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The QuickBooks Product Hot Seat: What’s Next for Accountants, AI and SMB Growth?
CLOUD ACCOUNTING
Supercharge your Practice with the Intuit Accountant Suite
At the Intuit QuickBooks Get Connected 2026 event in London, we had more than our fair share of incredible speakers, exploring how you can work harder, scale faster, and stay ahead of the accounting curve. But it was Richael O’Brien, Staff Product Manager for Intuit, who was ready to supercharge your practice with her talk on the Intuit Accountant Suite (IAS).
With 10 years at Intuit and a background as a practising accountant, Richael brought the perfect blend of insider knowledge and hands-on experience to explain how Intuit Accountant Suite is transforming the way firms manage their work and clients.
Read on and learn how Intuit’s AI-powered Accountant Suite helps you enhance operational efficiency, make snappy, confident decisions, and get the insights you need to make them.
Intuit Accountant Suite
At the Get Connected event, Richael kicked her talk off with many people already knowing about the Intuit Accountant Suite — but here’s a quick rundown:
Designed around account workflows, shaped by user feedback
All your client files in one place with one sign-in
Create a customisable homebase for important tasks and insights
Built from the ground up for intelligent support
Ensure data remains up to date from the moment you log in
Streamline searching, tracking, and billing
Scale with your clients.
Addressing user feedback
The Intuit Accountant Suite offers the core functionality of QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA), which has supported accountants for years, but with many improvements:
Apps and cognitive load
Our feedback indicated that accountants were juggling “six or seven apps daily”, with some advising they use more than that. “There’s a tax that comes from dipping in and out of those pieces,” Richael says.
Even in the existing QBOA, you are constantly in and out of client files. With Intuit Accountant Suite, there’s an “architectural shift” intended to move you from that “file level view” to a “firm level view”, reducing that back-and-forth.
“We wanted to make a structural shift to…reduce the friction of moving in and out of files”
The UI refresh
When accountants switch between different views, platforms, and layouts, it can result in unnecessary cognitive load. By refreshing the UI, we aim to address that. This change was made based on user feedback, who found it “jarring” to go back to the old QBOA version.
“It’s more than a UI refresh…but at the same time, the UI refresh is quite important.”
Control your access
Key feedback centred around team access to files — that is, the ability to give users granular access within a client's file. These “role-based access controls,” as Richael coins them, enable users to give their teams specific access to elements of a client's file.
Previously, with QBOA, if you wanted to give a user a portfolio of clients, they would need complete access to those files. Now, if you’ve got a trainee bookkeeper starting, for example, you can control what they can do within the client file until they learn the ropes.
“What we’ve added is more granular permissions.”
An introduction to Intuit Accountant Suite
The Intuit Accountant Suite is an AI suite built for accountants — but rather than simply listing its features, Richael wanted to step back and look at how you might use it, the impact it could have on transforming your practice, and where it stands in relation to QBOA.
Some things to note about the Intuit Accountant Suite:
Intuit Accountant Suite Core will replace the free version of QBOA, offering many improvements.
There will be a premium version, with everything in Core alongside the Client Insights Tool, and advanced team and organisation tools.
Additional add-ons will be available to curate your Intuit Accountant Suite experience, which are intended to be monetised after the beta trial.
The dashboard
In Intuit Accountant Suite, your new landing page is the home dashboard, not your client list. Richael describes it as a “cockpit from where you start your work”, intended to help users become proactive with a bird's-eye view of their clients. To help with this, there are two widgets — Clients with App Issues and Clients with Disconnected Bank Accounts. When you’re running a large practice, the disconnection of bank accounts and data can be challenging, especially if you’re waiting until deadlines to realise there’s an issue. These widgets are designed to surface issues earlier, rather than after the fact.
Client insights with Intuit Accountant Suite
Accessing and sharing important client data is an essential function of accounting software and a major driver of decision-making. Say you have a client meeting with someone in the construction industry. With QBOA, the current method involves:
Going to their file
Opening their P&L (Profit and Loss)
Pulling out the data or exporting it to a spreadsheet
Analysing said data to look for trends.
With Intuit Accountant Suite’s Client Insight feature, you can aggregate that data in a high-level view of their accounts to monitor key metrics, offer proactive advice, engage in forward-looking conversations, and achieve higher-value work without sifting through files.
Through the Intuit Accountant Suite, Richael can access net profit margins and gross profit and gather the information she needs in under a minute. Now, she can have a conversation with her client that focuses on the wider context. Rather than looking at costs being up, say, 7%, she can compare it to net margins.
You can create custom data views, but Intuit Accountant Suite provides a “bank of KPIs” and key transaction information. This can benefit your client and determine if you’re charging the right amount as their portfolio grows. This data enables experienced accountants to ask the right questions, quickly.
Intuit Accountant Suite AI-powered insights
With firm-wide data brought together in one place, AI can help surface anomalies and identify trends across your client base. Rather than manually reviewing each client's records, you can quickly identify patterns and potential issues across your portfolio. For example, the system can “spot something like a supplier who suddenly starts to charge double,” Richael points out, “which would be triggered as a kind of anomaly.”
Instead of spending time searching for issues, you can focus on what matters: understanding the impact and advising your clients on what to do next. By surfacing insights at a firm-wide level, this shifts the focus from reactive checks to more proactive, insight-led conversations.
Visibility across workflows
Richael switches gear — after all, there’s more to bookkeeping and accountancy than client data. Imagine you’re managing a team of bookkeepers and someone is sick.
Immediately, Richael can access the client the team member is working on and determine the progress made. Then, you can see what’s important to review within your own templates, which can be altered depending on the project or industry.
“We want to give you the opportunity to standardise those workflows and give you visibility across the client base.”
Transaction review
By using transaction review, Richael demonstrates that users don’t need to access every ledger. By looking for highlighted exceptions, she can determine what she really needs to review. For example, she can define a search time as transactions over £2,500. Immediately, she can define what she is looking for, whether that’s transaction amounts, or expenses and bills without attachments.
Alongside AI, which may be able to answer questions you have on client data, it reduces the “constant back and forth by bringing the information from QuickBooks.”
This helps you go through your portfolio clients, ensuring you have all the necessary attachments and details, with AI to help gather data from elsewhere. Another benefit of this firm-wide view is the ability to accrue this data without going into each client's file.
Automation
Automation tools allow you to offload some of the mental bandwidth or time spent obtaining data. However, people want a certain level of control. Many accountants would rather spend one day a month double-checking additions compared to daily work, manually checking each transaction. It’s a way to redefine your workflows.
Bookmarking
Intuit Accountant Suite helps you to stay on task by allowing you to bookmark pages, add pins, and customise your dashboard like you might a desktop with sticky notes. Alongside customisable widgets, your dashboard becomes a place for your way of working.
Try Intuit Accountant Suite today
Intuit Accountant Suite helps you be proactive and get the data you need, when you need it, with ease. Automation and customisation come together to enable your workflows, reduce your cognitive load, and unify systems.
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