Prioritizing QuickBooks Live Assisted Bookkeeping to better partner with you

We’re evolving our QuickBooks Live strategy to prioritize our assisted, do-it-with-me service to deliver greater benefits to you and our shared customers.

Our evolved QuickBooks Live strategy

Connecting People to Experts is fundamental to our mission of powering prosperity for our customers. We connect people to experts through both the QuickBooks ProAdvisor program and our QuickBooks Live services, helping small businesses feel more confident with insights and data that help them prosper. Connecting People to Experts is also a way for us to invest in the growth of the accounting industry, raising awareness of the value you bring to small businesses, which in turn helps drive your growth and success.

We now have a portfolio of QuickBooks Live services that assist small businesses in QuickBooks set-up, bookkeeping, and tax resource support. With our expanded do-it-with-me services, we’re evolving our QuickBooks Live strategy to prioritize our assisted services, and uncover new ways for these services to benefit you and our shared customers.

What’s happening

There are two changes taking place on April 29 we want to make you aware of:

1. We’re changing the name of our QuickBooks Live Assisted Bookkeeping service to QuickBooks Live Expert Assisted. This new name better represents our evolved strategy to prioritize our assisted services in a “do-it-with-me” approach, where Live experts are coaching small businesses on how to get the most of QuickBooks, and answering basic product and accounting questions.
2. A new “Live Experts” tab will appear in the QuickBooks Online left-hand navigation bar for all small businesses, including those connected to accountants. This tab will let small businesses know when they are eligible to purchase QuickBooks Live Expert Assisted.

QuickBooks Live Expert Assisted

Small businesses are contacting you to get help and ask questions about how to use QuickBooks. This can create a burden on you and your staff, keeping you away from priorities that drive your growth. QuickBooks Live Expert Assisted can free up your time by connecting businesses to QuickBooks Online-certified experts, using video, phone, and screen-share capabilities to help answer questions and educate customers about setting up, using, and managing their businesses on QuickBooks. The expert does not access or work in the business’ books. They guide the customer how to do the work. Topics covered include how to categorize a transaction, access financial reports and dashboards, and reconciliation.

Our assisted services do not include performing bookkeeping tasks, such as providing advice, managing, editing, or making changes to transactions inside or outside of QuickBooks.

QuickBooks Live Expert Assisted: An opportunity to partner with you

We’re committed to uncovering more ways to complement the work you do, taking to-dos off your plate that give you time back so you can focus on the activities that drive your growth.

Within this framework, we will continue to partner with you to ensure our shared small business customers clearly understand that our QuickBooks Live Expert Assisted service is designed to coexist alongside the services you provide. We also want to work with you to build a firm-facing experience so you’re aware of how our shared customers are engaging with our assisted services.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is QuickBooks Live Expert Assisted and what types of services are included in this product?

QuickBooks Live Expert Assisted is an add-on monthly subscription service that provides businesses with access to QuickBooks Online-certified bookkeepers who answer questions, provide guidance, coach on best practices, and show how to perform tasks within QuickBooks. 

With QuickBooks Live Expert Assisted, experts meet with the business virtually to view their books via screen share. Experts teach a business best practices and answer questions to help them get the most out of QuickBooks, including questions about setting up bank feeds, bank reconciliation, the Chart of Accounts, sending invoices, expense tracking and categorization, general accounting, balance sheets, and how to access reports.

QuickBooks Live Expert Assisted experts do not go into a business’ books and perform bookkeeping tasks. They do not provide consulting or advisory services. The small business (or their accountant) manages their books.

Q: What are the qualifications of the QuickBooks Live Experts? 

Many of our Live experts are also independent, QuickBooks-certified, accounting professionals who are supplementing their own firm’s work by working for QuickBooks Live Expert.

They are certified in QuickBooks, are CPAs, EAs, certified bookkeepers, have bachelor’s or master’s degrees in accounting, and have several years experience working with small businesses and in QuickBooks.

It’s also about helping ensure a small business’s books are done right—when they become more complex and need advisory services, those small businesses move onto a ProAdvisor or independent accountant with accurate, up-to-date books.

Q: How can QuickBooks Live address the challenges of accounting firms?

One of the biggest challenges facing accounting firms today is the talent shortage. QuickBooks Live Expert Assisted can help alleviate this challenge by providing firms with the ability to free up firm capacity by partnering with experts to answer client’s questions. This will enable your firm to scale your bookkeeping practice or serve the demand of your current practice.

Q: You mention investing in collaboration and co-working opportunities with accounting professionals and being complementary, what does that mean for me?

You’re making choices in terms of the types of clients you serve based on your capacity to serve them. You’re also looking for added efficiencies so you can focus on providing exceptional service to your clients that add value and revenue to your firm.

Our Live Expert Assisted service can help. We can free up time for your firm, so you can focus on the bigger picture and higher-value advisory services while we answer basic “how to” questions about QuickBooks.

We want to build a durable partnership with members in the accounting industry so that firms can grow with the QuickBooks Live Expert platform. We’re exploring ways to:

• Help you handle client work that you don’t have the capacity to service.
• Provide a way to keep you informed about work being done by QuickBooks Live experts for more co-firming opportunities.
• Seamlessly refer to you the more complex businesses who need the high-touch, advisory support of firms.

Q: How can I refer clients? Can I get revenue share for referred clients?

We appreciate your willingness to partner. If you have clients that are right for QuickBooks Live Expert Assisted, you can let them know that they can check out the Live Experts tab in their QuickBooks to see when this offer is available to them. There is not a revenue share option at this time.