Intuit QuickBooks Desktop | Ask a Pro, Ep. 1

Great.

So thanks for attending.

Episode one QuickBooks of Ask a Pro with ProSource.

We’re going to walk through the attendee introductions

first and let them tell you a little bit about themselves.

So first up, we have everything from Fishbowl.

Good afternoon and thanks for joining us today to hear

a little bit more about QuickBooks, how we use QuickBooks and help Me

host QuickBooks.

I’m Beverly Lane.

I am the senior director of integrated services with Fishbowl.

Fishbowl is an inventory software that is a great companion to QuickBooks.

It adds more robust system on top of QuickBooks,

but we’re also QuickBooks Solution providers that have been around

the QuickBooks industry for the past 25 years.

And we look forward to sharing a little bit of information with you today.

Dahlia

Thank you, Beverly.

Hi, everyone.

Thank you for joining us today.

I’m Dalia Cantor, owner of CPA Solutions.

And we.

CPA From providing accounting,

consulting and tax services to

multiple business clients and individuals as well,

We’ve been working with ProSource

Technology Solutions for 15 years, so they’ve been

not just our to provider, but also a really trusted business partner.

And I’m going to talk today about how hosted services really help us

be efficient with our clients, save time, and also provide

easy access and life

information for us to make decisions.

Ali I’ll turn it over to Ray.

Thank you, Dalia. Good afternoon, everybody.

I appreciate you joining this webinar.

I’m excited to talk to you

a little bit today about the services that my company offers.

My name is Leon Hart.

I’m the owner and CEO of ProSource Cloud Services.

We are a multi-service I.T.

business that offers managed I.T.

and cloud solutions, and we have decades of experience that spans

very specific industries, namely financial services, engineering and health care.

So I’m excited to talk to you a little bit today about how QuickBooks

fits into the kind of services we provide our clients.

And we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have about hosting

and how it can improve your experience using QuickBooks.

So Matt, back to you.

Great. Thanks.

So our first speaker is going to be Beverly, and she’s going to cover

some of the popular topics in the new version of QuickBooks.

So QuickBooks 2021 came out in September of last year.

So we’ll be getting a new software system in the next few months.

But I just wanted to highlight

some of the new and improved features that came out in 2021.

So one of the first ones was automated automated statements.

So you can use payment reminders

to schedule your statements for your customers and let them know

if they still have invoices that are past due.

Or you can remind them ahead of time if your customer needs that simple nudge.

So this has been a great feature for me to use in my practice

so I don’t have to monitor my air into it, does it for me.

It allows me to go in and say that if the invoice is still open

and it’s five days to its due date, I want to send a gentle reminder.

I want to send a reminder

three days after the due date to let them know that it’s now past due.

So it increases the ability for me to get paid without me having to work with air.

Another great feature that came out in 2021 was the data level permissions.

Now, we’ve always had the ability to create custom user roles,

but we got a little more detailed with it in 2021.

So this allows the admin to create users in roles with access

permissions and at the record level for both customers and vendors.

So now we can pick and choose which customers and employee

can see, which vendors an employee can see.

And so when you’re working with your sales reps

and they have different territories, this is great for your sales people

because you can only allow them to see the customers or the vendors that they are

working with on a day to day basis without giving them access to another

another employee’s customer or vendor records.

So, Matt, if you’ll change

to the next slide for me.

So then let’s talk about customer groups.

So a lot of people really like the ability to be able to create customer groups.

So this helps with marketing and the ability to be able

to see what kind of customers you’re selling to.

So you can group them in like statuses so that you can send

automated statements, automated payment reminders.

If you have customers that get billed at the first of the month versus customers

that get billed at the 15th of the month or even at the end of the month.

You can set up reminders based on those customer groups.

I personally love it for the mailing capability.

So with the mailing list, we can use those customer groups

to target those customers and give them either a special prize

or a special service that we’re going to offer for just that group.

In QuickBooks Enterprise, you can use these customer groups

to define permissions.

And again, only give access to a specific customer or vendor group level.

And then lastly, let’s talk about some of the improved bank feeds.

Bank feeds have been around for a while,

but we improved our ability to connect with banks in the advanced.

Online banking is a new way for you to be able to review the bank transactions

and match them to the existing transactions already in your QuickBooks,

and it gives you the ability to download the statement directly

from within your QuickBooks on QuickBooks desktop or QuickBooks Online.

You can grab your statement without having to go to your

online bank account to get that information.

So these are all some great new tips and tricks that you can use

with the new features that came out in 2021.

So, Dalia, if you’d like to take it from here and talk to them

about how you use QuickBooks, that would be great.

Sure.

Think of Beverly and the the improved bank feeds

is where we absolutely love as accounts.

So that that helps us a lot as well.

The way why CPA firms prefer QuickBooks hosting.

So first of all, it’s

really easy access for accountants and the client at the same time.

We can both be in in QuickBooks

file as a different user

and obviously giving a slight

financial data for decision making tax planning purposes.

As a CPA is our role has changed over the years, not just of being counters.

We act as business partners and advisors and we really need to fluid

financial information and able to help our clients

with some of the solutions and strategic planning as well.

Excuse me,

a big, big time savings because there’s no backups or accounts, copies

that need to be saved and shared between between different users.

So we did a little bit

of a math.

And so, for example, we have a client that by the time they download

QuickBooks file backup file sends it to us,

and by the time we we restore

the file, get the information ready.

That’s probably about between a now and one and a half hours a month.

So if we have 50 clients, that’s 50 hours a month.

That’s more than the week worth of work.

So it’s been a great time saver for for both.

And there’s no extra steps to be done.

Everything is life.

Everything is accessible immediately.

We also like that authorized host handle all software updates

so we don’t have to worry about when is the new update?

Do we have to shut down our service to it to install the update?

Everything is seamless and it happens in the background

and we don’t have to worry about

time spent on these such activities.

And the other thing that we really enjoy

with QuickBooks hosting is that

QuickBooks Online, which is a platform

that is used by many businesses, but

as the CPAs and I think other accounting firms will agree with me.

QuickBooks Desktop offers a lot more functionality

than QuickBooks Online, and clients find that as well.

So with QuickBooks hosting, you get the same experience,

but with the better platform software and a better functionality.

And of 95% of our clients use QuickBooks and this is,

this has really been a really, really great experience for us.

And again, time savings and and be able to have data by then

and then it’s current and up to date.

So I think that will be it for me.

GRACE Okay.

Thanks, Matt.

I’m going to grab control here real quick. Can.

All right.

So thank you, Dalia, for the Segway into hosting.

So hosting, why it why?

Host QuickBooks

Daily touched on a lot of good reasons for, you know,

her particular business to have it.

But you know simply put it it does facilitate multi-user

and better collaboration and a secure workspace.

In short, it’s really an enabler for your business.

It creates simple coordination

between what’s more than likely separated users and vendors.

You know, in the case of Delia and in the case of distributed workforces,

nowadays, it’s it’s much easier to have things in a centralized place

where everyone can access them uniformly, share it, no transfer files, etc..

So both customers and vendors can access QuickBooks desktop from a web browser

or potentially a small client for us.

A few feature enhancements and

secure access really from any device, so you can even access it

from tablets or from, you know, from phones or Chromebooks, etc..

It’s it’s a nice, nice, flexible way.

And as you pointed out, it offers eliminates the backups

and file transitions across organizations, which really locks the file

that a company may transfer to an accounting or CPA firm

and prevents that prevents a lot of flexibility.

When you’re working with accountants copies, it’s

harder for you to make certain kinds of changes.

And so you get that copy back and reintegrated in the file.

So that eliminates the need for that.

And certainly as a time saver for accounting firms or accounting firms

in particular, it does provide dramatic service efficiencies by having it.

So having a centralized.

So there’s there’s no no worries of having to go retrieve files

from customers or having to log in to customer systems to do that.

It offers really kind of a centralized standard, secure platform for doing that.

And in particular, it also has the potential

to create a service offering for accounting firms

by reducing headaches to their customers, eliminating licensing,

management of separate platforms, etc., etc..

For QuickBooks hosting in particular, the infrastructure for QuickBooks

hosting is purpose built for handling the complexities of QuickBooks desktop.

QuickBooks

desktop environments are tuned and optimized

for the unique operating requirements of the QuickBooks product.

These are not just simple desktops that are just thrown in a cloud environment,

but they’re really highly secure servers that are purpose built for this

and a lot of customer systems are just not designed that way, and

they don’t offer the same secure access uniformly for folks that need to share

that, that really

is particularly sensitive pieces of information for a for a customer.

Some partners may offer expansion

of the platform to a flexible virtual desktop.

This can create unique, unique enablement

opportunities for remote workforce offering and the ability

to host other applications with the same kind of convenient access.

So you can really consider this an investment

to solve other convenience or collaboration challenges.

So if you think beyond just QuickBooks, there are

there are good hosting providers out there

that also offer you to be able to host other line of business products

that may also be able to be used with your QuickBooks hosting platform.

So it really kind of opens up the door to a lot of other flexible

business options.

What about safety?

You know, hosting really should only be

handled by an Intuit authorized hosting provider.

That’s really, really important.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of hosting companies out there.

There are course there are hosting companies

that will certainly host QuickBooks for you or can host QuickBooks for you.

You have to be really careful.

Many companies will host it, but they do it illegally

and there are terms of use in the software that really prevent hosting

from non-registered providers and eventually they will be shut down.

That’s not to say that it still doesn’t happen.

Intuit is aware of it.

We’re aware that there’s a lot of companies that can do it,

but you have to be really careful from a safety standpoint.

There’s a lot of strict compliance guidelines for any host for hosting

any into a product and only partners in the program meet this requirement.

And authorized hosts have those purpose built environments for securing

and protecting customer data, things like encryption intrusion prevention.

A lot of these safety measures

that you’re accustomed to hearing the buzzwords in the industry,

especially in light of all of these ransomware

things that people have heard about in the news,

it’s really important that you have a safe, secure platform

that’s authorized, vetted and hosted in secure data centers

that have industry compliant security practices in place.

This also provides assurance for upstream support.

Anyone who’s ever had a deep QuickBooks problem in Beverly can attest to this.

And Delia is pro advisor as well can attest to this.

It’s really hard to get support if you’re running a system that’s not supported.

We see it a lot.

We’ve had to rescue clients that have actually moved

from other hosting platforms because they’re not part of a program

Intuit will not support them.

They can’t get upstream support from an authorized ISP like Fishbowl or

or a pro advisor like Dahlia CPA Farms because they’re not hosted on a platform

that’s actually authorized and supported by into it.

And that’s really important for a product that can be fairly expensive.

You want to make sure

that’s really hosting really business sensitive information.

You want to make sure that you have a platform that can actually be supported

end to end for the money that that’s paid for licensing and hosting.

So it’s really, really important to have the right safety measures in place,

and that’s what authorized hosting the hosting can provide for you.

So hopefully you can see the flexibility that it offers

and some of the safety concerns that it might address.

So, Matt, I’ll I’ll turn it back over to you.

Great. Thanks, Lee.

So that wraps up the presentation for our three speakers today.

We do have one question.

I know Beverly had touched on it quickly.

I’ll probably shoot this over to Lee.

Lee in terms of

version of QuickBooks that can be hosted, I know there are some limitations.

Do you want to cover that in terms of I know

there’s some limitations on how far you can go back,

but do you want to take that one?

Sure.

Are you talking about the

the the John question that was asked?

Yeah. What versions of QuickBooks can you host?

I see.

So John asks a question.

All versions of QuickBooks can be hosted.

What version are you currently using that you that you need hosted?

So the current support model for Intuit

is really current minus two and current being 21.

So that means 21, 20 and 19 or really what supported.

So anyone that’s running 2018 QuickBooks

really needs to be moved to a new or supported year.

You can’t typically by last year’s version when the New Years out.

So if you do upgrade from from say 18, you are upgrading to 21.

But we rely on a lot of experts like Beverly to

to help us get very specific your products if that’s something that’s required.

But that is how the support structure works.

Any version of QuickBooks can be hosted, pro premier enterprise,

all the accounting additions, all of those are supported on a hosting platform.

That’s part of the authorized hosting program.

But it is very important that you run

a supported version of QuickBooks because that is part of the plan,

that is part of the requirements for hosting.

As you only you only host supported versions of QuickBooks.

Yeah.

And just to piggyback on kind of what you said in your presentation, Lee,

it is imperative that you are in a supported product,

which means three years or less, so 19, 20 or 21,

when 22 comes out in just a couple of months into, it will give you leeway

until May of the next year to get upgraded if you’re in 19.

But more importantly, you need to ensure that you’re

with an authorized hosted provider.

If you are not into it, will not support you.

They will require that you bring it down out of the cloud

or they will not support you at all.

So you really have to pick and choose and make sure that your hosting provider

has met the

all of the requirements

that into it has put in place to protect you.

So into it, make sure that the hosting provider

is meeting the security requirements that they know how to handle the software.

So Intuit is trying to protect you, so make sure you’re

using an authorized hosting provider.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Bye. Beverly and Lee, I think that was the only question in the chat.

So I’ll move to the last slide, which is the contact information.

If you heard anything that interested, you feel free

to email any of the participants directly.

Their contact information is here.

I will leave it up here for a couple of minutes and it seems like

there are no other questions in the chat.

Thank you, Beverly Lee and Delia for taking a couple of minutes today

to cover some of your experiences in the space.

And thank you to all the attendees for

being participants.

In our first episode of Ask a Pro, we hope to make this a monthly

series going forward, spotlighting different challenges.

If you have any ideas, feel free to email Lee.

His email contact is on here, or you can reach out to me

directly as I’m the one kind of putting these together.

So any parting words from any of the presenters?

No, just thanks. For the opportunity, Matt.

I appreciate this. This is great.

Especially being on a panel of experts.

This is wonderful.

Yeah, I just wanted to say the same thing.

Thanks for taking the time to join us today.

If you have questions about hosting, please reach out to Lee.

If you have questions about how to use QuickBooks Ex or if you need support

with QuickBooks on setup, implementation, training, or even your accounting,

reach out to Dalia or myself and either of us will be happy to help you.

Great.

Thanks everybody.

Have a great Wednesday and we’ll speak to you in the next one, hopefully.

All right.

Have a great do great. Take care.