Jaclyn Anku, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: Hey ProAdvisors, I'm Jaclyn and you're watching In the Know. It's the show designed to keep you in the know on the most exciting updates to QuickBooks Online. So here's the scoop.

Today we're exploring how to make bulk and inline reclassifications on bank transactions because we know that every click counts. We'll be joined by ProAdvisor correspondents Kenji Kuramoto and Ramon Villard.

We heard that it's time consuming to fix mistakes or make updates to bank feed transactions by opening them up one by one or having to use “undo.” So we've added bulk reclassification so you can quickly change accounts, payees, classes, and locations on sets of transactions.

And that's not all. We've also added inline reclassification so that you can immediately change fields on a single transaction without having to open up a new window.

Here are the Fast Facts:

• Bulk and inline reclassification on bank transactions is available to all QuickBooks Online customers, including accountants and small business owners, with the exception of multi-currency users.
• You can access it by visiting the Banking page.
• Great news: Bulk and inline reclassification is now available to users across all regions.

If you find this update interesting or helpful, go ahead and like, comment, and subscribe.

Let me introduce you to Eric, the product manager behind this update. Eric, welcome. Thanks for being with us on the show. Do you mind taking us for a spin?

Eric Foster: Thanks so much for having me Jaclyn; I’m excited to be here!

So now we'll walk through the steps for bulk and inline reclassify. It's quite straightforward and hopefully easy to pick up.

Let's say I've got a bunch of transactions here, and maybe I'm a client or someone new to bookkeeping and not quite sure what to do with the transactions. I see them all right here, and just press “accept” without really reviewing the payee, the category, or anything else on those transactions.

So now I go over to the categorize tab and I say hold on a second, we need to make some edits here. And so what I can do is start by selecting a bunch of transactions. By the way, a quick pro tip available across QuickBooks Online is a shift-[mouse] click to select all these at once—especially helpful for this bulk reclassification feature. Now I can go and edit those transactions, and either select a vendor from my vendor list, or as I'm doing here, create a new one.

I'll create a new vendor for Target and save it. Over here, I'll select an account from my chart of accounts. In this case, I'll pick job supplies and press save. That's it; the edits are done and I don't need to do anything more. You can see right there that Target and job supplies are reflected on the transactions.

I'll do one more. Again, I'll shift-click to select all these Amazon transactions, press edit again, and I'll make a new payee—but you can pick an existing one. By the way, as I mentioned a minute ago, you can also edit class and location using this exact same window right here. Then choose your account. In this case, I'll pick office supplies and software, and press save. That's it.

Now what if I want to edit just one transaction or maybe two transactions, and don't even want to open that window? What I can do is just edit it there inline and it’s done. Here, I'll do the same thing with the account. All I have to do is type in a new account and select it. The transactions are updated, and I don't need to save. I don't need to open a new window. I don't need to open anything else. This is going back to what we've heard from so many of you that every individual click matters. We're looking to make this workflow as fast as possible.

So thanks so much for watching. I’m looking forward to seeing your feedback, and hearing how we can make this even better for you. Thanks for having me on the show.

Jaclyn Anku: Awesome, thanks, Eric. We'll turn now to ProAdvisor correspondents Kenji Kuramoto and Roman Villard for them to weigh in. Kenji, Roman, thanks so much for joining us on the show. Kenji, let me kick it off with you. What is an example of a time when your team would need to book reclassify transactions?

Kenji Kuramoto: There are a number of reasons. I'd say one of them would be that a lot of us as firm owners have clients who are also working in their books. It's probably kind of rare that we're the only ones, even if we're doing CAS [client advisory services] or clients are outsourcing all their accounting to us. Clients get in the books, and guess what they do? They like to go in like, “Ooh, look at me, I'm doing accounting.” They'll sit here and click “accept” on everything. Then our team goes in and goes, “Whoa, what did you just do?” When that happens, we need to find a way to go and fix in-bulk a lot of these reclassification errors.

I also think that oftentimes when we're taking on new clients, we want to go back and do some cleanup. It's a lot nicer to go back and do large-scale bulk actions then going back through every single transaction and clicking there. Those are a couple of examples that I think that most firms, even beyond us at Acuity, probably run into quite frequently.

Roman Villard: You know, it's funny Jaclyn. This morning I popped into the QuickBooks of a new client, and we had about 1,200 transactions that were uncategorized and sitting in the bank feed. To Kenji's point, there's often times where we've got to go in and clean things up. Kudos to them [the clients] for standing up QuickBooks, but they didn't do a darn thing in the system. So the ability to go in and batch classify expedites our cleanup time considerably when we've got to go through those types of situations.

Jaclyn Anku: I bet that makes your team happy. I know doing cleanup work and setting up clients can be pretty tedious and time consuming, so anything that gives time back to focus on more meaningful stuff is always welcome.

Kenji Kuramoto: For sure.

Jaclyn Anku: Kenji, you brought up something a second ago about the inline reclassification being a pretty slick time saver?

Kenji Kuramoto: Yeah. I think that was what I liked about this.

Our team has liked this, too. Not only can you do the bulk actions, but with one click, you can go into a transaction and just change the classification right there and automatically push it through. You think, okay, well of course, it should do that. Historically, reclassing took a number of clicks. If you can save time, it is incredibly valuable to you and to your clients. If you're a firm and team members are probably juggling multiple clients, you're saving them time in their day by literally just doing this. I thought that was a very thoughtful action the product team delivered. That may not be as noticeable in some cases, but I think that will have some real benefit from a timesaving standpoint.

Jaclyn Anku: So Roman, zooming out a touch from book reclassification, I'm curious when updates like this come out from QuickBooks Online, they will be big timesavers to your team. How do you make sure that they're aware of them and train on the new functionality? What processes do you have in place for that? 

Roman Villard: That's a good question. You know, now, thankfully, there are a variety of means that we can get this information. It used to be generally through emails, and clicking through the FAQs and the information online we'd be reading through to understand what changes are occurring. Now we have the pleasure of going to YouTube, following a YouTube channel, going on social media, looking at LinkedIn, and ensuring that we're In the Know on the right things that are happening.

But no, like seriously, following these channels has been a great source to not only understand what's happening and what's coming down the pipeline, but also getting educated about those, too. So the avenues to learn are a little bit more pervasive now than perhaps they were in the past.

Kenji Kuramoto: I'll give a plug on that as well. I think the way that In the Know is kind of giving us very bite size interesting ways to see new product updates. It's been fantastic. We've taken the YouTube channel and actually ported it into our internal Slack channels. We have a place where all the new In the Knows come in right in the environment. That's an environment that we happen to work in at Acuity. We get them all there so people can go back and really easily find them. It's right there inside of our environment.

Jaclyn Anku: Well, that is the perfect note to end on this particular update with very exciting things about bulk and inline reclassification—and just love that. These are timesavers that are ultimately going to help your team and enable them to focus on more meaningful client work. I'm glad that the show can be a small part of that.

Kenji, Roman, it's always so fun hanging out with you two. Thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate you both.

And thank you for watching this episode. I'm Jaclyn, the host of In the Know and leader of ProAdvisor Training and Certification. Be sure to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell so that you don't miss a single episode. We'll catch you next time. 

Meet the ProAdvisors

ProAdvisor Roman Villard: Founder, Full Send Finance

ProAdvisor Kenji Kuramoto: CEO, Acuity