hell they're doing. And that's one of the things where it's just like with any profession, Some accountants and bookkeepers may not know what they are doing, but not all of them. And that might be true for some of the QB Live bookkeepers, but not all of them. It's true in any profession. They don't, that's not the situation with all of them. So I get a little sensitive to that, but I do have a little insight from that perspective from Andrew working as a QB Live bookkeeper. He was a CPA working there. So I've got some of that perspective as well.

Dan DeLong 4:39

And then Matthew, do you have any ties to QB

Matthew Fulton 4:42

Live

Dan DeLong 4:43

or Intuit or how do you fit in this?

Matthew Fulton 4:46

Real quickly, everybody who's watching here in the comments, if you're like me, you probably learned a lot about QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks from Michelle. So could you imagine somebody that was related to Michelle? Knowing QuickBooks definitely validates the fact that there are people that know what they're doing there for sure. Cause I just can't imagine anybody related to, to not understanding the stuff. I do not have any connection to QB live. Haven't you, haven't worked for them thought about a long time ago Hey, health insurance could be a good way to do it that way, but have never actually worked for them at all. But I have definitely done some work on the back end of some of those files,

Dan DeLong 5:26

and you were part of the into a trainer writer network so you do have some, connection to to into it that way but as far as. Employment side of things never wore an Intuit badge or anything like that.

Matthew Fulton 5:41

No, and it gives a great opportunity to bring up one point that there are certain members of our communities that were very fortunate to have a relationship with Intuit to hear about certain things, maybe a little bit sooner than other people. And. They do that to give us the opportunity to help, calm everybody down, having have our insights into everything else. The reason we do that, it gives us the opportunity to help be your voice at times as best we possibly can. Never been connected to Intuit on that side, but I'm definitely proud to be able to have those relationships to hopefully help others in the future with other things.

Dan DeLong 6:21

All right. So let's talk a little bit about what it is that we're gonna. I'm going to, I'm going to talk about. So let me share my screen and you guys will tell me if I'm sharing the right screen this time or not. All right, this should be the firm of the future article. So I did put in the chat there the replay link, which, which has. The link to this article directly here. So you can always go to that and take a look at the, what it is that we're actually talking about here today. I've also included some other things like my blog about, my, my impression of what this might be and what this might look like for the accounting community Hector's video about, Him, him unpacking this as well as Alicia Katz Pollock's blog as well. Various different perspectives from those in the accounting community. What is, what has happened, right? Starting recently Intuit has created a QuickBooks Live Assisted Bookkeeping Offering. And this is going to be a something that is whether you're connected to an accountant or not in a QuickBooks online subscription. This is going to be. Visible, and we wanted to unpack that and list what it is, what it's designed to be and what it's designed not to be and how this kind of affects people who are connected to a client as an accountant and what this really works out to be. So I'm going to toss this out to Will, since he is a QuickBooks live team lead Just talk a little bit about what that is. What your day-to-day is or and just set the stage there. Could you give us a, an insider view of What is the QB lot? Yeah.

William English 8:07

Not a problem, Dan, first of all. I need to say that this is all my personal opinion. No official word coming down on high, nor do I push anything up. This is more of a day of the life. So the idea is with Intuit Expert assist now is the we want to be able to help those people that are underserved a lot of people. Honestly, they're looking to do it themselves. They're looking for a little bit of help and we're here. So the idea is that we're going to take a call. We have a queue. People basically request the callback through the software. And we try to limit the call to one issue. So the idea is that someone will call in and say, Show me how to do X. I want to do this. And occasionally we'll have to unpack what they've done and figure out, because especially with rules and a lot of those things that QuickBooks are, it gets suggested, it will mess up books. And so we help them unravel that. That's not to say that, we're going to help them do the bookkeeping. What ends up happening is we use a tool within the product. That allows us to point out on their screen and we give disclaimers, we're saying you're doing, these are your books, we're not doing this for you, you're doing it, and so the idea is we, we try to keep a box and we stay in that box.

Dan DeLong 9:39

Now I guess so, so the general idea is it's 50, 50 a month for this for this service. And it's all direct paid by the end customer. When I first saw. What this was it reminded me of me, I worked there it was the lane that I occupied in customer care that I was a seasoned QuickBooks user and I could offer a little bit more of of a, more of a consulting approach to, you What is the best way to do X, whatever that happens to be. Is that what you're finding? Will is weird.

William English 10:21

Yeah, honestly, a lot of our calls were unraveling reconcile problems, right? Parent child credit cards. That's a huge one. And so honestly, we're really in there trying to dig in, but you also, you'll get the calls where it's how do I pay a bill or how do I connect my ex with QuickBooks? So it's just really a variety of calls. Every calls different.

Dan DeLong 10:50

Yeah Michelle has a, I saw. Okay.

Michelle Long 10:53

Yeah, so a couple of things here. 1 of the questions came in and I don't remember who it was because it was in the chat and there's a lot of them in there, but 1 question was, are the people answering the calls? Is that us base? It isn't it? Oh, yeah, that's all U. S. based, right?

William English 11:10

No, it's not offshore, they're all U. S. based. Okay. For the most part, and they all have to have their certification, at least a certification. And for the most part, they are people that are, a few years of experience on up to, like me, who've been here. Okay. And so the idea, you really want to, and we monitor calls, we, there's quite a bit of QA, if that's The underlying premise here is that somehow if it's offshored or somehow that the they're not getting the proper expertise, that's,

Michelle Long 11:43

and they still are going to have the do it. So now that there's this expert live assisted, there's still two different basically. The do it for me and the do it with me. Isn't that correct? Yeah. And I remember Will, and maybe you can still, answer this or back this up or whatever. I remember Andrew saying one of the things that was so frustrating for him is the same thing we have always faced in our practices. Yes. The clients don't, return your calls or answer your questions or get you the information you need or, whatever the client doesn't get back to you. Like you said, reconciling, if you need something or have questions about something that they Still don't respond just like we face those problems as well. So a lot of times the Andrew would say, he couldn't finish something like he'd have five clients that he couldn't finish because the clients would never get back with him and answer his questions or whatever, just like we would face those problems, and here would be some of these clients that would be paying for the monthly service and they couldn't finish the work because the clients wouldn't respond or get back to them or whatever. And so if those clients then would leave. And the QB live didn't finish the job or whatever, it may not be the QB live fault because the client never responded just like with us. So just they would say some of the same problems. But I think aside from the work and who's doing what and all of this stuff, I think personally, the reason so many of us accountants and pro advisors are upset about things is It's the emotional aspect of this because the reality is that Intuit doing this is not really a big threat to us. Because a whole lot of other firms are doing this type of stuff as well, whether it's pilot or bench or other firms, some of the big firms are doing this type of thing as well. So additional, competition for us, this type of competition for these low level clients should not really impact us and our firms because these are not the type of clients that we want or need. Because anytime somebody cheaper comes along, we could lose these clients anyway. So from that perspective, I think the biggest problem we all have is that Intuit for years and years told us. That they weren't going to advertise and go after our clients and they are and I think that on top of and will you can help me with this? Because years ago, the solution providers that used to be an ISP and then a QSP and whatever SP it is, but the solution providers. They changed the residuals. It used to be the lifetime residuals and then it went to 12 month residuals and whatever. They changed some of the residuals and they changed how things work there. And then they changed things from us from a visor perspective. A lot of people felt slighted For recognition for being 25 year pro advisors and just a lot of things have changed just little things over the past. Let's say since Brad Smith left, things have changed over the past few years. It's been changing thing 1 thing after another to where the relationship between into it and us in the account. It's community, it's been changing, and I think a bit, and this is my personal, just like you said Will, this is my disclaimer. This is my personal assumption, and I would love your feedback. Sasan is betting the farm on AI, and I think this is all part of it. From TurboTax Live to the QB Live bookkeeping, it's all about the data. And getting more and more QB live clients so they can feed that into their financial data. Just like you have the LLM, the large language model for chat GPT and these other AIs. They need the financial model to train for tax preparation and the bookkeeping to train their models. That's why they bought MailChimp. That's why they bought Credit Karma. Sassan said he's betting the farm on AI, so they need more and more of these clients to get the data to train that financial model for AI, and they need more experts with QB Live. They don't want us as the experts anymore for the ProAdvisors. They used to promote that Find a ProAdvisor website. You don't see that promotion anymore. It used to be in QuickBooks Desktop. The link was It's there. The promotion was there. They don't really promote that like they used to anymore. That relationship between Intuit and the accountant community, in my opinion, has been deteriorating over a number of years. And this is almost like the nail in the coffin, and that's why people are upset more than anything. Is it's just one more nail in the coffin, in my opinion, that they always said they wouldn't do this, and now they're doing it. It's more emotional reaction than actually the service and this and that. That doesn't really, that to me is not really that big of a deal. These aren't our type of clients that we want. This isn't really a big threat to your practice or it shouldn't be, in my opinion. I think it's an emotional response. What do you guys think?

William English 17:15

Tell me how you really feel, Michelle. I didn't quite get that. Well, yeah. In terms of refer to a pro advisor, and again, this is my personal opinion, but they have really damaged what a pro advisor is. I can take pretty much anywhere, in a weekend and get them certified. So I don't know if it's, they have a fear by referring people back, for us to actually, in fact, third parties, any third party software is like, we can't say, Hey, this is what you should do. This is, so that there are some guardrails around that. So I think part of that is, referring back to a pro advisor. Now we own, we're saying, hey, go to this person to fix them. That, that again, my personal opinion as for the relationship, absolutely. I was a reseller. I, by the luck of whatever I got out at the right time, I sold at the right time because that the whole program is basically gone away. And what I know, my 30 some odd years is life is about change and I've seen pivot points. And so this is another pivot point. So we need to figure out how we're going to deal with that or you guys, because, I'm out of the game. And I really think, for years. Trusted advisor, consultative, CFO, we, there are a number of things that we do not do that are out of scope for this service. And therefore, that's the opportunity. And the other part of that is, you guys, the stuff that you don't want to do, give it to us. Do you really want to man up a support center for 12 hours a day to answer, questions about how do I categorize techs? And honestly, do you really want to try and unravel conciliation that someone, and maybe you get paid, big bucks to do that. But if you go in and someone says, hey, I need you to fix this, you take a look at it and you go, oh, that's going to be 5, 000, or whatever it is. And the customer go, and then, they can sign up and again, they're doing the work. We're not doing the work for them and they'll call and we'll go, okay, here's, you're going to, these are the steps you're going to do. Once you've done those, you call us back. We'll take you through the next step. And the goal here is to get a set of books. Now. Back to your AI. Yeah, absolutely. That's the farm on it, and I don't know that because Intuit own well, they don't they own the data. Anyways, it's on their servers. I do think that they do track the call generators to try and make the product better. I do think that they also track, we all have metrics for everything that we do. Is that being fed up into some big bad engine? Probably so at some point. Yeah, absolutely. Are experts going to wait, go away? Maybe, probably, 20, 30 years from now, but I do think that there's also that human touch every single call. They get a little video of us. We try and establish that relationship. People are graded on the rapport that they create with the customer. So we're, trying to bridge that gap.

Dan DeLong 20:27

I want to make sure that Matt's included in this conversation. What what is your impression initially of this offering, as a, someone who is distinctly not any, Not on either side of the fence as far as the Intuit badge is concerned.

Matthew Fulton 20:46

So I think it's really important that we reset the conversation to remind people there's two different conversations happening here at the exact same time. There's one, which is the bigger front, issue of, QuickBooks live the service itself where they're putting they're actually in the books. That's one part of the conversation but then the primary conversation about what we're talking about today is What I actually and other people prefer to call it is almost the QuickBooks life coaching I think would have been a much better name for it personally because they're again They're not touching the books. They are saying, okay, here you're going to click from here to here to do this type of a thing. So they're, it's still the person's responsible for doing all this stuff and they're not going to sit there on a call. William, tell me if I'm wrong on this, they're not going to sit there for two or three hours and watch you reconcile your accounts. They're going to show you the concepts of how to do it, maybe how to get started, but I don't think they would sit there through all of it. I agree with a lot of what Michelle said pretty much every bit of it, right? This is definitely a, it's a data play with Intuit. I said this before, we have to remember, this is a publicly traded corporation, guys. Their first responsibility is to the shareholders. Do we like it? No, do I miss the days where I felt super important and appreciated because They made us feel all lovey and warm inside. Of course I Do I wish I got free tickets to the Intuit Dome? Heck yes, it would be great, right? But Their responsibility is to the shareholders, and they've got this trajectory that they're moving forward towards. I do believe, and Hector Garcia is one of the people that said it to me very first, many years ago, this is all about having a controlled data set to properly train AI within their own sandbox to some extent. And, I've I personally see this as an opportunity to offload some of the entry level training questions. Um, when I have a client that all of a sudden has, a new employee, as I call boots on the ground, maybe it's a new office manager. How many times have I gone in to go train that employee very, for the very first time on how to just create an invoice or how to do this or how to do that? I would rather be able to set them up and explain to my client, look, we're going to do this because for 50 for the whole month. I'm going to give you a series of questions and tasks. I want you to have them teach you the basics on. And then once they have that, I'm going to teach you the way we want you to do it for your company. Because one thing they can't do is they're not going to be touching applications, integration, cape, again, William, please correct me if I'm wrong on it. But if when it comes to integration, 30 part, third party apps, advanced workflows, those type of details I don't believe that they're going to be providing that kind of support. Do they, William?

William English 23:54

No, absolutely. Yeah, we're basically part of

Dan DeLong 23:58

lane. Lane is what's in QuickBooks, what you can do inside of QBL and teaching them how to do those things within best practices, those types of things which is, good to hear, right? Because those that are outside of that, because as you. As everybody probably is well aware, a lot of the times you can't do everything that you need to do just inside a QVL. And that's where ProAdvisors and, outside experts, come in, come into play. I wanted to ask Will I saw a question in here and I think it got answered here, but on average, right? And you mentioned something earlier about who wants to staff a support center, right? Not me, right? I've been on the other side of that. There's a lot of metrics and, coach to certain things with the QB live assisted. Is that correct? Is that happening? Adding to it, is there a gauge for, the average amount of talk time or the amount of time that you're spending after the call and those types of things? Of course. Everything's

William English 25:07

monitored. Hello? And generally calls run 30 to 45 minutes on occasion, you'll get a 2 or 3 hour call, especially if you're trying to unravel something. We don't encourage that because the idea is that it's not our job to clean up their books. It's our job to show them how to do it. So yes, all of the agents are monitored. If there's a long call going on, one of us will jump on it to see if the agent is struggling or the expert. Sorry, I keep saying that's back to my call center days, but expert is struggling. If they're struggling, then, we hop on, but the goal is truly and they're monitored, and I'm not going to get into specific measures because, that's proprietary, but it's going to change likely to.

Michelle Long 25:57

Yeah,

William English 25:58

and there are metrics for everything. There are metrics for how long an average call should take, how long the after call should take, how long, everything.

Michelle Long 26:06

Yeah,

William English 26:07

change.

Michelle Long 26:09

Yeah, so I think for us in, in. The pro advisor in the accounts community. I think what we need to look at is, a lot of us. Have had our feelings hurt. This is intuitive hurt our feelings from all of the things they've done lately and everything. And so I think one of the things I have thought, is as an accounting professional, we need we should focus on what do we do moving forward. Okay, this sucks. We don't like things that Intuit has been doing or how they've been doing it, or how they've communicated things, whether it's, just banning the TWN or how they've done this or that or whatever. But what do we do about it? We just have to intu. Like everybody said, they're big corporation. They really don't give a crap what we're gonna say because they're gonna do what they've already decided that they're going to do. The decision has been made. They're moving forward. They're just telling us what's happening and really it's done, so I personally would think that sending a mutation to your clients. Hey, you're going to see this in QuickBooks, this live experts tab. This is what it is. This is what I recommend. Don't click it. Don't do it. This is why, you're going to get different people at Intuit who could respond and it may or may not be the right answer for you because they don't know your business as intimately as I do. You may get bad information. It may cost you three times as much for me to fix it and clean up what they've done. So please resist the temptation. Remember, you get what you pay for. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. They're looking for you to get the foot in the door and they're looking for new clients, for QB live bookkeeping, if you have questions, we have these support plans for, this much a month or whatever, or remember, support is already part of our package for your monthly services or whatever, I would send a communication to your clients, telling them about it and alerting them to it and letting them know, Here's what you're going to see. Here's what it is. And this is why you shouldn't click on it and what we have for you or what's included or whatever. If you got quick calls, please send us a text or an email or lithio or however you communicate with your client. But be proactive enough about it and don't wait for your clients to already have clicked on it or done this or that or whatever. But be proactive. And talk to your clients about it. However, you communicate with your clients, whether you're sending them a video or whatever, but communicate with your clients about it

Matthew Fulton 28:46

ahead of time. I'm sorry. This is probably a good point time to real quickly interject. What people see depending on how they're connected, who's paying for the subscription itself. And if I, anybody, if I don't say this correctly, please correct me. Correct me if from my understanding, if an accountant is paying for the subscription, then they will see when they go to log into it they will still see on the side the opportunity for it, but it's going to refer back to your accountant saying you, Hey, talk to your accountant about this, so forth. If the client is paying for their own books, even if they are connected to an accountant. Then they will have the ability to select it and subscribe to it and pay and use that service. Did I say that correctly? I believe

Dan DeLong 29:41

I am I got an impression that they will see live experts regardless of who's paying for it As an option to opt in to the qb assisted live. Is that Will, do you know?

William English 29:54

I honestly don't know based on the article. I think Matthew is correct. That, basically, if it's wholesale billing, then at that point, they get referred back. The tab is still there. But I don't know anything beyond the article. I do,

Michelle Long 30:10

The thing, one of the things One of the things that I would point out to your client is a live expert might be someone like William who has years of expertise. I'd be happy to pay 50

Dan DeLong 30:22

to talk to William.

Michelle Long 30:23

Exactly. That is a bargain. It is truly, he is truly an expert. On the other hand, an expert could be Joe Bookkeeper or, whoever just graduated, Took the bookkeeping training from Intuit Academy, which gives you the one year of experience. Because if you take the Intuit training at the bookkeeping academy, Intuit Academy, if you take that and pass that, that counts as your one year of training, or one year of experience. If you pass that bookkeeping class that they offer at Intuit Academy, you take that's your one year of experience, you can take the book, the QuickBooks certification and pass that, so all of a sudden, you're, you've got the credentials to be a live expert just by taking those self study courses. That's online, open book, open, whatever. So all of a sudden I'm an expert without really having any experience other than online training and online testing. And you're worth 50 bucks, it's not really staying alive. That expert and will is not the same in my opinion.

Matthew Fulton 31:37

So we know that Intuit's gonna watch this hi Intuit. One thing that I would truly suggest, and I, hopefully you guys will agree, I think the best way that they could gain more support of us feeling good about this is I would love to see all of those experts Advanced Certified. And, to show like they're a better minimum level of knowledge and expertise. I'd also love to know more, William, I don't know if you're able to speak to this or not, but I'd like to know what is their ongoing continuing training or updated education as things are changing? Are you able to speak to that at all?

William English 32:21

Oh yeah, no, absolutely. So at Michelle Love you.

Michelle Long 32:24

I'm sorry.

William English 32:25

This whole bashing, communicating with your customer to say these guys are crap. I don't know that I'm not saying. I'm not

Michelle Long 32:34

saying they're crap. I'm just saying they're, they don't know your business the way I do. If I've got a client I've had for five years. They're not going to know your business the way I do.

William English 32:45

That's yeah. That's my point. As opposed to, make it a positive instead of a negative is my own.

Michelle Long 32:53

They don't know your business the way I do. You've been my client for five years. I know your business much better than somebody else is going to, because they don't have the relationship. They haven't been with you for five years. That's my point for your existing clients. I would let these clients know, hey, I, you've been with me this number of years, they're not going to know you the way I do. For your existing clients, I'm saying that. And I don't mean to bash them, I mean talk about me and you and our relationship and how I have the knowledge. About your business, your industry, your goals for your business and things like that, that, that relationship that's already there. I'm not saying bash him at all. You don't have to talk about him. You just have to talk about our relationship and the value that I bring for you to my client. You don't have to say anything about them.

William English 33:44

Yeah. And so I missed your earlier comments then. So thank you for clarifying. As to the training, absolutely. We get training all the time. We have a daily meetings that we're reviewing things. We're reviewing problems. If there are problems with the software, we hear about it pretty quickly. If there are issues that, we have open investigations are. We can get the people over to support to be able to do that. So there's a lot of functionality that we have that we're able to, to service the customer. I'll say, and it's probably not going to make me very popular, but. The, I've seen comments in the about, we brought all these people to into it, and yeah, intuit is a huge marketing. Basically they were started by a Procter and Gamble guy. They are a huge marketing machine. If you didn't bring them, the brand awareness is something that Intuit takes very seriously. I get it, but, and the other part, and again, not going to be very popular is while accountants are a very important customer, they're basically not the customer. The customer is the small business. That's who we're wanting to help here. And accountants, we try to, obviously they get tools and whatnot. Back to, I remember back when I first started, Peachtree was dominant and, accountants hated QuickBooks. But guess what? The customer said, I need you to learn QuickBooks, so I can, you can support.

Michelle Long 35:19

And you know what, Will? There's a lot of small businesses out there that truly can't afford an accountant, and this is great for them. And I love that Intuit is able to help them at a really low cost. Reasonable cost. I don't have any problem with that. The problem is Intuit crossed the line when they started going after our clients. And that's what's really got people's panties in a bunch. And it got everybody upset. It's because they always said they're not going to go after our clients, and now they are.

Dan DeLong 35:51

And I think to, to Michelle

Michelle Long 35:53

that's the big thing that's different. To

Dan DeLong 35:55

Michelle's point To Michelle's point, the, um, the fine line I think that, that's being written here is that, okay, if somebody opts in to QuickBooks Assisted Live, and It becomes out of scope for the QB assisted, who do they refer to? So yeah. Is Intuit going to say you need more than what we have? Are they gonna look and see that they are already connected to accountant and say, Hey, talk to your accountant. Or are they gonna say, we have a full service, live bookkeeping service that we can. You can expand into where, that, that's, I think part of the emotional issue here is that where does the journey go for the customer when it's something that's outside of the scope of the 50 a month service when it needs to go to that, because in my blog I likened this to a gym. You get a gym membership and you have access to all of these. Fun tools, and maybe you know how to use them and maybe you don't, right? And then you need some help to figure it out. And there's going to be people that work at the gym that you can pay a little extra for, and they'll show you how to use the equipment properly. So you don't hurt yourself. No, you're not supposed to use your legs on this arm machine, right? And then there are people that work outside of the gym who are personal trainers that. May tell you go to this gym and use this machine and they'll set up a a routine for you. And then other days, hey, walk on the path outside or ride your bike or do other things outside of the gym. So where does this where does this journey take people to if they start with the QB assisted live and they've reached, okay you need to go to another gym or you need to go to, someone else. Will, do you have any insight on that? Pat, I think that would help with people understanding where this service

William English 37:55

lies. So again, we have guardrails there, if anyone is interested in full service bookkeeping, we have a ton of questions. We ask them to determine if they're in or out of scope from the beginning. There are also a ton of questions that we won't touch. So depreciation, tell me how much I need to depreciate this. It's no, you get the numbers from your accountant. And we'll show you how to enter those, but we're not going to help you. Or what's the split between, my land and my building. And no and we will refer it. We'll say you need to check with your, I don't know the number of times. Where I monitor a call or listen to a recording where basically it's like you need to talk to your accountant about that. Now, we don't say ProAdvisor, but we do say you need to talk to your accountant about that. We're very clear on what we do and we don't do. Every call is recorded and AI, they monitor a ton of stuff. So we take that very seriously.

Michelle Long 38:59

So wouldn't it be great? And why can't you say ProAdvisor? Wouldn't it be great? If we could work together and have a pro advisor work with the QB live expert assistance, because wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to worry about these basic calls and stuff and we had a partnership where we could partner together and have the support calls going to QB live expert assistance and let them handle those easy support calls. How do I pay a bill or how do I do this? And they can say, hey. Talk to your pro advisor about this. I see you're working with Matt, talk to him about that. He's your pro advisor of record and he can help you with that aspect. I can help you with how to add a new bill and pay it on the 15th or whatever, but you need to talk to him about this. Your pro advisor about that. Why are you all not allowed to say, talk to your pro advisor?

William English 39:54

Why

Michelle Long 39:54

not have that partnership? That sounds like a great idea.

William English 39:58

It's back to my comment that it's like, Pro advisor, and it's your comment about the QB Life people. I could take anyone and make them a pro advisor. So it's accounting professional, basically, is what they're talking about. But I do agree that I do think to a certain, a very complex, in my personal opinion, again, no one at Intuit has told me this, no one, I don't even know if they're going to do it, but if we can vet a certain number of pro advisors for certain specific industries. Back in the day, I did a lot of retail and manufacture wholesale. And again, that's back to Dan's comment about apps. So if I have someone who's doing manufacture wholesale. It's yeah, no, let's get them to an expert that can really help them. I do think that there is benefit there. There are opportunities, but bottom line, we're still, again, it's back to pro advisors, a, it's been watered down over the years

Matthew Fulton 40:59

and it's a term they created. I wanted to step back to a

Dan DeLong 41:02

pro advisor for free. You log into a QBOA and now you're a pro advisor. So that doesn't mean that you're any good.

Michelle Long 41:11

Yeah. And actually like the advanced certification used to be very difficult, it still is.

Matthew Fulton 41:19

That's true. Yeah. I had to retake it last year. It was Yeah, it was fun,

Michelle Long 41:23

They did make things significantly easier than they used to be, but will to your point, the basic certification test, heck, it used to be, you could go through and answer a on all of them, you could answer b, because you have four tries and five tries to pass it or whatever. Yeah, mathematically,

Dan DeLong 41:40

you could feasibly pass the certification

Michelle Long 41:42

test if

Dan DeLong 41:43

you were keeping track of your answers. Yeah, you were saying.

Matthew Fulton 41:47

Yeah, I wanted to step back to a question that I saw in the com in the comments that I think was really important, which was, how, so how can we be making money off of this? And I have a couple different perspectives. I remember when QuickBooks Live first came out, I was Grumpy pants about the whole thing too. Initially, and then I started to recognize whatever the price is for QuickBooks Live. It becomes the price floor for all of our services. So the higher the price that goes up, you should never be charging less for your services. As a separate professional on to it, and that's not speaking to whether or not the skills or capabilities of QuickBooks Live, but that's my personal belief on to that part. Another way to be making money off of this, if you've got the ability at 50 for the service, If you wanted to, you could theoretically market up, especially if you're on your billing for 75 or whatever. So if it's 50, be fair people, honestly, don't take advantage, but you could market up a bit. Have them set up to do certain training for you because again That's all time that you're not spending that you could be doing higher value stuff for the client There is a key thing that william was also saying is They're not touching Certain things like depreciation. They're very specific about what they can or cannot do If you recognize that part that means We are still the qualified expert that has the broader range that makes the longer, long term relationship. This specific offering, let's again, focus back onto, this is coaching is what's happening. It's coaching on the product itself. Yeah.

Dan DeLong 43:43

So I think the lane, I think the lane that's really being distinguished here is the difference between can and should write can I do this in QuickBooks and should I do this in QuickBooks? So when it gets to a can yeah, you can do all this stuff. But should you need to talk to your accounting professional in order to get that should, because, that's what I that's the lane that I occupy when I work there. Is that. Yeah, you could put this all to cost a good sold if you want to on this day. QuickBooks is not going to say, no, you can't do that, but maybe your accountant should say that. And that's where the distinguishes between, who's going to answer that question of whether I should do it this way versus whether I can.

William English 44:29

Yep, absolutely.

Dan DeLong 44:33

Is that where you drop

William English 44:34

it? That's

Michelle Long 44:36

a very good point. Yeah. Should should you track inventory? Should you use a third party app? What are the different options? And what's right for your business?

Dan DeLong 44:45

Yeah. Depreciation cost be well,

Michelle Long 44:50

I

Dan DeLong 44:50

cannot answer that, as a, from this side of the fence. Talk to your accountant to figure out what those numbers are. And I'll show you how you can enter that in. And I think someone mentioned earlier and where this, where QB assisted live. Yeah, or it could be live assisted. I'm screwing up the branding. Sorry. At

Matthew Fulton 45:08

least they didn't call it plus, right? Yeah, exactly.

Dan DeLong 45:12

QB live assisted. And now I've completely forgot. Or advanced. Yes. Other topics. I did put in the did launch a poll here, so if you're seeing those in, there's no, Flow to this this session. So I'm trying to throw in these poll questions as as they, they make sense. But I think oh, I remember the, idea of, hey, you know, this can be leveraged, right? Like the QB live assisted can be leveraged. In, in, by, by accountants and as part of the scope of service that pay I don't have the bandwidth, to really be talking to you about, managing the bank feeds or, doing the reconcile if that is, You, Mr. Client is supposed to be doing or whatever it is that you're, what you've already set up. Hey, opt into this service and talk to them. And then they'll be able to. That frees up your time. And of course, the keeps the client's bottom line in. In in perspective as well. It's Hey okay, this is a billable hour or whatever, for me to show, set up time to do this thing. And then that's a. Freeze up your time to be able to focus on those advisory types of conversations or, report generation and having those larger conversations that rather than click here and exclude this transaction because it's downloaded twice or whatever the case may be. That's certainly something that is available. But I did, I went, I wanted to ask, and I think where this where this is expanding from, and somebody mentioned in the chat, isn't QuickBooks support already included with the subscription, like where, why, what is the distinguishing here other than the fact that, okay, I'm getting someone potentially of Will English's caliber of who I'm going to be talking to. Okay.

William English 47:08

Yeah, so that's a good point. So the support and live are two totally separate offerings. Support is, should be more, Hey, I can't, my bang feed is broken, fix it. And we do, we transfer people to support if there are issues that, and we've run through that and we run through all of our troubleshooting and go, yeah, this is a program issue. As we know, there have been a few lately. So we'll go ahead and transfer those over. So the support that's built in the free is technical support as opposed to coaching or bookkeeping. I don't like to use the term. I like what Matthew said. We are there to coach the customer to do their own books. That's it. If they want someone else to do their books, obviously Intuit has an offering, but there are guardrails around that. A bunch of stuff that we don't do full accrual accounting. We don't. There's lots of, there's stuff in there that tells us whether or not they're a good fit for us. And, we won't engage if they're not a good fit. It does it. It doesn't do anyone any good. So back to the question, technical sport versus coaching. Those are the two differences. You pay it for coaching. You don't pay for technical support.

Matthew Fulton 48:26

So William, I got a question for you that I'm sure everybody here would like to know the answer to. And is there a secret pass code to get to tier two coaching instead of being at tier one?

Dan DeLong 48:39

Okay. It was worth a try. I knew that. I knew that. I heard at, when you call Apple, if you say the F word while it's asking you questions, it immediately gets you to a person. But it's sounds like you're frustrated. Let get you to,

William English 48:55

Yeah I started Don't try that with I'm doing No. Be nice. I started it live, supporting the customers. Now I don't do that. I'm supporting the experts on the phone. I miss it sometimes during tax time, a few of us jumped on calls and, took them. And I miss that. I get miss that, satisfaction that aha moment for the customer. But anyways, but no, there is no way necessarily, nor. They cannot request a specific person to call them back. Hey, I love working with you. How do I get you again? Sorry, you go into a queue and I like, when I was on the phone, I just say, Hey, I'm not here 12 hours a day, five days a week. And if I'm on a call. You wouldn't want, if you're not available, I'm not available. Phone tag. Most people were understanding, and again, understand that all of our, I, go ahead,

Michelle Long 49:48

no I was just gonna say, will I do respect you and all the people that work at QB Live bookkeeping, and all that. I really do. I just think it. It really wasn't handled well, the way into it did this as far as putting it in there for all of the clients that we already have. I think that's where a lot of us got upset about that aspect of it, but I really do think it meets the needs for some of these small businesses and stuff. But I also think in the next, I don't know, 1 or 2 years. I feel like it's almost there already, but I feel like that the basic bookkeeping and the bank recs are almost already going to be done because of all the AI automation and everything. We've got the bank rules set up and everything, and it's starting to download those bank statements for us and everything. It's almost going to have that whole piece already automated, to where we're doing the depreciation and some accrual entries or some other things. But I think a lot of the bookkeeping is going to be automated for us. And so a lot of the basic stuff is going to be done. And so we really need to be thinking, what are we doing for these clients? And we need to be adding value. And so I think it's time for us to be rethinking our relationship with the clients. If you're doing basic bookkeeping and everything, you've got to be thinking, what value are you adding for these clients? And you have to start thinking about that now. Because it is. A different ballgame than it used to be five years ago, three years ago, two years ago, it's just everything is changing

Matthew Fulton 51:22

We've had over 200 people with us today, which has been phenomenal And I just want to draw attention to the fact that those are all people that are committed to their craft They're here to try to understand what's true Coming. What's changing. So you've already you're already taking those steps to make sure you stay in front of this technology. Just keep doing it. Keep learning. Honestly, the best part about being a small business owner is the exponential learning curve. There's always something new to learn. And I live off of that. William. I have to say, knowing that there are people such as yourself behind the scenes at QuickBooks Live actually makes me feel a bit better about it. It really does. Because I know that there are some intelligent people that have good understandings of understanding of accounting to help educate others and help train other people up. So.

William English 52:10

Thank you for that. You'd be surprised at the number of people that actually do work here in Live that also have their own practice. Yep. So if, like you said, benefits. A lot of people work here because Intuit offers benefits for select time employees.

Dan DeLong 52:28

Yeah, there's another way to make money. I remember the benefits at Intuit are phenomenal. I remember going into the eye doctor and they're like, you work at Intuit, you can get this, because like over any other vision plan. Because you're staring at a screen for eight hours a day, they want to take care of their employee. And they do actually have other, other

William English 52:50

matching for a while, it's and

Dan DeLong 52:54

it's not all, it's not all about the shareholder, I do want to point out that, the customer, the employees and the shareholder is there three main. People that they groups of people and some, and sometimes unfortunately it does, the pendulum does shift. Heavy on one as opposed to the other two. But they do try to strike a balance between those three main shareholders in their practice, people actually are financially connected the employees that, that work there, because, you take care of all of them, that's just a synergy that, that. That drives, drives growth exponentially. But sometimes it's more customer focused. Sometimes it's more shareholder focused. And I think we're in that season of shareholder side of things. And our hope is of course that it can swing back into that sweet spot where, it's actually driving forward. Michelle.

Michelle Long 53:47

Intuit has consistently been rated one of the top companies to work for, so it is a great company from that perspective for their employees and everything and it to offer benefits at 20 hours. I know that's one of the things I was thrilled for my son because he had health insurance and everything. So it is great for somebody who's starting their practice, somebody who's not quite ready to retire. I know I even talked to Will, I have one point was thinking, Hey, maybe I'll do this myself to get health insurance, because my husband's retired and I'm thinking, Oh, what am I going to do, about insurance and stuff. And so it is a great opportunity. For people starting their firm, retiring, whatever, so it is a great company and stuff, it's just, we, a lot of accounting professionals, myself included, we've ridden the coattails of QuickBooks and Intuit for years. And there's bound to be relationship issues over the years where we get upset with one another, between Intuit and the accountants. And this is another one of those things where, we get our feelings hurt. But, the saga continues. Yeah. Yeah. The saga continues. Things go on. We have to get over the hurt feelings and say, okay, what do we do now? And how do we move forward? And I think communicating with your clients, this is what's happening. This is why your relationship with me is so important is because of what I know about your company and the value I can ask for your business, focus on what you bring for that company.

Dan DeLong 55:14

Yeah, I took I, I visited with Hector Garcia and his reframe conference up in New York a couple of weeks ago. And, he was talking about, the various things that Have affected the accounting community over the years and this is just another one of those waves, right? You know that's coming in and if you're doing anything about surfing, you know you got to get on that board, otherwise that wave is just gonna come and tumble you over but the waves are gonna keep coming whether you want them to or not and you just got to get it's got to write ride that wave to the shore You Yeah, the

Michelle Long 55:53

only thing that stays the same is changes, right?

Dan DeLong 55:58

Matthew will any closing thoughts from your side?

William English 56:02

I just appreciated the opportunity because again, I know there's a lot of hate and discontent and I've been through it I mean, I've seen my business change to the point where you know I got out and so I think that if we focus in on taking care of the customers Educating them and being consultative will do okay.

Matthew Fulton 56:24

I want to say thank you obviously for the opportunity to be part of this panel. I would like to make a major call to everybody who's watching this. Please be nice to the people when you're calling into QuickBooks live. They deserve it. We are that caliber of people have them help you because if we find that you're not being nice, you're going to get kicked out of the community. So be nice to everybody. Thanks for the chance to to share my thoughts here.

Dan DeLong 56:49

All right. We appreciate everybody joining us today. Many thanks to Will and Matt. Always great to see Michelle. We will see you in a couple weeks in the next QB Power Hour. Everybody have a great day.