QuickBooks Client Collaborator
The
I would like to point out that my description of this feature is based on presentations made to me by Intuit. I’ve not had my hands on the product yet, so I can’t tell you if there are any flaws that I’ve uncovered. Intuit has been very helpful in scheduling sessions to go over the details, but I prefer to have my hands on the product to dig in. In this case, since it uses a web-based service, it wasn’t possible for me to gain access prior to the official launch.
The Problem
You are an
You’ll send the message and eventually get a response. It might not be a clear response, so you may have to ask another question. In the meantime, you have OTHER email threads to the same client, asking about OTHER issues in the file.
Keeping track of these multiple parallel email threads can be difficult. Worse yet, if at some future date there is a question or a problem with how you treated the transaction, it can be difficult to reproduce a trail of messages to back up the changes that you made.
Sound familiar?
The QuickBooks Client Collaborator Solution
Wouldn’t it be nice if your copy of QuickBooks could generate the message to your client, pulling in the transaction information automatically? Wouldn’t it be great to have an “audit trail” of the messages that are specific to a particular transaction? This is what the Client Collaborator is attempting to do for you. Let’s take a look at how it will work.
To start, the client has given you, the accounting professional, a copy of their QuickBooks company file. This can be via the Accountant’s Copy process, or they could just give you a backup copy (a QBB backup, a QBM portable file, even a regular QBW file).
You find a transaction that you have a question about, and you have that transaction window open. Here’s a credit card charge, for example:
In the upper right corner of your QuickBooks window, where the notification icons are found, you’ll see the Client Collaborator icon – click on that (note that you can also select Ask Client about Transaction in the Accountant menu).
This starts a transaction conversation, opening a window that already includes information from the transaction for you, so that you don’t have to transcribe any of the information. Note that this is essentially a browser window within QuickBooks – you have to have an Internet connection for this to work.
Once you have entered your comment you can click one of the “Add” buttons at the bottom. These will add your comment to the “conversation list”, which is your list of the discussion for all of your transactions. We’ll click the Add & Open Conversation List button to save the comment and then open the list so we can review it. You can also open the conversation list by selecting View Conversation List from the Accountant menu.
This shows the “conversations” that are active with this client.
Click the Notify Client button and the client will receive an email notification that there are questions available. Here’s a sample of the email message at this time (note that the format of this message will most likely change by the time this product is available). I don’t know how much control you’ll have over the format. This doesn’t include the text of the conversation, which is GOOD, because email isn’t secure. It is just a reminder of where to go to find the information. Note that this is not a link to a website, instead the client is directed to the menu options inside their copy of QuickBooks. That is very good.
Now, on the client side, they select Company and then View Conversation List. This will open a browser-based window in QuickBooks that will have them sign in with their Intuit ID. I’ll discuss the Intuit ID in more detail below. The screen show I’m showing here will change, it is an early test version and it isn’t shown the correct text (it says “with your clients” and it should say “with your accountant” for the user side).
Here’s what the client sees in their QuickBooks program – a list of the conversations on the various transactions. This window can stay open while the client looks for the transactions and decides what is going on (there is no link to jump to the transaction). Note that the transaction doesn’t even have to exist in the client file – it can be something the accounting professional created on their side. This is just a communication tool.
The client can enter a message into any of the conversations listed here, and click the Notify Accountant button. This should, if I understand the process, send a notification to the accounting professional similar to what the client received.
The accountant can now view the conversation list to see what the client has to say.
This can continue back and forth, per individual conversation, as long as you need. The accounting professional can “close” a conversation, which just hides it from the standard view. The client cannot close a conversation.
This service provides you with a great in-product tool for exchanging information about specific transactions in QuickBooks. You have, essentially, an audit trail of your conversation with the client so that you can see exactly what was said. I like that you aren’t required to use the Accountant’s Copy feature, as many accounting professionals just swap the QBW file. You can pass instructions to the client to make adjustments on their side if you want, and this meshes very well with the Send General Journal Entries feature that was added last year.
Availability
For the QuickBooks Client Collaborator to work:
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The accountant must be using a current copy of:
- QuickBooks Accountant Plus. This is available (as described in one of my other articles) either as a separate subscription OR as a part of the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program.
- Enterprise Accountant, as a part of the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program.
- The client must be using the 2014 version of QuickBooks.
This means that if the accountant does not have a current subscription or membership, this feature is not available.
Also, note that ProAdvisors won’t be able to test or play with this until September 24th at the earliest, as that is the first date that clients can purchase QuickBooks 2014.
There are many accounting professionals that use QuickBooks to work with clients, but who are not a member of the ProAdvisor program (or, who have let their membership lapse). It will be interesting to see if there is pressure from clients on these accounting professionals to join the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program, or to subscribe to QuickBooks Accountant Plus (described in another article), because the client wants to use this feature. Probably not, but who knows?
Intuit ID’s and Realm ID’s and Confusing Technical Issues
Since I can’t really play with this yet, there are a number of things that I’m not sure about. There are a number of technical details as to how this is working that I’m still trying to work out, and in some cases I’m making some guesses here. So I might be a bit off the mark – I’m sure I will hear about any mistakes I make.
Security is an important consideration, you don’t want just ANYONE to be able to see these conversations. Intuit starts off right by not putting the details in the email exchange itself – it is all kept in the service.
How does that make it secure? Well, that depends on how the client handles things.
There are two key elements to the ability to use Client Collaborator.
- Both the Client and the Accounting Professional should have their own Intuit ID,
- The client file needs to have a Realm ID, which is separate from but related to the client’s Intuit ID.
This can be a bit confusing sometimes.
The Intuit ID is an online account that you may or may not have set up. If you use TurboTax Online, you have an Intuit ID. If you have used any add-on applications through the Intuit App Center, you have an Intuit ID. My understanding of this is that this should be an ID for each individual person, and it shouldn’t be shared with other people in your company.
In the QuickBooks Client Collaborator, Intuit uses this Intuit ID account to manage the conversation exchange. The accounting professional is going to log in with an Intuit ID. The client is going to log in with their Intuit ID. The email accounts associated with those Intuit ID’s are what will be used when sending the email notifications.
However, note that an Intuit ID is not unique to a particular QuickBooks company file. You can have multiple company files associated with your Intuit ID.
So how does QuickBooks know what client Intuit ID email address to use in a particular conversation? This is controlled by another identifier – the Realm ID that is associated with the QuickBooks file that the client has given to the Accounting Professional. The Realm ID is a unique number for each QuickBooks company file that is associated with a particular client Login ID. Keep in mind that you may have multiple company files associated with your Login ID, so the Realm ID is going to keep that straight for you.
If you open the client’s QuickBooks company file and press F2 – you can see the Realm ID in the right. In this example, since I’m using a test file that isn’t connected, mine is not set yet.
So, for Client Collaborator to work, the client file must have a Realm ID when it is given to the accounting professional. It can’t be added without the client’s Login ID, and the client shouldn’t give their Login ID to the accounting professional.
With me so far?
How DO you get a Realm ID set up in a QuickBooks Company File? I’m not happy with this, but as far as I can see the only way is for the client to set up Sync Manager on their computer. I don’t like this! Sync Manager is NOT needed for QuickBooks Client Collaborator to work, it is ONLY needed (in this case) to establish the Realm ID in the file. Sync Manager is going to send a copy of the company data up to the Intuit cloud servers – the only time you need to do this is if you are going to use one of the App Center addon applications (IPP interface, not the desktop SDK interface).
To get the Realm ID in the file (which must be done before the client sends the file to the accountant), the client, on their computer, will select Company then My Company, click the Sign In link in the upper right corner, log in with their Intuit ID (or create a new one if necessary, and remember the password as they will need it later). MAKE SURE that the check box to “Connect my QuickBooks company file” is CHECKED. This installs Sync Manager, and it should also assign the file a Realm ID.
You will only do this on one of the client computers in a multi-user system.
Confusing? Yes, it is a bit. I’m hoping to provide more detail on this in a future article. The whole “Intuit ID” and “Realm ID” issue is something that I don’t think a lot of people understand. I can’t claim that I understand it completely, at this time (although I think I have a pretty good handle on it).
IN ADDITION – the accountant must also set up a realm ID. This is where it is really starting to get confusing. Isn’t a Realm ID associated with a file? And doesn’t the Realm ID come with the client file? As I understand it now (still working on this), the accountant has to set up a Realm ID on ANY file (a test file) of their own ON their computer. If you don’t have your own Realm ID, this all won’t work. That means you also have to install Sync Manager, at least for a moment, on your computer.
I hope that I am wrong here, and if not I hope that this gets changed! This is too convoluted a process to set up, and there are too many issues with having Sync Manager set up on client and accountant computers that don’t necessarily need this.
A couple of notes on this:
- Intuit is assuming that an Intuit ID is a “personal” identifier. There should NOT be one that is “company wide” that people will share. This is the keystone to the “security” of the exchange between the client and the accounting professional, as this Intuit ID is what controls the email address being used. I don’t think that everyone realizes this is how it should work.
- I understand the need for the Realm ID – it is a key feature and it makes all of this work smoothly. But I don’t like having to set up Sync Manager to be able to establish a Realm ID in the file. Why should the client have to “sync” the file to the Intuit Cloud if they are not going to use any Apps? Sync Manager is a source of errors, it is a resource drag, and many clients just aren’t interested in doing this. There should be a way to establish the Realm ID for a file without installing Sync Manager.
- I want to reiterate that Sync Manager is not needed to exchange “conversations” at all. The exchange of info is totally independent of Sync Manage itself. This means that once the Realm ID is established you can stop Syncing your file with Sync Manager – as long as you aren’t also using any Intuit App Center apps. See this Intuit KB article about how to stop Sync Manager from starting up when you boot your computer.
- Client Collaborator only allows one accountant to converse with the client. There isn’t a way for multiple accountants to converse with the client. In many cases, this is not going to be a big issue, but I can see a number of problems here. What, for example, if you want to switch a client to a different accounting professional in your office? What if the client wants to work with an accountant in a different company? There are details to work out here.
- Also, only one client user can work with the client. It has to be someone at the client office who has an Intuit ID, and then that is the only person who can participate in the conversation.
I’m still confused as to how and why a Realm ID needs to be set up on the accountant’s computer. I’m still digging in to this.
Is QuickBooks Client Collaborator Worthwhile?
My initial impression is that yes, this can be a very useful tool in many situations.
Keep in mind that this is an early iteration of the concept and that I have not had my hands on it yet. I can’t say how well it works until I get the chance to play with it. ALSO, we are seeing “version 1.0” and I fully expect Intuit to be expanding this in the near future.
There is room for improvement, there are things that I would like to see them add or change, but I’m sure that the product will evolve quickly.
A few additional notes and observations:
- The Client Collaborator icon, in the notification section of your QuickBooks window, will not change if there is correspondence waiting for you. The other icons there, alerts and reminders, will show a number next to them if they have a notification for you, but Client Collaborator won’t. Since the information is coming in for a specific file, via a web service, I think that having this icon change color or show a number would actually be technically difficult to implement.
- The email notification comes from a generic Intuit email account, so your client’s email system has to be set to accept these rather than pass them to a spam folder. In some cases this can be a problem.
- Since the Client Collaborator is not associated with the accountants copy process, this means that it is not affected by anything the user might do to cancel the accountants copy. THAT IS GOOD.
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This isn’t a technical issue, but I wonder what happens if the IRS wants to see these conversations? Would they? At this point the only way to show them is to give them your Intuit ID, and that is NOT a good idea. I’ll admit, I’m probably worrying about something that isn’t an issue, as I don’t deal with
tax audit issues at all. The “conversation” is not directly a part of the QuickBooks database, it is separate. - There is no ability to do a “batch” of transactions at a time. I’m not sure how that would work, exactly, but if you are trying to decrease the amount of time that the accounting professional is spending on this, some form of batch processing would be helpful.
- There needs to be a way to generate a report of the conversations, or export them to a PDF, so that they can be stored outside of the service. This means that, as it stands now, you have to maintain your subscription current to continue having access to the historical conversations.
- There should be a search feature, and filters, in the conversation list window. After awhile you could be getting a LOT of conversations and you need to be able to find the right one, and ones that the client has responded to (and those that they have not).
- There needs to be a way to remind the client about specific conversations that haven’t been answered yet.
All in all, from what I can see, this is a good first step. There is a lot of value here for accountants working with clients of the desktop product. There are some technical issues to be worked out, and I think it is going to be a bit complicated to set up for some users, but I’m sure that these will be addressed. I’ve discussed many of the points I’ve brought up in this article with the folks at Intuit and they have stated that these are areas that they are working on to improve.
I’m interested to see how Intuit develops this, moving forward.
Category: Product Reviews, QuickBooks Tips/Tricks, Software Updates