Business Accounting

New Improvements to QuickBooks Online — First Half of 2021

2021-06-30 | by Gene B. Reynolds, CPA

One of the benefits of using QuickBooks Online is that every month, Intuit releases new features and improvements. Business owners can take advantage of these enhancements to improve their use of QuickBooks Online and streamline processes to get more done in less time.

While not every improvement is relevant for every user, we want to present some of the most useful enhancements from the first half of 2021. Consider which of these features could help you get more out of your investment in the QuickBooks Online platform to help run your business.

Have questions about these features? Our CPA firm can help! We are certified as QuickBooks ProAdvisors.

New QuickBooks Online Improvements & Enhancements for 2021

Here are the categories of QuickBooks Online improvements, enhancements, and new features from the first half of this year that we will be highlighting in this article:

• Improved dashboards
• Payroll enhancements
• Cash flow visibility
• Time Tracking
• Autopay enhancements

Improved Dashboards

At the beginning of the year, Inuit rolled out a new two-tab structure in the QuickBooks Online dashboard. The tabs are labeled “get things done” and “business overview.”

So, depending on what action you want to take — complete tasks or gain insight into overall business performance — you can follow the desired path. This enables business owners to be more efficient with their time doing what you set out to do when opening QuickBooks Online.

Payroll Enhancements

There are two key payroll-specific enhancements to QuickBooks Online for business owners that we want to highlight.

– Users can sign up for QuickBooks Contractor Payments to help with managing payments to contractors and vendors. This also helps with filing 1099 forms at the end of the year for tax purposes. For enhanced support, you can sign up for Core, Premium, or Elite Payroll. (We recommend reaching out to our CPA firm to discuss whether an upgrade is the right fit for your business.)

– Intuit rolled out enhancements to the Auto Payroll workflow. Now, you can choose which eligible employees can enroll in Auto Payroll. Intuit says that this enhanced flexibility is designed to help business owners who only want to have certain groups of employees on auto pay, rather than all employees. An important note is that this enhanced feature is available for users with QuickBooks Online Payroll Core, Premium, or Elite.

Cash Flow Enhancements

QuickBooks Cash has been enhanced to display credit card and loan balances in Cash Flow Center. Now, you can find a quick, accurate snapshot of your company’s financial position.

Plus, Intuit upgraded the “all accounts” section that allows business owners to view all accounts in one place. Instead of having to click through multiple accounts, now you can see cash flow across every account in one place, including outstanding credit card and loan balances. Overall, it’s easier to view money in and money out in one view to support decision-making.

Time Tracking

Time tracking is incredibly valuable for many of our clients that follow a jobs-based or project-based business model. Now, business owners can access a single source of information to review and edit timesheet data. You can also use workflows for invoicing, job costing, and payroll to complete important tasks.

Here’s the best part. The new Time Tracking workspace eliminates redundant data entry. Your employees can self-enter their time directly into QuickBooks Online, then you or your team can review inputs at any time to verify accuracy without having to re-enter information.

Autopay Enhancements

We recently wrote about the importance of enhancing your invoices in QuickBooks to support prompt payment from customers. Now, this process is even better. Business owners can now offer their customers the option to set up automatic payment of invoices. This autopay feature provides two options to set up recurring payments of invoices.

• Option 1: Send a recurring invoice with an online payment option. Your customers can save their payment information in the system and pay every invoice on-time.
• Option 2: Send one invoice with online payments enabled. This way, your customer can schedule their payment for a specific date in the future (as opposed to it being automatically scheduled for them).

If you choose to utilize this enhancement, we recommend that business owners work with your customers to determine which option is best for them. Every relationship is different, so you may even end up with a mixture of some customers preferring one option over the other.

Talk to Our QuickBooks Online Expert Team About the Features

Intuit is constantly releasing enhancements to the QuickBooks Online platform. To get the most benefit from using QuickBooks Online, we recommend talking to our team of experts to discuss how to utilize these features.

Some features may be perfectly suited for your business to create time savings, while other features may create more effort to perform necessary tasks. We want to make sure QuickBooks Online is working for you and fits your workflow so that you can best run your business.

You can reach out to us today to discuss these new features and enhancements to make sure you are using them as best as possible. Call us today or send us a message to talk more about incorporating these features into your use of QuickBooks Online.

 

About the Author

Previous Post | Next Post