Free Practice Management Features Added to QuickBooks Online Accountant

Intuit Inc. has added free Practice Management features in QuickBooks Online Accountant, significantly reducing the number of tools accounting professionals need to manage their practice. Accountants in the United States, Australia, Canada, France and the United Kingdom can now access the features directly in QuickBooks Online Accountant.

The new work dashboard is fully mobile-enabled and gives accountants the power to track their work in the same place where they get it done. The availability of this first set of practice management features is the first step toward providing an end-to-end practice management solution designed with the accounting professional in mind.

“The new Practice Management in QuickBooks Online Accountant is saving me time before I even start using it,” said Stacy Kildal, Founder, Kildal Services , White Lake, Michigan. “The first time I clicked on the ‘Work’ tab, it had already created payroll jobs based on my client list. Thanks for thinking of me, QuickBooks Online Accountant team!”

“The Practice Management features in QuickBooks Online Accountant allow accountants to seamlessly track and coordinate all the work associated with their clients and firm, in one place, to help ensure nothing falls through the cracks,” said Rich Preece, leader of Intuit’s Accountant Segment, Small Business Group. “Accountants can now get high-level visibility across their initiatives – all in the cloud – and collaborate with clients and staff members much more efficiently.”

To develop the first Practice Management feature set, Intuit watched accountants complete their work and designed the new dashboard to solve three key challenges:

From tedious management to command center: accountant work is completely deadline-driven, and the number of deadlines is enormous. The existing process to track client information and work is cumbersome, disjointed and highly manual, leaving employees overwhelmed and firm owners feeling anxious that deadlines might be missed, resulting in potential fines and client losses. With Practice Management, it takes seconds to create new jobs or tasks and assign them. Accountants can then edit job cards straight from the dashboard.
From disconnected to integrated solutions: accountants often use several separate spreadsheets to track employees’ granular tasks, keep management informed of progress and track client information. Often times, there is no or very little integration between the tools they use every day to complete their work. QuickBooks Online Accountant is directly connected to the applications accountants use to perform work, making it the source of truth for client data and work management.
From broken to central client communication: accountant communication with clients happens outside the context of work, which introduces challenges as much gets lost in translation. In fact, Intuit estimates accounting professionals spend 65 percent of their time tracking down source documents from clients. Practice Management features allow them to send document requests and messages to clients from QuickBooks Online Accountant. Clients can view and respond directly from QuickBooks Online.

Practice Management is free, regardless of the firm size or number of clients. Click here to see Practice Management in action and for more information, visit bit.ly/practicemanage.

Accounting