QuickBooks Online Accountant Review 2023: Features & Price

The ProAdvisor Preferred Pricing program provides accountants and their clients’ exclusive discounts on QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Time, and QuickBooks Payroll. It’s applicable only for new client subscriptions that are initiated from the “Add client” tab within QuickBooks Online Accountant. There are three billing methods you can choose from when setting up a new QuickBooks Online client account:

• ProAdvisor discount: You can pay for your client’s QuickBooks Online subscription and get a 30% discount for their entire subscription duration. You or your firm will be charged monthly with the option to cancel anytime. You can pay the discounted price to QuickBooks and then charge your clients the full price if you want. If your client leaves, you can move the subscription to them and they’ll have to pay full price.
• Direct discount: With direct discount, your clients are billed directly instead of you paying on their behalf. The discount rates are the same as with the ProAdvisor Discount, but only last for 12 months instead of the entire life of the subscription. After 12 months, your client is billed the then-current regular price.
• Revenue share: Just like Direct Discount, your clients are billed directly in the revenue share billing option. When you sign up a new client with QuickBooks Online or Payroll, they will receive a 50% discount for three months, just like if they had purchased the subscription themselves on the QuickBooks website. QuickBooks will then pay you 30% of the subscription fees paid by your client for the first 12 months.

The table below shows the available exclusive discounts and the discounted price for the different QuickBooks products.

*In addition to the base price discounts, both QuickBooks Payroll and QuickBooks Time offer a 15% discount on fees per employee or contractor in all their plans.

There are two ways you can add a new client in QuickBooks Online Accountant—depending on whether they already have a QuickBooks Online account.

Adding Clients Who Have a QuickBooks Account

Adding Clients Who Are New to QuickBooks

If your client has no QuickBooks account and doesn’t intend to sign up for QuickBooks, you can still add them to your QuickBooks Online Accountant account. To do this, select the Clients menu from the left navigation bar, click Add Client, and then provide the required client information. Make sure to select No subscription under the Products section. Click Save to add your new client.

Setting up a new client in QuickBooks Online Accountant

The QuickBooks ProAdvisor program offers benefits and resources that get better as your firm grows. You’ll earn points and rewards, such as free training, and software discounts for the things you do already like training in QuickBooks Online, adding clients, and attaching software.

Once you complete the training, pass the exam, and become a QuickBooks ProAdvisor, you’re eligible to list your profile for free in the Find-a-ProAdvisor Directory. Essentially, the faster your firm grows and earns points, the faster you’ll elevate your status and gain access to rewards.

When you sign up for QuickBooks Online Accountant, you’ll gain access to QuickBooks Online Advanced. This version has features such as Batch Transactions, which gives you the ability to define and automate specific tasks and workflows. It also assists with organization, integrating seamlessly with Google Sheets. The Performance Center also allows accountants to track business performance and gain valuable insights with customizable, presentation-ready reports.

Project management can be accessed through the Work menu. This feature lets you create projects or tasks and assign them to your team members. One of the most useful features is the ability to create recurring projects, which makes sense as accounting professionals often manage projects that are repeated regularly. You can specify how often the project will be repeated and the end date.

Creating a new project in QuickBooks Online Accountant

The “Books Review” feature is an expanded version of “Month-End Review,” and it’s designed to help QuickBooks Online accountant users streamline their workflows for initial transaction review, reconciliation, and final review. The Books Review includes two new review phases:

1. Setup phase: This allows you to find and fix errors made during setup, including errors on the existing balance sheet, profit and loss (P&L) reports, and opening balances and chart of account issues, like bank accounts that haven’t been linked to bank feeds, missing system accounts, and incorrectly classified account types.
2. Wrap-up phase. This helps you add finishing touches to your work. With this new tool, it’s easier for you to prepare a customized report of your client’s monthly financial data and business performance, helping you provide them with better information for more strategic business decisions. The feature also enables you to email the report to your client and close the books for the accounting period.

In the “Your Practice” section, you’ll have access to built-in tools for workflow tracking, document sharing, and team assignments. This enables you to streamline your communications by sharing client documents and keeping them organized in a password-protected environment.

You can also view your firm’s upcoming deadlines and urgent tasks and filter by clients, assigned team members, or type of task. Additionally, you can manage employee permissions by allowing access to specific information. The client menu lets you add new clients, edit existing clients’ details, or make a client inactive.

Client management tool in QuickBooks Online Accountant

With these accountant-only tools, you can streamline your work and access customizable reports, so you can advise clients quickly. The accountant toolbox includes quick links to your chart of accounts, journal entries, and reports, as well as tools for performing several functions like reconciliation and reclassifying transactions.

Accountant Toolbox in QuickBooks Online Accountant

• Chart of Accounts: Review the list of your client’s chart of accounts to make sure it’s still relevant to their business.
• Journal entries: Create an accounting journal entry easily to track money spent and received by your client.
• Reconcile: Match your client’s transactions on QuickBooks to their bank and credit card statements to make sure their books are accurate.
• Report: Build and view different types of reports. You can pick from standard reports, like balance sheets, P&L statements, and cash flow reports, or you can create a customized report based on your client’s business needs. The Performance Center gives a visual chart of your financial data, which is easier to comprehend than plain numbers:

Performance Center in QuickBooks Online Accountant

• Void/Deleted Transactions: Quickly run a report of voided or deleted checks. You can select your desired date range and track which user made the transaction.
• Close Books: Reconcile your client’s books to the prior year’s tax return. If everything is accurate and complete, you can close the books to prevent unwanted changes.
• Reclassify Transactions: Reclassify income, expenses, cost of goods, and balance sheet accounts to make sure that no transactions are incorrectly paired up with classes or accounts.
• Write off Invoices: Record uncollectible invoices as a bad debt by using the Write Off Invoice tool. This feature helps you keep your net income and accounts receivable up to date.
• Prep for Taxes: Review and adjust your client’s accounts to prepare for the tax season. After you review their accounts, you can export the pre-filled form to ProConnect Tax Online to help you file your client’s tax returns easily.

While there isn’t a mobile app designated for managing client books within QuickBooks Online Accountant, you can access your own books through the QuickBooks Online mobile app, just like any other user. The app has most of the same features as the software itself, such as entering transactions, recording expenses, invoicing customers, and sending reports.

There are also many integrations for both your firm and your clients. These include:

• Accounting firm: Practice Ignition, Karbon, Aero Workflow, and Hubdoc
• Clients: Method:CRM, SOS Inventory, Expensify, Float, Plooto, and Veem

This tool reduces time spent on manual data entry by exporting your clients’ QuickBooks Online data directly into their tax returns prepared with Intuit ProConnect and correcting entries to simplify end-of-year duties. This includes adjusting entries and mapping account balances to specific tax lines.

If your client wants you to handle their payroll, you can add QuickBooks Payroll to your account. You can choose from three plans (Core, Premium, and Elite), starting at $45 per month plus $5 per employee. All plans include full-service payroll, including unlimited payroll processing, tax payments and filings for federal and state taxes, and employee benefits management. If you upgrade to Premium or Elite, you’ll get access to HR tools, such as onboarding checklists and performance tools.

If you drive for work, you can use QuickBooks Online Accountant to record your deductible mileage. With the free QuickBooks mobile app, you can automatically track your business mileage without manually recording your odometer readings. Alternatively, you can manually enter your mileage each time you drive.

Tracking mileage in QuickBooks Online Accountant