QuickBooks Online Accountant is a cloud-based accounting practice management software designed for accounting and bookkeeping professionals who serve multiple clients.

The platform provides direct access to clients’ books, which is essential for managing client transactions, reviewing books, and making adjustments.

It emphasizes collaboration, convenience, and a user-friendly interface, helping you to access and track financial data, create reports, manage transactions and collaborate with your clients on the same platform.

You will love the ease of communication and simplified workflow, and your clients will love the timely and accurate results. Tools like batch transactions and advanced custom fields will allow you to meet your business needs even more efficiently.

Signing up for QuickBooks Accountant is so simple and easy to do. The program will request you to enter some basic information, including your name, email, and the name of your company. Once you complete the registration, you will be able to access QuickBooks Online Accountant and will be ready to use the program.

You will need internet access and your login information in order to get into your account. As the accountant signing up clients, you can have the system bill you or bill the client directly for their subscription to the service.

The cost is the same initially, though when billed to the firm, there is a 30% discount on subscriptions where the client only enjoys 12 months at a discounted rate. QuickBooks Online Accountant is free; and when you enroll, you’re eligible to take part in the QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor program.

Who Uses QuickBooks Online Accountant?

QuickBooks Online Accountant is mainly used by small businesses, mid-sized businesses, large enterprises and freelancers, helping them to manage their expenses and sales. It gives you automatic access to the ProAdvisor Program tools, training and benefits to automate your day-to-day operations and grow your business

Customers who use QuickBooks are enjoying its benefits such as managing multiple users, handling a good amount of transactional data, inventory workflows, and more. QuickBooks Online Accountant is a widely used accounting software as it provides the best features like Invoicing, Payroll Management, Sales Tracking, and Easy Reporting.

The cloud-based accounting software helps to know your current financial health and allows your accountants, colleagues, and bookkeepers to log on and work simultaneously.

How QuickBooks Online Accountant Helps your Business?

QuickBooks Online Accountant can track your income and expenses, stay tax-ready, invoice, pay bills, manage inventory, run reports and more.

It has the tools, training, and community to support you every step of the way like auto-pay employees and contractors, get payroll taxes done for you, stay compliant with HR laws, and access 401(k) and healthcare to offer your team.

Let’s see how QuickBooks Online Accountant helps your business to grow and expand:

  • Automatically identify and resolve common bookkeeping issues so the books are closed accurately and on time.
  • Visualize your clients business performance and compare it with local industry peers. 
  • Grow your knowledge and skills to advise your clients through self-paced lessons.
  • Manage your books with the powerful features of QuickBooks Online Advanced such as batch invoicing, manage 1099 contractors, track income & expenses, send estimates, capture and organize receipts and more. 

What Other Apps QuickBooks Online Accountant Integrate With?

Below we’ve mentioned the app names which can be seamlessly integrated with QuickBooks Online Accountant:

Foxit eSign

Foxit eSign is a top-rated eSignature software solution used by companies and independent contractors worldwide. They provide customers with intuitive, versatile, and adaptable interfaces to meet their electronic signature needs. In just a few seconds, documents and contracts can be sent out, signed, and returned, allowing users in any industry to be more efficient and streamline their ongoing workflows.

Uncat

Uncat helps bookkeepers and accountants to fix uncategorized transactions with their clients. It gets information back from clients faster, and syncs with QuickBooks Online, Xero, and QuickBooks Desktop (e.g. Uncategorized Expense, Uncategorized Income, Uncategorized Assets, Ask My Accountant, Suspense). 

MobiWork

MobiWork is a B2B Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) technology company best for any business with employees in the field on a regular basis such as field services, equipment management, logistics, field sales and field marketing organizations, regardless of size (small, midsize or large enterprises).

It has user-friendly turnkey solutions that enable rapid-deployment, enforce best practices, unite all stakeholders and provide everything a field-based organization needs before, during and after each job. 

MobiWork provides extensive built-in configuration capabilities, ever expanding catalog of integrations, and a dedicated professional services organization to satisfy any custom requirements. 

Fyle

Fyle is a credit card expense management platform that enables Finance teams and employees to track expenses seamlessly, reconcile corporate card transactions in real-time for business credit cards from any bank, and integrate with accounting platforms saving hours of time and manual efforts. It also helps you to automate and optimize field operations, grow the business and delight its customers.

Workyard

Workyard is a time tracking software designed to help businesses in construction, electrical, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), landscaping, and other industries monitor employees’ work shifts, labor costs, visited sites, and much more. Crew members can capture notes and images to document jobs and edit time cards according to their requirements. 

Using Workyard, organizations can monitor driving routes between sites and visualize employees’ work itineraries on a unified platform. The software maintains an audit trail of adjustments across time cards and automatically tags captured images or notes with relevant projects.

Supervisors can also review or approve times heets and track overtime on a monthly or weekly basis. Workyard enables managers to track employees clock-in locations using real-time GPS tracking capabilities and facilitates integration with various third-party payroll software including Gusto and QuickBooks.

QuickBooks Online Accountant Features

QuickBooks Accountant is designed to provide bookkeepers and accountants a reliable and efficient platform to manage the finances of many small or mid-sized businesses. Its features are designed to promote efficiency and collaboration in accounting and bookkeeping, which usually helps you to generate accurate results in minimal time. 

QuickBooks Online Accountant lets you manage and connect with multiple clients from a single dashboard, removing any guesswork from tracking financial information and staying organized. You can easily switch between different accounts and take advantage of advanced reporting options, user roles, and permissions.

The program also helps you to avoid errors and even allows multiple transactions to be sent at one time . With this Client Data Review feature, users can quickly identify and fix common mistakes in financial data, which helps you to ensure accuracy and compliance with relevant laws and regulations.

They also have the option of handling their entire inventory process via QuickBooks Online Accountant. These features save you time, streamline your workflow, and keep your critical financial data protected.

Split Billing

With a new split billing feature, you have more flexibility and control over who pays for your clients QuickBooks subscriptions. Through QBOA, you can now mix and match the billing options for each QuickBooks product based on what best suits your client and your firm.

This new customization will apply to existing and new clients (coming soon) and can help your firm standardize your monthly QuickBooks invoice without the complications of variable costs.

Role-Based Access Permissions

Role-based access permissions are now available for your clients’ and your firm’s books. With this feature, you now have more granular control to separate access and permissions across firm users. You can also delegate AP/AR, bill payment, payments, and payroll tasks to firm users with predefined roles.

Also, decide who has permission to view, create, edit, or delete transactions and choose which data users can access within specific areas of sales, expenses, inventory, payroll, and other areas.

QuickBooks Online Accountant allows you to set custom role-based access to manage creating, editing, and viewing permissions for financials, receivables, payroll, and other key reports for your firm.

Accountant Toolbox

With these accountant-only tools, you can streamline your work and access customizable reports, so you can advise clients even faster.

The accountant toolbox includes quick links to your chart of accounts, journal entries, and reports, as well as tools for performing several functions like reconciliation and reclassifying transactions. 

Mileage Tracking

If you drive for work, you can use QuickBooks Online Accountant to record your deductible mileage. With the free QuickBooks mobile app, you can automatically track your business mileage without manually recording your odometer readings. Also, you can manually enter your mileage every time you drive. 

Chart of Account Templates

At the end of 2023, Chart of Accounts templates were added to QuickBooks Online Accountant to save your firm time and establish consistency across your clients.

Here are three ways to help you make the most of COA templates:

  • New client setup: If your firm has a specific way of setting up new clients, Chart of Account templates can be particularly useful, helping you to create a template based on how your practice prefers to organize the COA, load the template into QBOA, and use them as necessary for new clients.
  • Think about existing clients: In addition to new clients, you can also apply Chart of Accounts templates to existing clients. It adds new default accounts to your client’s COA, but won’t delete existing ones. If an account with the same name or number already exists, QuickBooks will flag it so it isn’t added. 
  • Create your own template: You can build templates from scratch, customize ready-made product-based or service-based business templates, or import established templates you’ve already built from your computer or Google Sheets. 

Books Review

The “Books Review” feature is an expanded version of “Month-End Review,” and it’s designed to help QuickBooks Online accountant users streamline their workflows for initial transaction review, reconciliation, and final review.

The Books Review includes two new review phases:

  1. Setup Phase: This phase allows you to find and fix errors made during setup, including errors on the existing balance sheet, profit and loss (P&L) reports, and opening balances and chart of account issues etc.  
  2. Wrap-up phase: This helps you to add finishing touches to your work. With this new tool, it’s easier for you to prepare a customized report of your client’s monthly financial data and business performance, enabling you to email the report to your client and close the books for the accounting period.

Project Management

Project management can be accessed through the Work menu. This feature lets you create projects or tasks and assign them to your team members.

It has the ability to create recurring projects, which makes sense as accounting professionals often manage projects that are repeated regularly. You can specify how often the project will be repeated and the end date.

Trial Balance

The Trial Balance tool is particularly useful during the preparation of financial statements. It serves as a preliminary step before generating reports like balance sheets and income statements. It also allows you to easily identify any unbalanced accounts, missing entries, or misclassified transactions, helping you to find out and correct errors before finalizing financial statements.

What’s the Difference Between QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Online Accountant?

QuickBooks Online Accountant is a cloud-based portal that allows an accountant to access their clients’ data in QuickBooks Online from any computer. Not sure if QuickBooks Online, or QuickBooks Online Accountant is the better choice for your needs?

Let’s compare the similarities and differences between QuickBooks Online vs QuickBooks Online Accountant customers by industry, by geography and by buying patterns.

QuickBooks Online competes with other products in the Accounting, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Billing And Invoicing, Expense Management and Reporting, Financial Reporting, Tax Management categories. It has a 4.54% market share in the Accounting category, and QuickBooks Online has 12,325 customers in 10 countries.

QuickBooks Online Accountant competes with other products in the Project Collaboration categories such as Accounting, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Billing and Invoicing, Expense management and Reporting. It has a 0.69% market share in the Accounting category, and QuickBooks Online Accountant has 1,883 customers in 10 countries.

Pros and Cons of QuickBooks Online Accountant

QuickBooks Online Accountant is a way for accounting firms to grow their business with a reputable and reliable software partner. The platform allows accountants to enroll clients by serving them as their ProAdvisor, helping accountants bring all the necessary tools to the client relationship to perform accounting tasks with strategic planning. 

Pros of QuickBooks Online Accountant 

  • Portability is the key benefit of QuickBooks Online Accountant. Like other cloud accounting platforms, it allows you to monitor your business and financials from anywhere you have internet access.
  • You can grant your accountant access to your books and allow them to review, make corrections, plan, or even handle all of your bookkeeping needs without having to wait or risk losing data in the backup and restore process. You also don’t have the limitations of a regular QuickBooks Accountant’s Copy.
  • QuickBooks online accountant’s banking center is so easy and convenient. You can keep your accounts up-to-date with minimal maintenance through automatic and frequent transaction downloads from your banks and credit cards, whether you are in the program or not.
  • QuickBooks Online Accountant is far simpler than setting up a network and far cheaper than buying multiple user licenses. The users only have to pay a specific amount on a monthly basis.  
  • You are not required to patch or update the software—QuickBooks handles that process automatically, as part of your subscription fee.

Cons of QuickBooks Online Accountant

  • You can’t upload files from non-Intuit payroll services into your QuickBooks file. If you use a payroll company—like ADP, Paychex, or Paycor—this means you will have to make a payroll journal entry to record your payroll.
  • Some banks are not set up to download transactions. Most national banks aren’t a problem, but some local banks don’t offer feeds. Other local banks will face interruptions in the constant transaction download if your login times out or if they need you to answer your bank security questions again.
  • In QuickBooks Online Accountant, you will have to pay a subscription cost for each company which covers server space, as well as updates and security. 
  • QuickBooks Online Accountant has limited customer relationship management (CRM) features. As a result, the users can’t store customer and prospect contact information, identify sales opportunities, record service issues, and manage marketing campaigns, all in one central location. 
  • The software is also not compatible with QuickBooks Desktop and all its versions such as Pro, Premier and Enterprise. 

QuickBooks Online Accountant Alternatives

Here’s a list of some alternatives that can provide better or similar features as QB Online accountant offers:

Zoho Books

Zoho Books is an easy-to-use, GST-compliant accounting app that helps you to keep track of your company’s financial transactions. It also allows you to send invoices, create bills, monitor expenses, reconcile bank statements, and collaborate with your team right from your mobile device.

Zoho Books offers a Free plan service for small businesses, customization and automation on paid plans, multiple features beyond accounting and billing as well as can be integrated with Zoho ecosystem for comprehensive work OS. 

FreshBooks

FreshBooks is an accounting software designed for solo business owners, freelancers and sole proprietors. The software makes it easy to stay organized, keep track of payments owed and expenses made, send invoices and accept payments.

FreshBooks comes up with affordable plans and low introductory pricing, 30-day free trial, intuitive and user-friendly interface, unlimited invoices as well as several support options such as phone, live chat, email. 

Xero

Xero is entirely cloud-based accounting software ideal for small business owners and managers who are signed up and set up in Xero. It performs bookkeeping functions like invoicing and payroll and allows you to connect the program to a live bank feed.

Xero is for both cash-based and accrual accounting systems, so it is perfect for companies adhering to UK GAAP or IFRS. With the Xero Accounting app, you can keep track of your cash flow, view income, manage your expenses, and create invoices on the go.

The app acts as a companion to your Xero account, helping you stay productive and keep an eye on your cash flow and business’ financial health from when and where it suits you. 

NetSuite

NetSuite is a leading integrated cloud business software suite for enterprise resource planning. It helps you manage inventory, track financials, host e-commerce stores and maintain customer relationship management systems. NetSuite was acquired by Oracle in November 2016.

Its built-in functionality allows it to support multiple applications under one platform with customizable dashboards to measure progress. 

Since NetSuite is built on the cloud, all your important accounting and operational information is accessible from anywhere and from any device. NetSuite can help your business gain visibility, control and agility. The software is highly customizable and it has several automated features to reduce manual tasks. 

Sage Business Cloud Accounting

Sage Accounting is perfect for managing your accounting needs and staying on top of your taxes. It allows you to quickly and easily create invoices, track cash flow, accept payments, record transactions, automate admin, capture expenses, and much more.

Sage Accounting is designed for small business owners (supports unlimited users), sole traders (with or without staff) and limited companies operating in any industry – from professional services to construction to retail. 

You can use Sage Accounting either by yourself or with collaborators. It’s easy to give access to multiple users, including an accountant (if you use one). You don’t need any previous experience with this type of software to get started, as our intuitive solutions are simple to set up and easy to use, offering features like free one month trial, automatic bank reconciliation, multi-currency support etc. 

QuickBooks Online Accountant Pricing

After finding out all the great features and benefits of this QuickBooks Online Accountant version, you may be wondering how much QuickBooks Accountant costs. The answer may surprise you as accounting professionals get QuickBooks Online Accountant for free. How could QuickBooks Online Accountant possibly be free, when it provides so much value? 

QuickBooks believes in rewarding accounting professionals for bringing new customers onto the platform. Accountants thus use the program at no cost, and everyone wins. Now, What if you are a financial professional then how much you’ve to pay? 

If you want to control the entire purchase and setup process, you will pay only a small fraction of the price using QuickBooks Payroll Service for QuickBooks Online Essentials or QuickBooks Online Plus (currently 50% or $17.50/mo or $25.00/mo, respectively) for each client as long as you are subscribed. Plus, you can have your clients pay for the subscription themselves. They can also get a 50% discount on the program. 

Unlike the financial professional, though, clients get the discounted price for only one year. QuickBooks regularly gives amazing offers for accountants, which makes their software even more affordable. For example, some offers include a subscription for just $1/month for three months or 50 subscriptions for just $500 for a whole year.