Last week at Intuit’s QuickBooks Connect, we saw a demo of a new feature with the QuickBooks app called QuickBooks Assistant. Think Siri for your QuickBooks and the ability to ask it questions about your accounting.
Demo
Sasan Goodarzi with Intuit did a cool demo where he asked QuickBooks Assistant various questions and it spit out the answers. See this video for a short summary:
Digital Assistants are Cool
Star Trek was one of the classic shows showing people talking to computers to get things done. Until a few years ago, it was keyboards only, then came touch interfaces, and now we have digital, voice-enabled assistants: think Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or Google Assistant. This is more than simple voice-enabled interaction, but the intelligence to ask complex questions and now a simple set of commands. We are in the early age of digital assistants, but this will continue to be a big part of interacting with our computers and software.
QuickBooks Assistant Has Potential
If your QuickBooks Online is well-maintained, you have a lot of rich information to gather. Beyond the simple reports, there are some many specific questions to ask. What I liked about the demo was the ability to quickly get answers to a really specific question. How often do you want to know your sales for the month or year, your profitability, or some other question with a simple answer? This could eliminate the need to click and report and just get to the answer quickly.
Move to QuickBooks Online
Right now, it is only available with QuickBooks Self-Employed and adding to QuickBooks Online in coming months. Noticeably missing is QuickBooks Desktop and Enterprise. I highly doubt QuickBooks Assistant will ever be added to these products because the data needs to be in the cloud to be analyzed for quick answers. There are many other reasons to move to QuickBooks Online including easy and secure access, continuous upgrades and backups, and a great ecosystem of apps. It’s not for everyone yet, but it covers most companies needs and is the future for QuickBooks.
Click here to learn more about how LedgerGurus can help you with QuickBooks Online. Contact us here if you have questions.