CPA Practice Advisor - 13

SPONSORED CONTENT
Now Available in QuickBooks Online Accountant:

Month-End Review and Industry Benchmarks
YOU'RE ALWAYS LOOKING for tools and resources to help you work more efficiently and
elevate your role as a trusted advisor. The two newest features in QuickBooks Online Accountant-month-end review and industry benchmarks-can help. Month-end review enables
accountants to standardize the process and then uses automation to help deliver accurate
books in less time and with more confidence. And industry benchmarks allow you to quickly
gain expert-level insights in order to make actionable recommendations to your clients, providing a helpful resource during this unprecedented time.
Month-end review and industry
benchmarks are currently available
to all QuickBooks Online Accountant
users in the United States as "open
betas." Intuit will continue to evolve the
experience for both features, including
rolling out additional enhancements
and functionality to help save you time
and better serve your clients.

MONTH-END REVIEW
With month-end review, you'll have
a simple, powerful platform to help
create a more organized, consistent,
and accurate process for closing your
clients' books at the end of the month.
At the same time, you'll get the tools
you need to identify common client
issues and hard-to-find anomalies.
Here are some of the biggest
benefits of the new month-end review
feature inside QuickBooks Online
Accountant:
More time. Being able to easily
identify common problems and
difficult-to-spot issues can help save
you time and allow you to bring your
clients impactful solutions that were
previously overlooked or identified
too late. With month-end review, you
can also quickly resolve transition

details with automatic flagging of
missing data. New functionality that
is expected to come this summer
includes the ability to more accurately
reconcile accounts through automatic
detection of duplicate and outstanding
data, and the ability to easily identify
issues for further investigation through
automatic identification of unexpected
balances from period to period.
More confidence. Another big perk
is having confidence that your clients'
books are complete and accurate. In
addition to step-by-step workflows,
customizable client checklists allow
you to track unique client processes,
while task and reconciliation progress
tracking helps you keep up with the
month-end closing process.
Streamline your firm. Getting
more done in less time is key for any
practice. With month-end review, the
end-of-month close is simplified and
standardized across your team with
consistent workflows and a final review
checklist.
Month-end review is broken down
into three steps: transaction review,
account reconciliation, and final
review. Here's a sample overview of
how it will look inside the accountant
toolbox (actual screen may vary), when
logged into your clients' books:

INDUSTRY BENCHMARKS
Industry benchmarks are part of the
rapidly growing QuickBooks Online
Accountant Business Performance
Dashboard, which quickly assesses

key performance indicators, and spots
business trends to help you identify
and share opportunities - that may
be applied towards recovery and/or
growth -- for your clients.
With industry benchmarks, you
can now bring expert-level industry
insights to client advisory, enabling
you to better identify areas for business
improvement and set smarter goals.
Based on the power of aggregated,
anonymized QuickBooks data, you
can compare your clients' business
performance to similar businesses in
their industry, in the same location
and with similar revenue, to identify
problems and opportunities, as well
as focus and improve your clients'
business outcomes.
To help ensure accuracy, the data
used to generate benchmarks is pulled
only from QuickBooks Online accounts
that are attached to an accountant
and where the books are regularly
reconciled.
Here are several of the biggest
benefits of industry benchmarks:
Provide greater impact. You are

MAY 2020 ■

able to provide recommendations
based on actionable data that can help
your clients to understand where they
stand next to the competition based on
available data. Specifically, you could
help them make informed decisions
by identifying areas for improvement
through industry benchmarks across
key metrics. On top of that, you can
measure how clients are trending
against their competition through
period performance tracking.
Save time. Using the industry
picker, you can quickly determine how
clients compare to one another. Simply
select your client's business type using
the industry picker, and QuickBooks
quickly and automatically compiles
industry data from similar businesses
in the same location and revenue
range. Once selected, QuickBooks
updates your data every month, so
you don't need to search for the correct industry data or worry that your
comparisons are out of date.
To access industry benchmarks
within the Business Performance
Dashboard, go into any of your
clients' books and click on Business
Performance Dashboard within the
overview tab. Here is a snapshot:

TRANSFORM YOUR PRACTICE
Taking your practice to the next level
means that you must embrace change
and find solutions to meet your clients'
needs. With these new features in
QuickBooks Online Accountant -- both
available at no additional cost -- you'll
have the tools and resources to help
you on this path, making sure you
provide your clients with excellent
service.
Learn more at: https://quickbooks.
intuit.com/accountant. ■
The ProAdvisor Spotlight is sponsored by

www.CPAPracticeAdvisor.com

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CPA Practice Advisor

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