QuickBooks
- You can buy it directly.
- You can get it as a part of your annual QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program membership (but not as a part of the QuickBooks Cloud ProAdvisor Program).
- You can get it as a part of a lower cost QuickBooks Accountant Plus subscription (as I described in this article last year).
It is important to note that the features you have access to if you buy QuickBooks Accountant directly are not the same as what you get in the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program and QuickBooks Accountant Plus subscription. There are differences, and we’ll see how that works out this year.
What Are The QuickBooks 2015 Accountant Improvements?
That is the odd thing this year, as far as I can tell there aren’t any improvements found just in QuickBooks Accountant!
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any improvements for accounting professionals, it is just that the QuickBooks Accountant product by itself doesn’t, as far as I can tell, have any new features.
Here’s what Intuit says are some of the features that accounting professionals are going to like in QuickBooks 2015 (which I summarized in my first QuickBooks 2015 article and will explain in more detail in other articles):
- Comments on Reports: The ability to annotate reports is going to be appreciated by accounting professionals. However, this feature is found in QuickBooks Pro, Premier and Enterprise, not just in QuickBooks Accountant.
- Send Multiple Reports: The ability to send multiple reports as attachments in one email message, rather than as separate emails, may be useful to accounting professionals. However, this feature is found in QuickBooks Pro, Premier and Enterprise, not just in QuickBooks Accountant.
- Send Portable Company File: This is a simpler way for your client to send you a portable company file (or, for you to send one back to the client), simplifying the steps that it takes and making it less likely that an error will occur. However, this feature is found in QuickBooks Pro, Premier and Enterprise, not just in QuickBooks Accountant.
- Insights Dashboard: Intuit has been touting this as a great tool for the accounting professional to gain insight into the client’s business processes. However, this feature is found in QuickBooks Pro, Premier and Enterprise, not just in QuickBooks Accountant.
See what I’m getting at? These features, while very useful to accounting professionals, are found in all Windows versions of QuickBooks and are not limited to “QuickBooks Accountant”.
However, there is one additional feature for accounting professionals in the mix, called the Accountant Toolbox, which I’ll talk about in this article. I’ll also describe the Send Portable Company File feature. The other features will be described in other articles.
QuickBooks 2015 Accountant ToolBox
A few years ago Intuit added the “External Accountant User”, a user that a client could add to the company file that the accountant could use when logging in to the file at the client’s office. If you log in to QuickBooks Pro or Premier with this special user account then you have access to some of the features of the Client Data Review, which normally would only be available in QuickBooks Accountant versions. That would let the accountant perform a review while on site.
The problem is, when you did that, you didn’t get all of the Client Data Review or other accountant features. With some options in the Client Data Review you would see a warning message:
I believe that the features you could not use when logged in as the external accountant are:
- Reclassify Transactions
- Write Off Invoices
- Troubleshoot Inventory
- Batch Enter Transactions (not in the CDR itself, but still not available to you in Pro or Premier)
Very annoying! Of course, this was a way to keep at least some of the QuickBooks Accountant features limited to people who purchased that product, rather than giving the users of the standard products access to those features just by creating this special user account.
This is changed in QuickBooks 2015 in the Pro and Premier products. Remember how I made a distinction between QuickBooks Accountant, the product, and membership in either the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program or the QuickBooks Accountant Plus subscription? If you are enrolled in either program, you now have the Accountant Toolbox available to you when you log in to a client file as the “external accountant” user.
To enable this feature you must be accessing a client’s QuickBooks 2015 program (Pro or Premier, this isn’t currently available in Enterprise) as the external accountant user. Select Company, and then Accountant Toolbox, and choose Unlock Accountant Toolbox.
You will need to log in with the Intuit Account email address and password that is associated with your ProAdvisor account or QuickBooks Accountant Plus subscription.
Once you do this you should be able to access the Accountant Center, the Batch Enter Transactions feature, and the entire Client Data Review.
Why do they do this? It makes all of these special features available to you if you are enrolled in one of the Intuit accountant subscription/membership plans, without giving all other users access to the features. I always thought that the “external accountant” feature was odd, since anyone (not just an “accountant”) could access them easily.
Note that you can’t test this with your QuickBooks Accountant product, even if you toggle to another edition. This is only found in a “native” version of Pro or Premier. In addition, even if you have a copy of Pro or Premier 2015 to test, I believe that the validation server behind this won’t be working until the official release of the end user products, which usually happens in early October. So ProAdvisors can’t test this fully until that time. Hope it works!
Special Note – I believe that you can only use this from a “regular” version of Pro or Premier – toggling out from the Accountant version won’t work. So we won’t be able to actually test this feature until Pro and Premier 2015 is released to end users, which should happen around September 22.
Send Portable Company File
Even though this is available in QuickBooks Pro, Premier and Enterprise, I’ll describe it here.
Intuit has added a new option to make it easy for someone to send a portable company file via secure folder such as you might have when using SmartVault or Dropbox. They’ve rearranged the options under the File menu to add an option, Send Company File. Under that you will find the Accountant’s Copy option (which used to be directly under File) and the new option, Portable Company File.
When you select this new option a dialog will open as shown below. They are suggesting (and rightly so) that if you use a secure “shared folder” in the cloud to transmit the portable company file that this is more secure than attaching the file to an email message. And they are right!
QuickBooks will remember the setting here so that it will show as the default value the next time you use it.
The goal here is to try to make a seamless one-click file exchange between the accountant and the client (if you are transferring a complete file). The feature automatically selects the right format, remembers the folder name from the prior time.
I’m not overwhelmed by this, however. The concept of using a shared folder instead of an email attachment is correct, but we could already do that with the portable company file under the File / Save Copy option. The only difference here is that the new feature remembers the location you use, just for the portable company file, while Save Copy will remember the last location used for any type of copy/backup you make. Other than that, there is text that reminds you that it is better to use a shared file.
Special Thanks
Special thanks to my dear friend Laura Madeira of of ACS for her assistance with this article. Laura is the author of multiple books on QuickBooks, including the QuickBooks in Depth series, essential books for any ProAdvisor.