How Intuit Intelligence Works in QuickBooks Online (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hey, QuickBooks, tell me my five most expensive vendors in the past year, which ones have raised prices in the last six months, and by how much? That's Intuit Intelligence, a conversational AI built right into QuickBooks Online. It can create custom reports, track down out-of-control spending, and help you create more cashflow. I'm David, I've partnered with QuickBooks Online to show you everything Intuit Intelligence can do and what it can't do yet while it's still in beta. And stay tuned, later I'll ask it how to increase my profit. To follow along, head to the link in the description below. That link lands you on the QuickBooks homepage. From here, click on See Plans and Pricing. Intuit Intelligence is available in all QuickBooks plans, and while it's in beta, you can ask it 25 questions a month. If you haven't chosen a plan yet, here's a quick overview. Choose Simple Start if it's just you. Choose Essentials if you have a finance team or you have over 100 transactions per month that you need help categorizing. Choose Plus if you need project or inventory tracking. And choose Advanced if you need revenue recognition, financial forecasting, or custom dashboards and reports. Once you choose a plan, you can choose whether or not to opt in to payroll. For this video, we'll continue without payroll. Then put in your information, click Create an Intuit Account, and I'll see you on the other side. To find Intuit Intelligence, click the AI icon at the top right of any screen. You can ask questions in the side pane, but I prefer using the full screen experience by clicking this icon. Here we've got a pretty basic chatbot interface. On the left side of the screen, you can see and access your chat history. And of course, you can ask questions in the main pane. Think of Intuit Intelligence like ChatGBT or Claude, except it already knows your financial data. So there's no uploading spreadsheets or copy pasting from any other source. Let's start off with a simple question. What were my biggest expenses last month? You press Enter, and about a minute later, you'll get your answer. Now, most of your answers will be overflowing with data, just like this one. Here we've got a table of our biggest expenses, and down below, we see it visualized as a bar graph. Now, are you thinking what I'm thinking? This is a great way to get custom reports out of QuickBooks. You're just limited by the quality of your questions. Now we're going to cover four major categories of questions you can ask, starting with number one, business performance. This is where you check your company's vital signs. For example, how does my revenue in Q1 compare to 2025 Q4? These questions help you understand revenue and profit trends within your business. The answer shows a steep decline. In Q4, we got 65,000, but in Q1, it was only 22. And if you've ever done this kind of analysis, you know the next question is why? Sometimes the AI will help break that down for you in the chart. Sometimes this chart shows us a breakdown by month instead of quarter, which clearly reveals an anomaly. We didn't get lucky and see that this time, but fortunately, QuickBooks catalogs the sources it gets its data from. You access that by clicking the sources button under any response. The next step is to figure out why Q4 was so good. So let's use this profit and loss report to find out. So this looks suspicious, right? November's income almost triples October's and over quadruples December's. This may in fact be an accounting error that's been sitting in your books unnoticed. This is the pattern you'll use over and over. Ask questions, discover insights, check sources, and then dive deeper. Here's another question in the same category. How's our cashflow now compared to six months ago? Again, we'll get a simple narrative, some key numbers, and then a chart. And with really poor performance in March, QuickBooks knows we wanna dive deeper. Here are three potential follow-ups. We could look at expenses, we could look at income, or we could look at the entire P&L. Let's choose the third one. You might think that this is just a fancy way to pull reports. And honestly, that's kind of the point because most business owners never pull these reports because they don't know which ones to ask for. Don't let this be you. Now you know the health of your business, it's time to find out what's happening to your money. That introduces category two, expenses. Let's start with a simple one. How do my expenses in Q1 so far compared to Q4? We get this same summary overview again, but we actually wanna go deeper. So let's ask another question. Show me the expense categories by amount each month of the two quarters. That's gonna help us reconcile the difference between them. With this answer, we're starting to get somewhere. We get the expense categories for every single month. But this format is hard to compare from month to month. So let's go even deeper. Show me the percentage changes in expense amounts from Q4 to Q1 by expense category. And then we ask it to display the results as a table with specific columns. Let's see what it does. Now you see how specificity gets you the data that you want. We've got all the expense categories here with the percentage change, and the chart below actually helps us visualize the before and after a lot better than before. Before we go further, here's something that most people miss. You can export any response you get as a PDF report. This is a great way to get summary data and reports to send to your accountant. Now let's push this even further. I wanna see how lumpy my payments are for every vendor. So now I'm asking to show me the variation in terms of standard deviations. This prompt gives you full vendor pricing consistency at a glance. This is something that's hard to see out of the box in QuickBooks. So I hope you see how much power this gives you. So far, we've just been asking questions, but what happens when you actually ask it to do something? It's just told us about our unpaid invoices, so let's see which customers are on our naughty list. Oh, well, it looks like that Kevin Cookie Company is at it again. We gotta take care of this. So let's tell Intuit Intelligence to send a reminder to the Kevin Cookie Company for this invoice. And unfortunately, here's the honest answer. It can't do that, at least not yet. Intuit Intelligence can't take actions, but it does show you exactly how to do it yourself, and it links you to the right place. Now, if you've been around QuickBooks Online for a while, you'll know that you can use AI to create an invoice from text. Unfortunately, you can't do it in this experience either. Like before, there's no direct creation, just instructions. That is unfortunately the ceiling right now for actions. As a silver lining though, this happens to highlight that this is a built-in help system. So if you need help with something in QuickBooks Online, try asking Intuit Intelligence first. So far, we've looked at business performance, expenses, and how-tos. Those are useful, but there's one more category, and this is the one that should make accountants and bookkeepers nervous. And that's category number four, strategic advice. This is a broad category, so let's run through a few examples first. First up, in the spirit of tax season, let's talk about taxes. This is a new pattern. We're asking for historical data, but then looking for a recommendation on next steps. The AI advises us that we're probably not gonna owe taxes this quarter with a net loss. But it's important to take this advice with a grain of salt, especially with important financial decisions. What I personally find useful though, is that I don't know what I don't know. So this gives me a good idea of conversations to start with my CPA. A good example of this is tax deductions I might be missing. But take note that some of your questions will show this notice that the information might be out of date. Let's move on from taxes. Remember at the beginning of this video, I said I'd ask it how to increase my profit? Well, here we go. So here you see the analysis. We got a couple bullets to increase our income and a couple to reduce our spending. While this is in beta, you'll see a lot of high level advice like this. My hope is that Intuit Intelligence evolves so that we can have in-depth strategic discussions, much like you can have with other AI models. Now before we wrap up, here's one more type of question you can ask. Just looking if anything looks off in your profit and loss statement. I'm sure now you see the pattern. Historical data plus analysis plus recommendation on next steps. There's a lot of promise here, but with any beta product, there are limitations. For example, at the time of filming, you can't carry on multiple chats at the same time, like with other models. If you click new chat when it's working on something, it cancels your prompt. It can also make mistakes. So don't rely on it 100% for legal, financial or compliance decisions. Now that might seem ironic given that most decisions will be financial. So my advice is before you make a decision based on any answer, validate it with the underlying data in your reports. Don't expect it to catch everything either. For example, this 401k contribution being on a P&L wasn't flagged as a mistake. Now you might ask, why not use ChatGPT or Claude instead? The reason is data privacy. Do you really wanna send your financials to OpenAI or Anthropic or any other company? Intuit has developed their own models and they don't use third parties. Intuit Intelligence is a power tool, especially if you're producing reports for clients. And unlike Claude or ChatGPT, your data never leaves QuickBooks. It's version one and it'll only get better from here. Check out the link in the description below to get started. I'm David and I'll see you in the next video.