A Tour of QuickBooks Online’s New AI Agent Team (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: QuickBooks Online added a whole team of AI tools and agents to make your life easier. And in this video, I'll show you what they're all about. That includes AI for taxes, accounting, payments, reporting, lead tracking, and project management. I'm David, I partnered with QuickBooks to bring you this one, so to follow along, click the link in the description below. You'll land here on the QuickBooks homepage. Now, let me take you through which agents you get depending on your plan. It's pretty simple, the higher your plan, the more agents you unlock. On all plans, you get the base AI. It's AI chat, plus business tax AI to maximize your deductions, and accounting AI to categorize your expenses automatically. The essentials plan adds the full accounting AI to categorize batches of expenses easily, and it also provides the payments AI to get you paid faster. The plus plan adds AI-powered reconciliation, the sales tax AI, and the customer AI that finds leads for you. Finally, the advanced plan adds the finance AI for executive-level end-of-period reporting, and the new project management AI. Today, I'll use the advanced plan so I can show you all of them in action. Starting here on the home screen, you're gonna see most of these AI agents pop up on the business feed. You see a preview of that here, but for more details, click on the feed icon in the left sidebar. The Intuit intelligence card on the right side of the screen shows you which AI agents you have access to. As you use QuickBooks, you'll see those agents pop up cards inside the feed. The finance agent has built a monthly summary for us, the customer agent has given us seven new opportunities, the payments agent's recommending we add late fees, the accounting agent's telling us we've got some transactions ready to post, and the business tax AI is ready to maximize our deductions. These cards are all information only, so nothing happens without your approval. So let's start our review with the business tax AI by clicking maximize your deductions. The AI knows your industry, which is a limited service restaurant in my case, and it points out deductions that businesses like yours commonly missed. For a donut shop like mine, that could be something like food spoilage costs. If you have a home office, there's a lot of stuff you might miss. You can scroll through the whole list of categories here, and when one looks interesting, you can click see full list. This gives you a more comprehensive list of deductions, and if you see one that you actually have, you can click add expense right next to it to open the Intuit intelligence chat. This walks you through recording that expense, whether you paid it from your business or from your personal account. Now remember, this is not a certified accountant, so make sure you run your deductions by a real person before you commit. That's gonna keep more money in your piggy bank. Now let's see how the accounting agent can help you every month. Back in the feed, the accounting agent says I have four transactions ready to post, so I'll click review all to see them. This takes you to the familiar bank transactions page. Now, notice we have 22 total transactions in this list and only four are marked ready to post. These four are the ones the agent is highly confident about from your transaction history. When you click review, you'll be able to post them all at once instead of one at a time. Now, in my experience, the agent cares a lot about getting the categories right, but not necessarily the vendors. So make sure they're all set before you post. This batch approval of ready to post transactions is only on the essentials plan and higher. What is available on all plans is auto-categorization. Next to an expense that you have not categorized, you might see an exclamation mark or a check mark which indicates that the AI has tried to categorize that transaction for you. This is sometimes based on your past behavior and sometimes based on what it knows about the vendor. As with all QuickBooks agents, this is just a default choice. You get the final say and can make the choice here. Now, the accounting agent doesn't handle split transaction categories. You'll still need to handle those yourself. In the plus and advanced plans, you'll also get AI-powered reconciliation. You can access that by going to the accounting app and clicking reconcile. Reconciliation just means matching your bank statement to what's in QuickBooks. That used to mean downloading your bank statement and then copying and pasting the ending balance directly into QuickBooks. Instead, now you can upload your statement and it lines everything up for you. That means two things. First, it gets the ending balance and ending date for you. And second, when you click start reconciling, it will match every transaction in QuickBooks against the appropriate transaction in the bank statement. It then shows you any differences between the statement and QuickBooks that you need to account for. Here, we've got a $560 charge that is not in the bank statement. When you click on the AI star icon in that row, it gives you some guidance on how to handle it. We determined that this payment hasn't hit our bank account yet, so we unclear it. And once there's zero discrepancy between the bank and QuickBooks, you're allowed to finish the reconciliation. Now, back in the feed, the accounting agent also watches your spending and flags anything that looks off in your profit and loss report. Any of these issues might be cause for concern, so make sure you click review all so you don't miss one. Now, let me show you how to get money in faster. If your customers pay late, you'll see it in the feed with a nudge to add late fees. You can set that up directly inside the card. Assuming you have a late fee policy, you can set a flat fee or a percentage of the balance with a grace period. Now, quick note, this is not legal advice, so make sure you check your local laws before you click apply to all customers. You'll also see the payments AI when you choose a customer on your invoice. When you click on this icon, you'll see the customer's payment history. Payments agent also makes suggestions like updating the payment terms. You can click any of these suggestions and then click apply to see it reflected on the invoice. The payments agent can also create an invoice for you when you click autofill. It works by reading a contract, a picture of some notes, or even an email to fill out the order details. Here's an email making a catering order for 20 dozen assorted donuts. I'm just gonna copy the entire email, go back to the invoice, click text, and then paste it in this box. I'll click autofill and it builds the invoice. If it's not sure about something, it'll ask you. Adele did ask for boxes with a custom logo, but we don't supply those, so I'll delete this suggestion. Looking at the line items, it did match the product, which is this assorted dozen donuts. But make sure you check these because sometimes the quantity won't quite be correct. Next, check the invoice date. In this case, the year got reset to 2024. Next, we'll talk about the agent which keeps you from losing leads in your inbox. That's the customer agent which you can access on the plus plan and up. You can get there by going to all apps, customer hub, and then opportunities. The customer agent watches your inbox for leads. To connect your inbox, click on manage sources and then use Outlook or Gmail. New leads take about 24 hours to sync, so don't treat this as an instant follow-up tool. New leads expressing interest in your products and services arrive as opportunities, and they're scored as warm, hot, or cold. Clicking an email gives you a summary so you get the whole thread at a glance. And if you want to follow up on an opportunity, because why wouldn't you, you just click on draft a response. The agent will create an email response for you which you can edit and send directly from QuickBooks. Now, what's new this time is that you can train your agent to create better emails. When you click train your agent, you land on your business knowledge base. Here, you can tell it about your business, your ideal customer, and your value proposition, so its scoring of leads and its email drafts get better. Next up is the agent that saves you from charging the wrong sales tax. That's in the sales tax app which you can access from all apps, sales tax, and then sales tax categories. Now, sales tax is trickier than expenses because what you owe depends on exactly what you sell and where you sell it. This AI looks at all of your products and services, which there's one per row, and suggests the right sales tax category. If it looks correct, you can click confirm suggestion. If you're confused or have a question, click why this category. This work here is a simple trick to tell QuickBooks whether or not to charge tax on an item and at what rate for your location. That wraps up the agents on the plus plan. Now, we're on to project management. This is the newest QuickBooks agent and it shows up when you create a new project. Here, we've got a proposal for a donut bar at a grand opening. In addition to the scope of work, we also have project timeline and milestones. Now, instead of having to type those details in by hand, I can upload this document to the project management agent for it to read it all. It drafts the project template for you, including the customer, the dates, and the details pulled straight off the page. Now, if you are on the Intuit Enterprise suite, which is QuickBooks' newest mid-market offering, it'll go further and fill in those projects tasks from the document too. That brings us back to the big picture to check out the finance agent. This is also an advanced only agent and you'll find it under the reports tab under standard reports. At the end of each month, the finance agent generates a key financial summary. You can see it by clicking review summary. You'll get a stakeholder ready overview of your finances. Performance highlights cover key financial metrics, including income, COGS, margin, and expenses. And you get informative trend lines and insights for each of those metrics month over month. You can modify this report by selecting different KPIs or a different reporting period using the filters at the top of the screen. And if you get curious, you can drill down without building another report by clicking drill down on this insight on any card. Unfortunately, you're limited to the pre-canned questions that show up on screen, but these are the types of questions that you'd have to build another pivot for by hand. When you've got the right metrics, you can click on export to PDF to share it. To modify the report before you export it, move your mouse over any card and use the trashcan icon to delete it or use the pencil icon to edit the insights presented. When you're done, click generate PDF to create a clean report you can share with an executive. That wraps up the team of agents at work for you. Try out your new QuickBooks AI team with the 50% off link in the description below. I'm David, and I'll see you in the next one.