We’ve heard from accountants that most times they take on a new client, that client is already coming with baggage: an existing QuickBooks file that needs cleanup done before the real work can begin. This forces accountants to charge clients for a lot of upfront cleanup work that the client may not want to pay for, and it also requires a lot of tedious, manual effort on the accountant’s side.
At Intuit Connect this week, we announced Chart of Accounts Cleanup, which helps with this task. COA Cleanup looks through your client’s books and identifies potential issues. It shows you the issues it found, and tells you how it proposes fixing them.
It never, ever acts without your approval. You must approve every single action before the client’s books are touched.
COA Cleanup helps with common errors like:
- Using vendor names as accounts (for example, an account called “Ads - Google” and another account called “Ads - Facebook” instead of a single account called Ads, with payees on the transactions to determine where the money was spent)
- Lots of similar accounts with no parent account to group them together
- Duplicate accounts
- Unused accounts
- Typos in account names
- Mis-typed accounts
In the Ads example, it will look for existing vendors, create new ones if needed, apply those vendors, reclassify transactions, and finally inactivate the accounts once done.
It also respects your closed books date.
It won't reclassify any transactions prior to that date unless you specifically choose to override it. And every action is logged in the QBO audit log, along with a dedicated COA Cleanup History page for you to see what was done.To learn more about what COA Cleanup can do, see here.
You can also watch the Intuit Connect demo.
We’ve tested the new tool with many accountants, and they’ve reported hours and hours of time savings on every single client. The feature is available to all accountants worldwide, today. To access it, use QBOA or IAS to log in to a client file and visit the Chart of accounts. Then choose Clean up —> Start cleanup session. It’s safe to hit start. Nothing will happen until you press approve.
Your clients can also access COA Cleanup, but the version they see is different, and much narrower. They’ll only see suggestions that are easily reversible, like inactivating or renaming accounts. More complex suggestions show to accountants only.
We’re really excited to see how much time this will save you, and we look forward to hearing your feedback on the new feature!
P.S. — if you like this, we think you’ll also like Batch editing the chart of accounts with Edit mode!
