Jaclyn Anku, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: On today's episode of In the Know, we'll be exploring the exciting launch of Intuit Enterprise Suite. Here's what to expect. You'll hear about the "why" behind Intuit Enterprise Suite, then see demos of key features.
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. We heard that you need a more sophisticated solution for your complex clients so that you can keep them on QuickBooks, so we've introduced Intuit Enterprise Suite, a new cloud-based multi-entity and multi-dimensional platform designed to help you enhance profitability and productivity with complex clients.
Key features include:
- Multi-entity management and recording.
- Project financials and management.
- AI powered forecasting, and so much more.
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All right. Let me introduce you to Debbie and Daniel who will provide more context. Debbie, Daniel, welcome.
Debbie Shorstein: Thank you so much, Jaclyn, for having me. I know there's a lot of excitement around the recent announcement of Intuit Enterprise Suite, and we're thrilled to share more. As this is an entirely new offering, we're going to go into why we developed Intuit Enterprise Suite, along with a high-level overview—before we get into some of the details that I know you're hungry for and how we're delivering these benefits.
To kick off, first, I want to bring you back to your most complex clients. We spoke to a number of firms and heard from so many of our accountants that you have clients who are complex and want to keep them with QuickBooks. There are some advantages to doing that. It allows you to keep your clients on a familiar platform that reduces your team's time for training. It really streamlines your operations having every one-on-one cohesive solution, and it avoids timely and costly migration.
We're also hearing that there are some critical areas where you're looking for more robust functionality, particularly when it comes to multi-entity and multi-dimensions. These clients, as they grow, are looking for better access to insights to inform real- time decisions they're making. They may be developing more complex industry specific needs. And in general, your firm and clients are looking for more workflow efficiencies. Time is money at the end of the day for you, and there's so many more areas of opportunity that we heard, but these are some that we're bubbling up to the top. What it looks like for these complex customers is they have all these interconnected jobs to be done, and all you want is a seamless way for all this data to flow together so you can help your clients make the best decisions.
We're so excited that Intuit Enterprise Suite is now available. With this suite, you will be able to keep your complex clients growing with a more powerful configurable platform that is cloud-based with multi-entity and multidimensional capabilities designed to help you enhance profitability and productivity. You'll eliminate the manual work it takes to consolidate data and get to deeper insights you've been craving so you can make better decisions for your clients. With all your clients top jobs to be handled within the suite from accounting to payroll, AR, AP, and marketing. All of their critical data will be all in one spot.
What that means for you is that you're going to be able to get those actionable insights to help advise your clients on how they can drive the most profit. One of the most powerful capabilities of Intuit Enterprise Suite is the ability to manage multi- entities all in one place and perform intercompany journal entries, saving you hours each month. By leveraging custom dimensions, you can tag transactions on line items the way you need to track your client's business and unlock key insights. Plus, you'll have access to real-time, customizable dashboards to track critical KPIs.
When you have questions, you'll be able to drill into the details to make sure you're really understanding where those results are coming from. You'll also have a number of ways you can drive efficiencies through smart automation that boosts productivity, powered by AI insights.
We know month-end close is an arduous task for everyone involved, and usually requires aggregating data across multiple systems to get to accurate financials. Intuit Enterprise Suite is going to allow you to streamline your year-end close process so you can save time, increase accuracy, and get the insights you need to make more confident decisions for your clients. To help save you time, Intuit's AI will analyze your clients data for you to suggest root causes impacting their project profitability and it will even help generate management report summaries. You'll be able to connect projects to profit. You'll also seamlessly pull in data from third-party app integrations, giving you that data hub that you've been craving.
We're just getting started. Without further delay, I'm going to pass along to Daniel to show you what some of these benefits will look like.
Daniel Malinov: Thanks, Debbie. Before I jump in, I'd like to reiterate that today we'll be doing a high-level walkthrough of some of the most exciting features we brought to the market with Intuit Enterprise Suite.
Okay, let's jump in. As you know, when organizations grow into the mid-market, the number of entities within the group often grows, too. Managing these entities through QuickBooks Online becomes ever more challenging, especially when they have different naming conventions. Well, with Intuit Enterprise Suite, the companies will show up in a new client management tab called Multi-Entity and will be grouped together in a basic hierarchy, making it much easier to track the group as a whole. I'd also note that this is just the first iteration. Our QuickBooks Online account team has some amazing innovations planned around the design and interface for managing multi-entity clients on Intuit Enterprise Suite. So more to come on this in the future.
Moving on from QuickBooks Online Accountant and jumping right into Intuit Enterprise Suite … now, we know you and your clients spent countless hours every month managing accounting for, and reporting on, all the different entities within the organization. For your clients that log in to QuickBooks Online, this involves many clicks throughout the day just navigating between the different entities, which interrupts their workflow and forces them to content switch just to get to the appropriate company. With Intuit Enterprise Suite, your clients can easily jump between companies using the company switching tool in a similar fashion as QuickBooks Online Accountant, saving hundreds of clicks a day and keeping their teams focused and on task.
Now, any time there's a new hire, a change in scope, or offboarding employees, your team would need to go into each entity to change the user permissions one by one, which can be extremely time consuming while also opening them up to major risks should they forget to remove access in one of the entities for former employees. With Intuit Enterprise Suite, they can manage user access across all the related entities from a single user management panel, thereby significantly mitigating risk and allowing for a streamlined separation of duties across all of the entities. This includes control over payroll with who can create, approve, and pay bills with our bill pay offering.
Now, we also know that automating workflows is a major efficiency driver, but needing to set workflows up from scratch and in every company is very time consuming, not to mention updating them any time a change is needed. In Intuit Enterprise Suite, you can create a workflow once, and then publish the template which can then be turned on in each of the companies within the group. You can customize it further as needed for each company's unique structure, saving hours of manual setup and management time while maintaining flexibility to customize as needed.
The nature of multi-entity organizations often requires one company to pay bills on behalf of the group, which your team then needs to keep meticulous track of in Excel for month-end reconciliation, where they will then need to log into each related company and post their respective portion of these transactions. This process is tedious, manual, and extremely prone to user error, which is why the intercompany journal entry in Intuit Enterprise Suite is going to be a game changer for these companies, allowing you to allocate these same transactions across all the relevant entities in one single journal entry.
As you can see, when the toggles are turned on at the top, a new column for company appears, and you'll be able to select all the related entities in this group from that dropdown on multiple lines within this journal entry for up to 100 companies at once. Once all the related party transactions are posted to the correct books, you would look to prepare one set of consolidated financials for the entire organization. This is a completely manual process that involves exporting each individual company's balance sheet, P&L and cash flow into Excel, lining up the accounts, and manually keying in the eliminations to remove all the intercompany balances.
More likely than not, you'll also have to have multiple team members review the end-to-end process to catch any data entry errors. This monthly process is extremely onerous, especially considering accounting teams are always under major time constraints between closing the books and getting the consolidated financials out the door.
This is where Intuit Enterprise Suite comes in. With a click of the mouse, you're able to generate a complete set of consolidated financial statements that pull in all the relevant companies’ data and automatically post the elimination entries in Excel through spreadsheet sync. In this example, you can see a portion of the P&L with four of my companies and the Eliminations column, all of which is automatically pulled in from your Intuit Enterprise Suite company.
Now let’s look beyond what is currently live. There are some really exciting developments coming soon.
First are chart of account templates, which basically allow you to control the chart of accounts across all the related entities from a single interface. Second are supporting consolidated financial statements along with the automated eliminations, which by the way, are non posting all through our native reporting platform within Intuit Enterprise Suite. So if you don't want to export into Excel, you can do it all within the platform. However, you'll always have the option of exporting to Excel, and soon, you'll also be able to export to Google Sheets and have them consolidated in the cloud through Google sheets as well.
We're now going to switch gears from core financials and walk you through some of the great innovations we've developed for companies in the construction industry, which is the first of many industries we're focused on for building out critical functionality.
We'll start off with our new construction dashboard that you'll see as soon as you open the project's landing page. It's preset with the top KPIs and metrics we know are critical for this industry. These include pulling in data from all your projects into one overview, such as estimates versus actual income of project, actual income versus cost by project, overall project expense breakout across all your projects, and many more. All of these give your project management team the insights they need to make strategic decisions and stay on top of all the activity within the organization.
But we know there's a lot more to managing the project financials than just KPIs, which is why we've brought all the key reports we know are critical for construction companies into Intuit Enterprise Suite. This includes a work in progress, committed cost by project, unbilled time and expense by project, and many more. We know that many of these reports are actually available on our desktop product, and a lot of you have been asking for us to bring it online. Well, now we have it available in Intuit Enterprise Suite.
Now that you've got your dashboards and reports covering all your projects, we also understand how critical it is to monitor the performance of individual projects, which is why we've launched AI-powered project profitability monitoring to ensure your respective projects stay on track. To use it, simply set profitability goals for each project and you will then immediately see when a project is at risk. You can then click into the widget to see a root cause analysis, as well as recommend actions to take to mitigate the issue and get the projects back on track.
For example, in this case, there are two issues: more overtime than budgeted and an increase in material costs that weren't expected. To address these issues, your project manager is provided with AI-powered recommendations, such as assigning a team member a task to review the overtime hours and creating a change order to the original estimate to increase the price to the customer. Now we know QuickBooks Online didn't support change orders, meaning you'd have had to send a new estimate, losing valuable information and causing confusion with customers. However, with Intuit Enterprise Suite, you can now initiate a change order to the original estimate, allowing you to maintain a consistent and traceable record of events.
Continuing on the same theme of project management, we have also enabled a dedicated task module to support the management of deliverables across your client's entire team that can be linked to specific projects, allowing for centralized visibility for the financials as well as the actual hands on tasks. This gives you clear demarcation of complete and outstanding tasks, allowing for a much more streamlined experience for you and your clients team.
Within Intuit Enterprise Suite, we've also created dedicated workflows to drive efficiencies through automated reminders and notifications. As you can see, we've got four preset templates for projects specifically, but we've also enabled project names as a criteria within all our other workflows, whether they're approvals, reminders, or notifications. You can now use projects as a trigger across all our workflows.
Now all of this is great. However, without the ability to control what your client's project managers can see and do within QuickBooks Online, they often didn't feel comfortable giving their staff access. They ended up having to put the administrative burden on you or themselves to manage the project finances within QuickBooks Online. This also created delays in getting projects started, as well as identifying and addressing issues that obviously had a negative impact on cash flow.
With the new project manager role exclusive to Intuit Enterprise Suite, they will now be able to maintain strong controls around separation of duties, giving them peace of mind that project managers will not have access to any sensitive company information. This allows them to effectively delegate duties to the appropriate staff, significantly improving overall efficiencies.
Finally, we know there are many third-party apps your clients use as actual front office project management tools, but due to the limited integrations with QuickBooks Online, they regularly spend hours manually reconciling data between the two platforms. However, with Intuit Enterprise Suite, they can seamlessly sync projects from apps such as Knowify and BigTime into Intuit Enterprise Suite and back, capturing all the pertinent data, including customers, vendors, and even custom fields. These are exclusive partnerships we're developing with third-party tools, with many more to come in the future.
Switching gears again, we know that accounting and finance teams have been pushing for more granular reporting capabilities that are critical as companies grow into the mid-market. However, in QuickBooks Online, metadata tag to transactions limited how your teams can strategize on your client’s growth opportunities. With Intuit Enterprise Suite, you can easily assign multiple dimensions at the line item level on transaction forms, which can then be leveraged to create P&L reports via these new dimensions, as well as create custom reports that pivot any two dimensions against each other without having to export to Excel and manually pivot the data every time you need an update.
Intuit Enterprise Suite supports up to 20 user-defined dimensions, and will also support bulk reclassifying, so you'll be able to assign the new dimensions to historic transactions. Also, it's important to note that Intuit Enterprise Suite supports up to 20 user-defined dimensions, as well as a bulk reclassifying, so you'll be able to actually assign new values to past transactions across the new dimensions. You'll be able to generate panel reports, and filter and sort other custom reports, as well as pivot the dimensions against each other, as I mentioned earlier. And you'll be able to use the new dimensions within our budgeting module.
Sticking with the reporting theme, as accountants, one of your most important roles is managing the FP&A [Financial Planning & Analysis]. With the Intuit Enterprise Suite, you will be able to create AI-powered P&L forecasts, leveraging the last five years worth of performance at the line item level within your client's financials to project two years into the future.
You can then also assign additional users with added access to go in and fine tune the forecast, while giving other users view-only access for high-level review and feedback. You can then convert the forecast into a budget, making additional changes as needed and adding notes to specific line items for your clients to review, as well as assign tasks to different department heads to review and provide bottom-up input. Once all the changes have been made, you can actually initiate a formal approval process to have all the department heads, finance manager, controller, and anyone else review and approve the budget with a formal audit trail. Tracking everything.
Now that the bottoms of targets are set, you can set aspirational profitability goals similar to the way project goals work, allowing you and your clients to monitor performance over time. If the goals are at risk, Intuit Enterprise Suite will provide a root-cause analysis with recommended actions to take to get closer in reaching your goal.
And finally, we have a number of additional capabilities we have launched with Intuit Enterprise Suite with enhancements beyond what's available in our lower SKUs. One example is revenue recognition. We know on QuickBooks Online Advanced, we have straight line, whereas on Intuit Enterprise Suite, we will also support milestone basis and percentage of completion. We also have the fixed asset module that is also available on QuickBooks Online Advanced. However, with Intuit Enterprise Suite, we will actually automate the creation of draft assets within the module based on the data from transaction forms, saving you quite a bit of time from having to reenter all that information every time there's a new asset. There's a number of workflow enhancements, as well as industry customization that are going to continue to evolve, in terms of our current focus on construction, as well as all the industries we'll be tackling in the near future.
That's a wrap. Thanks so much for having me on your show, Jaclyn.
Jaclyn Anku: Debbie and Daniel, thank you so much for being on the show and thank you for watching this episode. I'm Jaclyn, host of In the Know and Leader of ProAdvisor Training and Certification. Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe so you don't miss a single episode. We'll catch you next time.
