Intuit debuted Intuit Accountant Suite and Intuit Intelligence, partnering with a group of accounting firms leveraging artificial intelligence, during its Intuit Connect conference this week in Las Vegas.
Intuit Accountant Suite is an AI-native platform, while Intuit Intelligence enables accountants to use embedded AI agents and connected data to access insights and recommendations to scale up their businesses and deliver advisory services to clients. Intuit is partnering with firms such as Aprio, Cherry Bekaert, EisnerAmper and Sorren on trying out the technology.
Intuit Accountant Suite includes features such as consolidated client management, a custom dashboard, role-based access controls, firm-specific client numbers for tracking, and AI-powered client insights. Intuit Intelligence provides access to a virtual team of AI agents for growing and managing customers, payments, payroll, accounting and tax services.
Intuit Accountant Suite is the successor to the QuickBooks Online for Accountants product that's been on the market for over a decade. "Accountant Suite takes all of the data that firms have that's been federated across all of their accounts and actually provides it in a single platform where they can then get the best of our Intuit Intelligence, our AI offerings, working on behalf of their firm, on behalf of their clients and the firm's teams," said Ted Callahan, Intuit's director of accountant partnership and strategy, in an interview. "We've been developing this for years, and in close partnership with the community for the last year."
Intuit has been beta testing the technology with over 1,100 different firms to get it to market. "We're pulling together all of the data for these firms," said Callahan. "The way that manifests itself is when you log in, depending on who you are, we've got different personas that drive your experience."
For example, the firm owner and partner in charge of client advisory services will get a totally different dashboard when logging in than a bookkeeper on the CAS team. "It's a completely customized experience for you based on who you are," said Callahan. "The way that we show the information that's most relevant to you is something that you can customize for yourself or for your team."
Users first get a heads-up view of what they have to do that day, such as the training sessions their manager has assigned to them through ProAdvisor Academy and the new ProAdvisor Training Manager Dashboard, and the set of client files they need to be working on that day.
"If you're a manager of that team, we can really drill into the efficiency of your team where you can see who's got capacity, where they're going to be tapped out with too much work for the time and vice versa, so you can load balance across your team," said Callahan. "We're bringing together not only the technology that we've talked about traditionally, all of the QuickBooks capabilities, but also our Virtual Expert platform capabilities that we use to run our own Live Expert offerings. They're now powering a number of those capacity planning, team management experiences that we've been hardening and testing, running our own virtual firm for the last five years."
For firm leaders, Intuit has developed a firm console, where leaders can see in one pane the state of all their clients and learn about future growth opportunities, with the AI recommending conversations with specific clients.
"We've got the ability to say because of that capacity constraint, you should be paying attention to this client because we think you need to be leaning in there," said Callahan. "We also have the ability for you to drill into the upcoming cash flow issues with those different metrics on that firm console view for a firm owner, so they can be getting ahead of any client problems."
Intuit Intelligence provides a conversational interface that works across all of the proprietary data collected by Intuit, with the ability to compare individual company performance to industrywide data. Intuit previewed a set of
"Now when you log into an individual QuickBooks Online file, what you'll see is an experience at the top of the screen, where it's powered by all of the different AI that we bring to bear," said Callahan. "You can ask, in conversational language, 'Tell me how you know my business is doing? What's the upcoming set of vendors that I need to be monitoring when I think about AR?' It can instantly pull up the report for you, and then it can say, 'This vendor has traditionally been somebody that pays you late. Should I send them a proactive notification on your behalf?' And then you can dispatch that. If you think about the power of what AI is doing for you, it's surfacing not only anomalies that we've detected that you can then correct, but also forward-looking areas of opportunity for growth for your business."
In July, Intuit introduced AI agents in its
Intuit didn't announce any new features for TurboTax, but Callahan said Accountant Suite will offer an upcoming set of features for users of ProConnect, Intuit's professional tax software. "If you're a multiservice firm that has a bunch of tax clients, we've got the ability now, in the experience of the Accountant Suite, to see that entire set of clients and bring that experience into the Accountant Suite, so you don't have to leave it," he said.
Intuit is already offering such features for bookkeeping. "Live today in the Accountant Suite, we have something we're calling Books Review," said Callahan. "If you think about the job of a bookkeeper, it's to provide a consistent month-end close. We're providing it in a completely integrated workflow inside the Accountant Suite to enable the bookkeeping team to deliver that workflow inside the suite, versus needing to go to individual files."
Intuit's ProAdvisor program is now completely integrated into the Accountant Suite. "We're really in the midst of a transformation from our traditional ProAdvisor program to a true global firm-based partnership program," said Callahan. "Now with Intuit Accountant Suite, all the firms that consolidate all of their various realms that they had in QuickBooks Online for Accountants now will have a true firm-based partner program for them, where the points are accruing at the firm level versus in the past because of some architectural constraints at the realm level. And then when you log in now to the Accountant Suite, we actually provide visibility into your ProAdvisor status for your firm, and then what are the actions that would take you to the next tier that unlocks the next set of benefits."
Intuit is also making an announcement at the conference about ProAdvisor Academy. "We have an industry-first collection of courses that we've bundled together that we're calling the CAS Foundations," said Callahan. "Think about client advisory services, which has been the growth star for accounting firms for the past several years. We're providing a bundle of five different courses that provide both product training and skill-based training for teams."
Those modules include bookkeeping and the Level 1 certification that Intuit provides to become a Certified ProAdvisor, as well as training on AI. Intuit is offering two different courses on AI, one on agents and the other on how to develop business insights out of the financial statement analysis. Another course focuses on client communication. Callahan talked with members of about 55 large firms on Monday, and they were interested in the new ProAdvisor Academy and CAS Foundations offerings.
The Intuit Connect conference also features several guest speakers, including singer and actress Queen Latifah, Blue Angels pilot John Foley and best-selling author Brene Brown. Foley showed videos of jets flying in tight formations, and discussed the power of what he called the "debrief," in which the pilots candidly talk about what they did well and what they did wrong that they intend to fix.
"At the end of each of the individual teams sharing, they would say, 'Glad to be here,' and it had both this meaning of glad to be alive, because the mistake did not mean they got hurt or anybody else got hurt, but also an expression of gratitude," said Callahan. "He had this whole concept of how joyful giving is what unlocks the highest performance in teams."
