Customer Review: QuickBooks® Online Accountant and ProConnect™ Tax Online

Intuit® is updating QuickBooks® Online Accountant to include the client list for Intuit ProConnect™ Tax Online, providing a single client list for both products in one place. If you are using both QuickBooks Online Accountant and ProConnect Tax Online, this will make it easier to manage all of your clients from one place.

Let’s take a “first look” at the changes. Please note that I haven’t been able to dig into this update at the time that I’m writing this article.

Merging Your Accounting and Tax Client Lists

Intuit’s goal is to make QuickBooks Online Accountant the place where you can manage all of your accounts, including tax clients. Prior to this release, you would have had to manage two separate client lists, one in QuickBooks Online Accountant, the other in ProConnect Tax Online. That was inconvenient and could lead to inaccurate information in one place or the other if a client changed an address. You also would have to keep track of two separate logins.

With this update, you will see a Tax column at the far right of your QuickBooks Online Accountant client list. This column shows the status of the current and prior year’s tax returns.

There are two elements to the status value. One is the IRS automated status for a return that has been submitted, which shows in red. The other status value, for returns that haven’t been submitted, is shown in black. This is the status that you assign yourself, in ProConnect Tax Online.

If you have multiple returns for the client you will see a dropdown list, so you can select the return to work with.

When you look at the client detail window in QuickBooks Online Accountant, you will see a new tab for Tax. This will list all of the tax returns that you have for this client in ProConnect Tax Online, not just the two most recent.

The values in the client detail view, as well as in the client list, are links to the actual returns in ProConnect Tax Online. Click on the link; it opens that tax return without your having to log in again in that product.

A few notes about this new integration:

• The client list in QuickBooks Online Accountant isn’t stored in ProConnect Tax Online. If you log in to QuickBooks Online Accountant and then access ProConnect Tax Online, you will not see the clients from QuickBooks Online Accountant in the client list in ProConnect Tax Online.
• If you only use ProConnect Tax Online, and don’t use QuickBooks Online Accountant at all, you still manage your client list in ProConnect Tax Online.

I like the direction that Intuit is going with its various online products. Having a consolidated client list is very helpful, and having a single place to see all of the information about all of your accounting and tax clients will save a lot of time. It will be interesting to see what additional features Intuit adds to QuickBooks Online Accountant in the future. Keep in mind that this only works for clients that you manage in the online versions of the products, not the desktop products.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on the Accountex Report by Sleeter Group. Check out this video that further explains the QuickBooks Online Accountant/ProConnect Tax Online integration.