The Accounting Podcast

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Hector: Welcome to the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast. I am joined by my good friend Alicia Katz Pollock, the original, the one and only Rockstar CEO and founder of Royal White Solutions.

Alicia: And I have the privilege of collaborating with Hector Garcia, CPA, the founder of Right Tool for QuickBooks.

Hector: And in this episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants [00:00:30] podcast, we're going to be talking about QuickBooks ledger. This is going to be a special episode because it's going to be podcast format, and we're also publishing the video version to YouTube. So first of all, hi, Alicia. How are you?

Alicia: Hey, Hector. I'm great. How are you doing?

Hector: Excellent. I'm excited. It's a brand new product. We haven't seen a new product from Intuit in a very long time.

Alicia: And it's completely fun to work on minimal information and speculate about what this might possibly be. And does it fill our wish lists? [00:01:00]

Hector: Absolutely. So let's talk about dating, the dates and the timelines of this. So on November 6th, in the firm of the future website. So you've got a firm of the future.com and you go into the November updates. They first talked about QuickBooks ledger. There's also a post I believe it was November 4th or fifth. There's very close to that November 6th actual publishing date in the firm of the future, Ted Callahan, the director or leader of the accountants segment [00:01:30] in in QuickBooks, posted a LinkedIn post saying, hey, by the way, if you follow me on LinkedIn and you're an accounting professional, message me or click on this in this form and you can get access to QuickBooks ledger, the brand new products. So Alicia and I started speculating. And then between our speculation, the comments in LinkedIn, the comments in Facebook, people calling QuickBooks tech support the subsequent pages that came out. I think we have [00:02:00] about 98% of what this is. So we can map out conspiracy theory exactly what this is, and we assume that in QuickBooks connect next week, because we're recording this right after that November 6th launch of that article next week in QuickBooks connect, they're probably going to clarify and get us to 99.9%. And I'm sure that 0.1% will figure out later. So, Alicia, reader's digest version, what is QuickBooks ledger?

Alicia: So QuickBooks ledger is [00:02:30] a product that's specifically for the accountant users, although the client is going to be able to sign into it, but it's really designed for the accountant user. That's like minimum ledger for what they would need in order to run a PNL, a balance sheet, file taxes. So it's really just a trial balance report in the end. And so there's none of the none of the the typical business transactions, there's no invoices, there's no R, there's no AP, [00:03:00] it's just an after the fact accounting process that allows you to do kind of quick and dirty bookkeeping.

Hector: That's a great summary. I'm going to share my screen. So if you're watching in in in YouTube, obviously you'll be able to see my screen. If you're just listening in audio format that's okay. You can follow along just fine. So in the firm of the future website on the November 6th, what's New in QuickBooks update? The very first thing that shows up is QuickBooks [00:03:30] ledger. In the firm of the future website. You don't get that much information. The most important piece that you see is sort of like the marketing briefing. This is for your year end tax only, low transaction volume clients that essentially you're going to be moving from a Excel spreadsheet, some competing products like Xero ledger or something like that into this version of QuickBooks online that is now quote unquote [00:04:00] affordable compared to what it would cost otherwise to put your clients in QuickBooks online. Simple Start, which used to be the lowest cost QuickBooks online product. You could put a company file a client onto, which was $21 a month effectively, which is $30 minus a 30% ProAdvisor discount. So in contrast, we now have QuickBooks ledger, which is launching at $10 a month. This is per client, per subscription, [00:04:30] per company file. Now will this be $10 a month forever? Probably not, but it's launching at at $10 a month. We are used to QuickBooks online increasing prices, so we'll speculate later on in the future whether this thing will go to 15 or something like that.

Hector: But it is. The target is to give accountants, especially the ones having 20, 30, 50 clients in QuickBooks desktop where they only do their once a year sort of tax only write up work [00:05:00] to get them into the cloud. To get them into Qbo and of course getting accountants to pay per client, which is obviously the ultimate goal in override into it. And obviously they also want to have access to the data and have just more information about more small businesses out there. So when you move your QuickBooks desktop clients, or maybe you were doing things in a spreadsheet or some other software, you're now going to pay $10 a month. They don't say whether the ProAdvisor discount can be applied to this, but I think it's implied that this is $10 a month period. No [00:05:30] such thing as a ProAdvisor discount, and they give five bullet points on the firm of the future website. One is automated, automated bank feeds, the other one is bank reconciliation. The third is financial statements, the third is 1099 tracking and the fifth is seamless transition to tax preparation. Those are the five that we see in the firm of the future website. I think we can extrapolate tons of stuff from here. But listen, these are the things that we need, right? We are accountants.

Hector: We want bank reconciliations. Beautiful. [00:06:00] Xero doesn't have that. And of course Xero Ledger wouldn't have that. And we're making the assumption this is a response to Xero Ledger and also a respond to books which I haven't talked about, which is legal Zoom getting into the accounting business as well. So this is a response to the lower cost online based products for having, again, like Alicia said, no invoices, no standard business transactions, just ledger. Now, the really important thing [00:06:30] about this, and I'm going to suspect this is going to be the single thing that causes the most amount of confusion. Based on the responses I'm seeing in Facebook, a lot of accountants are saying, great, I'm going to recommend this to a client, or I have a client that would be great for this, or have a client that's been trying to move from QuickBooks desktop to online. It was too expensive. Now it's finally affordable. And that is the wrong thinking because you're missing the mark. This is an accountant only product that [00:07:00] the accountant will pay for that the accountant owns and controls. And yes, you're going to be able to give the client access so they can view stuff, but it's not meant for the end user to do the work. It's meant for the accountant to do and own the work. Any comments on that? Alicia.

Alicia: Yeah, I mean, really what it is, is just a quick and dirty bank transactions import allowing you to say this is income, this is this type of expense, this type of expense map that chart [00:07:30] of accounts to your taxes and then get everything in with rules and a minimum of fuss, reconcile it to make sure it's right, and then just import it into proconnect tax and be done with taxes. So if you're not tracking sales, you're not tracking customers, you're not tracking products and services. You're just saying, I made this much money and I spent it on these things. That's absolutely the nutshell.

Hector: Yeah. And so let's dig into the details.