QuickBooks's New Look and How Intuit is Layering in AI Across the Platform

There are some massive changes coming to QuickBooks Online for both customers and accountants. The new Intuit platform looks different for sure, but there's a lot more to it than just a facelift. They are introducing AI agents—little smart assistants—to help in various ways, layered throughout the platform. These assistants are going to speed up those tedious tasks, minimize external research by keeping you within the platform, and surface new customized and actionable insights to guide your workflow.

A New View, A New Workflow

Don't freak out. The new layout looks a little different. It will take some getting used to, just like anything you've ever learned in your entire life. The beauty of our brains is that we can learn new things! I assure you that by putting in a little effort, a few months from now you'll be flying around the new platform just as you were able to quickly jump around in the old one.

There's a new module called the Business Feed, which is a customizable dashboard that will highlight key data and insights and then suggest actions and walk you through them. For example, it'll show you which invoices are coming up or overdue, and an agent will help you draft an email reminder. It'll start to learn—if there is a repeat offender on late payments, the agent might suggest a percentage late fee to be a bit more heavy-handed with that particular customer. The Business Feed will also show news articles relevant to your client's industry, giving you macro context and potential advisory talking points.

There's an anomaly detection feature that I’m really excited about! What this feature does is dig through your Balance Sheet or Profit & Loss report, analyze the data and assess trends, then highlight accounts that have potential oddities for you to investigate further. It'll give you an explanation as to why a particular balance is significant or unexpected. This allows you to quickly focus on areas for improvement or concern so you can have more targeted discussions with your clients. I remember as a young auditor, much of my time was spent doing flux analyses—this would have been a dream to have back then.

Intuit will continue rolling out specialized agents to tackle different aspects of your workflow, like a Payments Agent, a Finance Agent, and a Customer Agent (Beta). These agents won't replace human judgment; they'll be intelligent assistants offering up items that need your approval or attention. The robots aren't taking over. You'll always maintain control. They'll simply start to assist with the repeatable work, support your daily tasks, and proactively surface insights to make you a superhuman accountant.

Your New AI Colleagues: The Intuit Agents

Categorizing bank feed transactions is one of the biggest time sucks and lowest value tasks in CAS. So this is the biggest opportunity for Intuit's agents to tackle, and it's a win for accountants.

I have been beta testing the Accounting Agent, which helps automatically categorize transactions. Previously, you could look at historical categorization, but only within the context of that vendor for the past 12 months. Now, this Accounting Agent is combing through the broader context of transactions to help automatically categorize based on the company's entire historical data and leveraging the vendor, bank description, amount, etc. It's finding way more connections and offering up suggestions.

After posting all my ruled transactions, I scan the transactions that are leftover. The agent has populated most of the categories for me, provided an explanation, shows me the other transactions it's comparing it to, and may suggest an alternative category that I can select.

Side thought: We're in a transitory stage, a changing of the guard from Rules to AI agents. Keep in mind the interplay of those. Rules trump the agents for now.

This also supplements training. If you're new, new to the file, or you're delegating the bank transactions to someone new, it'll guide you through the "thought" process around why something might be categorized a certain way—so you're not starting from scratch. As you work, the Accounting Agent will learn and continuously improve its precision.

I get excited when I see the little AI sparkle icon—what does it do?! Click on it! It feels like an accountant's easter egg hunt within QBO. I just stumbled across another one when I was writing this: the “Potential Vendor” suggestion where the agent has done a simple search and identified the name of the vendor, which you can then add with a couple clicks. Very cool!

Supercharged Client Collaboration

Client collaboration on transactions has always been a major pain point for accountants, with back-and-forth happening through a variety of disparate tools—maybe an Excel spreadsheet, messy email threads, or phone calls. This process can now be done within QuickBooks. They're releasing an AI-powered collaboration capability that helps both you and the client: it helps you collect the information you need from clients on transactions while helping the client by providing response options and prompting follow-up questions to make sure their response is complete before delivering that information back to you. This will help cut down on chasing down your clients and retain the whole conversation connected to the transaction. Any time we can consolidate the spider web of tech systems used to support clients, I'm all for that.

Change Management and The Future

To address the elephant in the room, this is a big change and big changes are often uncomfortable. Our brains are really content on autopilot working in a familiar space. We feel in a groove, efficient, fast, competent. Learning something new is hard. You feel slow at first; it can be clunky and awkward—like when a non-iPhone user hands me their phone, it feels like a foreign object. That reminds me of playing with a friend's brand new Gen 1 touchscreen iPhone in college. I told him "I don't like it, it feels so unsatisfying to not press a button." Guess what? I got used to it. How is Blackberry doing these days?

I see new releases as a fun challenge. How can you learn and improve the context of your little bot buddies the fastest? By interacting with them. And it's a two-way learning process. When ChatGPT first came out, I asked basic questions the same way I used to search in Google. But over the years, I've learned how to work with LLMs, and the more I interact with them, the more I unlock and expand their capabilities.

This is just the beginning. It starts with little efficiencies here and there, and at scale they become moderate efficiencies, which will eventually become standard practice. Just like how you take bank feeds for granted now, I don't think it will be long before you wonder what life was like before these agents.

There's a time suck and a skill gap holding many accountants back from advisory—I think these agents are the catalysts to help close that gap. So get in there, start using the new platform and engaging with the agents, and let's see where they take us. We're moving into a new era of accounting, and I think you, your teams, and your clients will be better off if you embrace the possibilities that these AI agents bring to the table.

*This is my content from my experiences, please note this is presented as part of a paid partnership with Intuit.