QuickBooks Online new features and improvements—October 2023

From cool weather to hot pumpkin-spiced lattes, there's a lot to enjoy in October. So settle in with a toasty mug and check out the new QuickBooks updates we've got for you this month.

In the Know Webinar: Register today for the next In The Know Webinar on Thursday, Oct. 19 at 11:00 AM PT, a monthly webinar for accountants to learn more about the latest and greatest product feature updates. This month, we’ll share our new Bill Pay product, as well as tips to start preparing for the upcoming tax season.

Reserve your spot

Share QuickBooks updates with your clients: Send them this link for QuickBooks innovations relevant to business owners and admins. 

Your Feedback in Action: This is a regular series where we share relevant product improvements specifically driven by feedback from accountants. See the September edition for the latest updates.

What’s new in October

Chart of accounts templates

QuickBooks Desktop 2024 now available

Payments information for clients includes discounted rates

QuickBooks Time PRO to be discontinued

Updating existing transactions using exact time frames

Increased flexibility when tax mapping

Balance sheet budgeting in QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced

New workflow run history

Tax readiness widget in QuickBooks Online Payroll

Automatic setting for local tax deposit frequency

Streamlining local tax collector information

Chase Bank requires bank account reconnection in QuickBooks

Chart of accounts templates

You’ve shared how setting up a chart of accounts for every new client can be time consuming, particularly when your firm has a specific way of setting all of your clients up. To make client setup easier, we’ve launched Chart of accounts templates. This feature will save your firm time and streamline setup across your QuickBooks Online Accountant account. With it, you have the ability to create and apply personalized chart of accounts templates. You can build templates from scratch or customize ready-made product-based or service-based business templates.

In addition to new clients, you can also apply chart of accounts templates to existing clients. Applying a chart of accounts template adds new, default accounts to your client’s chart of accounts, but won't delete existing ones. If an account with the same name or number already exists, we'll flag it so it isn't added.

See how it works

Learn more

QuickBooks Desktop 2024 now available

In a nutshell: QuickBooks Desktop for 2024 has arrived! New features include enhanced security with industry-leading AES 256-bit encryption¹, seamless background updates² to ensure you’re on the most recent version of QuickBooks without interrupting your work, and more.

QuickBooks Enterprise includes all of Desktop 2024’s new features, plus:

• Customer deposits/prepayments: Improve the bottom line by recording and tracking customer deposits/prepayments on sales orders, and applying the prepayment credit to invoices.
• Enhanced inventory management: Save time with enhanced search and bulk add/edit of item categories. Set granular pricing rules by categories. With new inventory reports, gain better insight into inventory levels, costs, and sales organized by categories.

Learn more

¹QuickBooks Desktop Plus and Enterprise now utilize 256-bit encryption. It applies to local data files, data hosted remotely in the cloud, or data backed up online via the cloud.

²Only available for Desktop Plus and Enterprise versions 2024 or higher.

Payments information for clients includes discounted rates

In a nutshell: In the past, providing clients with discounted pricing for QuickBooks Payments required you to make a phone call to our sales team with your client on the line. We’re pleased to let you know that our new QuickBooks Payments information page now includes the accountant discount, meaning the phone call is no longer necessary. You can easily share this new Payments page with your clients and the discount will be applied to their rates automatically.

QuickBooks Time PRO to be discontinued

In a nutshell: The QuickBooks Time PRO Program offers benefits for accountants who refer their clients to QuickBooks Time, Intuit’s time tracking solution. On or after 11/15/23, the PRO Program will be discontinued, along with access to the PRO website.

Current QuickBooks Time PROs will soon join the QuickBooks ProAdvisor program. The ProAdvisor program will broaden the benefits, advantages, and resources for multiple QuickBooks offerings, including QuickBooks Time. Sign in to QuickBooks Online Accountant to get started and learn more about the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program.

Updating existing transactions using exact time frames

In a nutshell: In the past, you couldn’t choose a specific date range when updating existing transactions in your clients’ payroll account mapping.

Good news! Beginning this month, you can specify an exact time frame for the updates you want to make. And if an update affects a number of transactions that exceeds the limit, you can simply run the same update for multiple shorter periods.

Learn more

More flexibility when tax mapping

In a nutshell: Now you can increase granularity when breaking out your client’s tax liabilities and expenses with more flexible tax mapping.

Starting this month, a new option in Employer Tax Expenses and Tax Liability Accounts breaks down individual agency groups into their individual tax items. This gives you a more detailed view of your clients’ tax liabilities and expenses.

Balance sheet budgeting in QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced

In a nutshell: Creating and manually updating balance sheet budgets in spreadsheets can be time consuming and hard to scale as your clients’ businesses grow; in addition, the manual data entry leaves room for error.

Now your clients using QuickBooks Online Plus and QuickBooks Online Advanced can create balance sheet budgets for asset, liability, and equity accounts right in QuickBooks Online. A status bar also helps them ensure their budget entries are balanced, and in Advanced, your client can use custom roles to assign more granular access to create these budgets.

To find this new feature, select the gear icon to open your preferences and choose Budgeting. In Advanced, you can also access it via Budgets on the left side of the screen.

New workflow run-history

In a nutshell: In the past, you or your clients weren’t able to see how workflows were progressing. That meant if a workflow had issues with completion, you couldn’t identify the bottleneck and address it.

Now, you and your clients can see a complete history of each workflow you have created and run. You can use a run history of any workflow to easily track its progress and identify issues in real time. This audit will include a detailed history—when it ran, when it completed, who was involved, where it currently sits in the process, and its owner. In addition, your client’s QuickBooks admin will be able to see how long a workflow is taking to complete.

Tax readiness widget in QuickBooks Online Payroll

Considering QuickBooks Online Payroll for your clients? We just made payroll tax setup easier with a new tax readiness widget. This widget helps ensure you’ve provided all the information needed to take advantage of the AutoTax feature—such as Federal EIN, State Registration ID, plus the filing and payment schedules unique to their state.

In QuickBooks Online Payroll, you’ll see the tax readiness widget in the Payroll Overview page or the Payroll Tax Center after you or your client have run their first payroll. If any AutoTax information is missing, the widget will provide a quick overview of what’s still needed to be 100% ready to automatically pay and file payroll taxes.

Learn more

Automatic setting for local tax deposit frequency

In a nutshell: When setting up taxes in QuickBooks Online Payroll, it’s not uncommon to choose the wrong frequencies for local tax deposits, especially if they’re not familiar to you. If set incorrectly, this can mean missed payments and tax notices.

To help with this, the tax deposit frequency for all your client’s local collectors will now default to their most recent deposit frequency. You or your client can easily update this later if needed.

Streamlining local tax collector information

In a nutshell: Multiple local taxes are often handled by a single tax collector or assessor. These taxes usually feature the same account number and deposit frequency for each customer.

Previously, when you or your clients set up local taxes in QuickBooks Online Payroll, you had to enter the account number and deposit frequency multiple times for these taxes, even though they’d go to the same collector.

Now, local taxes that roll up to a single collector will be grouped together. This will reduce the number of times you or your clients enter the same information, saving time and reducing the chance of manual errors.

Chase Bank requires bank account reconnection in QuickBooks

In a nutshell: If any of your clients have connected a Chase Bank account to QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop, they’ll need to update their connection soon.

As part of two upcoming security enhancements in October and November, Chase Bank will require any QuickBooks customers with a connected Chase account to update their bank connection to continue using QuickBooks services. These services include payroll direct deposit, payroll tax payments, loan funding, pre-authorized loan repayments, QuickBooks Payments, bill payments, bank transfers, and more.

Your clients who have a connected Chase account in QuickBooks will receive detailed instructions about what to do via email and through notifications in QuickBooks. If your client receives two different notifications about Chase Bank, they should be sure to follow the instructions for each of them. This means that both of the security enhancements require action to resync their data.