Do you currently run client oversight and client month end via excel?

I thought so, and so do most firms.

Capacity planning, month-end client reviews, reports, KPI’s, all of it. Excel spreadsheets.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could view all of our clients in one place, group them by whatever we want to group them by, and track bookkeeping and tax workflows by client on top of the actual data?

I’ve been at multiple firms and now run Celerity, and most of the time this requires many different tools and at least an excel file and a few hours.

Intuit has been building for these pain points and recently released the Intuit Accountant Suite.

What IAS actually is: 

Intuit Accountant Suite (IAS) is an evolution of QBOA. It’s a client list, it’s a bookkeeping review tool, it’s employee development, and it’s a high level dashboard (by role). IAS is everything we’ve been stitching together across five tools. But in one place.

One platform for the entire firm.
– It’s a full client list.
– It’s a bookkeeping review tool.
– It’s team oversight.
– It’s role based dashboards.
– It’s firm level visibility.

And this is just a foot in the door on these tools. Intuit seems to be focusing on us, the accountants.

The Key Benefits: 

Efficiency and Scalability:
IAS brings firm level efficiency and makes generally easier for firms. Remember using different logins to access those certain clients? Well that problem is eliminated, we can now access them all under one login.

We’re also able to control apps by clients and get alerts for issues within IAS. I find this incredibly useful and helps me quickly re-connect and limit missing data for clients.

The organization of our clients in this new way helps eliminate the chaos typically involved with scaling a firm up. For medium/large firms, this is solving a major pain point.

Better Delegation:

Remember when we all had the same dashboard logging in, no matter what role they held at the firm? Well, I’m happy to say, we all get our own roles based & customizable dashboard now in IAS.

This helps each role to focus on the areas that are most important to them each day. Less wondering who’s handling the task & emailing about it. It’s about to be much clearer for those workflows within Quickbooks Online.
One of the hardest parts of growing a firm is onboarding new staff. It usually takes weeks before they understand where everything lives. With IAS, new hires get structure on day one. They open their dashboard and immediately know what they own. For a firm like mine, this is a huge improvement.

AI at the firm level:

We get the AI tools as well, not just our clients. What if you could identify trends for an industry group of clients or get an anomaly detection notification that helped you find and fix an issue for a client?

High level KPI’s by client and alerts specific to our clients to help identify where we can stay proactive for our clients vs. reactive. I love to fix problems before the client’s notice and AI within Intuit is going to help us do that more regularly.

Client books close:
Intuit released a book’s close feature recently as well. It’s full of useful tasks related to month-end close client by client. Similar to other tools in the space, but this one is right on top of our client’s QBO data. Track your client work step by step using this tool.

Some features they’re offering us: Bulk processing, conversing with clients in the system, tracking close status across all clients, and standardizing closing workflows.

New Proadvisor program:
This is the one I’m probably the most excited about! We’re getting a new ProAdvisor program soon.
Intuit is focusing a bit more on helping us elevate our skillset. They’re doubling down on the need to partner with accountants like us so they’re making the new ProAdvisor program better and more relevant.

We’re looking at better training that isn’t only focused on using Quickbooks as a tool. These resources will help you serve your clients better, upskill your staff, and help your team learn the skills to scale up your firm. I believe there’s a focus on higher level advisory services and the soft skills that are needed for that (something most accountants I know would love to learn about).

Final Thoughts

We are about to get a full suite of tools built specifically for running our firms. Not just for client work. For the actual operations inside the firm. Imagine having all of the data you need to run your firm at your fingertips at any time? That seems like the vision here.
I plan to test the new Intuit Accountant Suite across Celerity Accounting over the next year. I think there is a lot of power in using all the context Intuit sees across clients, industries, and benchmarks. If I can use that to help clients faster and give them better visibility, I’m in.

Have you tried IAS yet? If you have, send me a message. I want to hear what you’re seeing so far.

This was a paid promotional post with Intuit.

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