I’ve got a bit of a reputation around the Acuity team — I take conferences REALLY seriously. I love the collaboration, the opportunity to connect with our partners, vendors, and other professionals in the space, and I love getting to kick back and have a good time. But I especially love the new products and updates, and if we’re getting down to it, that’s where Intuit’s Quickbooks Connect 2019 in San Jose really delivered.
This year’s theme, “Own the Future,” was the ideal focus for the conference as QuickBooks unveiled updates that prioritized usability and overall customer experience for everyone who uses QuickBooks.
Takeaway 1: New features
Here’s what was newly announced on QuickBooks this year:
- Optimization Center: This will be a huge game-changer for firms working with clients. The Optimization Center will list your clients in QBO, show you how efficient you are in the top three areas (banking, expenses, and income), and then show you how to increase your efficiency on QBO for each individual client.
- Bookkeeping Review: Bookkeeping Review was announced last year, and is now rolling out. The new feature will help automatically find bookkeeping areas that need work, provide a statement export feature to help finalize month-ends, and just overall helping streamline the review process. It’s going to be great.
- Business Performance Review: In a nutshell, the Business Performance Review is a super helpful feature giving QB users data and key metrics on their clients in a quick snapshot. Users will be able to filter and search for time periods, and it will provide industry comparison metrics that allow users to measure up their business in comparison to companies in similar industries. Very cool!
Learn more about optimizing QuickBooks for your business here >>
Takeaway 2: GREAT speakers
As always, the QuickBooks Connect stage was also stacked with world-renowned speakers:
- Common, award-winning artist & activist
- Ashton Kutcher, actor & investor
- Jennifer Hyman, CEO of Rent the Runway
- Michael McQueen, trend forecaster and author
- Jade Simmons, concert pianist
- Katie Kinendoll, journalist and consumer tech expert
Not to play favorites, but Jade Simmons and Jennifer Hyman were by far the most exciting and high-energy speakers up there. Jennifer’s journey with Rent the Runway was energetic and compelling, and Jade gave great advice, can play a mean piano, and was very uplifting in her talk about how to “Make Moves like a Maverick.”
Takeaway 3: QuickBooks Live
There’s no way to recap the conference without QuickBooks Live.
Probably one of the most talked-about subjects in bookkeeping since the industry moved away from the abacus, QuickBooks Live will dramatically change the accounting profession. But controversy aside, QB outlined at the conference how it’s new services will be very focused on connecting small businesses with bookkeeping help. If you’re wondering what these changes mean for your business, check out this guide we posted when the new feature was first announced where we detail what the new offering is, talk about the pros/cons, and outline options for small businesses moving forward. Have any questions? Drop us a line and let us know, we’d be happy to answer any of them.
Takeaway 4: Connecting with our partners
Last (but never least!): Quickbooks Connect 2019 was an excellent opportunity for us to connect with our partners.
From new platforms to new offerings, this conference is always a great time getting to see how our partners like Bill.com, Gusto, Expensify, A2X, Veem, Brex, OnPay, and Jirav are diving into the latest technology and coming up with new accounting solutions. These guys also threw a couple of awesome parties (another highlight!), and we all had a blast. A special shout out to Blake, David, and the Cloud Accounting podcast, too — it was great to see them there as well!
Just one week after our very own AcuityCon conference, QuickBooks Connect 2019 was a serious high, and an excellent way for us to build some momentum for 2020. Big new things are coming next year, and we can’t wait to get started.
Have a bookkeeping question for us or want to learn more about how we use QuickBooks at Acuity? Let’s connect.
