Linda Artesani shows how to enable and use the QuickBooks Assistant in Labs, an experimental feature that answers questions about your account like a search engine. Ask it "top customers" or "who owes me money" and it pulls data from your account, though coverage is still limited and some bugs exist.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. I wanted to do a little tutorial on QuickBooks Labs. So it's a place that you can kind of play around in places that they're still working on in QuickBooks that aren't quite ready for prime time, but are there if you want to try some of the new things. They tell you that you don't want to fall in love with something because they may, you know, just dump the entire project, although that hasn't really been the case. So I'm going to go to my sample file. So how you find these is you come into the gear and then you're going to go to QuickBooks Labs right here under the settings, under sample company files, the name of my company. So I've turned on QuickBooks Assistant. This is one of the new things. It's one of the features they unveiled in QuickBooks Connect. They always usually do something big in QuickBooks Connect. So right before QuickBooks Connect conference, their annual big conference in the US, they do one in They're doing the next one is in Canada, and then they're going to, I think, London, and I think Australia. So QuickBooks is pretty worldwide, but they usually unveil something, and in this case, it was QuickBooks Assistant. It is in both the QuickBooks Self-Employed version and in the QuickBooks Online. Self-Employed has already started to be used. Online is going to probably come out in 2018. So what is it, right? So what is QuickBooks Assistant? Well, basically as a bookkeeper, it's probably going to make your job be taken over by a robot. Things that your client would normally call you up about, they can find these things out very simply by typing into the little box over here. So you can see that this is chat for QuickBooks Assistant. So I'm going to click on this. So you— this was not there until I turned that feature on. So Let's go up here and start with a fresh question. I was already playing around in this, so you can just type in any question like, who are my top customers? So I can just go top customers. Just like Google, when you're searching with Google, you want to keep it pretty much to what you're looking for. Don't get too wordy. It helps with the find. So I'm going to come in here and type top customers and see what comes up. And here we go. Here's my top customers in this particular sample file, which is just a bunch of Generic stuff. And I can over here, and I guess next logical question was, well, who owes me money? So you can thumbs this up, say yes, that's great, that was the answer I wanted. Who owes me money? Something that your client might call up and ask about. And there's the two people that owe me money. What's my average monthly income? Kind of finding questions for you, kind of like Google. Smart Learning, and it'll tell me that— what did I spend the most on? As you can see, searched high and low but can't find anything. Well, that wasn't very helpful. There's a case of you might find that it will figure— it won't be able to answer the question. So again, this is in its beginning stages. Last year when I went to QuickBooks Connect, They talked about this. They showed actually somebody getting in a vehicle and saying, hey, QuickBooks, I think they called her QB. Hey QB, can you create an invoice for me? As they're sitting in their car. So they just came in from working with a client. And can you bill her the same amount as Mr. and Mrs. Smith invoice from October? And she went back in and said, okay. And she's actually creating the invoice for you while you're in your car. So you don't even have to type it in. So that's where they're going with this, but this is just an assistant. So so that you have basically Google searching inside of your account. I tried to do like I usually do with Siri, ask some silly question, and ask about estimated— what are my estimated taxes? How about that? What are my estimated taxes? Now, if I had QuickBooks Self-Employed, it would be able to answer this question. This is QuickBooks Online, and there's not really anything to do with that here, so she's not sure what that means. And what it is, is it's actually the Smart Learning has linked itself up with the QuickBooks Community, which I'm really active in. So it's finding words here to look at. The first one is estimates setting up. Now I didn't ask about estimates, I asked about estimated taxes. So you're going to have to do your research here. Maybe take off what are my and then ask about estimated taxes. And then maybe I can define my search a little bit better. So that's what QuickBooks Assistant is. So if you're curious, you want to play around with it, it won't do anything to your file and you can always shut it off. If you find anything weird happening in your file when you do turn any of these things on, and this actually happened to me when I was working in— I had turned on, and it's not here anymore. Oh, it was Import Style. I had this turned on and it did some really strange things in my reports. It turned all my invoices— actually, it was sales receipts on a report. It turned them all into packing slips. So even though I clicked on it and it showed on the page that it was a sales receipt, I could print it, when I put it on a report, Oh, I see. Instead of showing it as a sales receipt, it showed it as a packing slip. It's just kind of a glitch, which is why this is still sitting in the playground of the QuickBooks Labs. So to shut it off, shut it off. It's going to say, why do you want to shut it off? Give me the reason. So it says, you sure you turned it off? Yep, I am. And then why did I turn it off? You know, what was my experience, my feedback? So you can give feedback or not. So that's simply how you can play around in the Labs. You will probably see this new learning tool coming up in 2018. It will be a maintenance update, and then all of a sudden, there it'll be in your file, as that's what happens in QuickBooks Online. Like it or not, that's there. You don't get to turn things on, turn things off, or change things. It's what the program is. But that's what they're looking to do in the future, gonna make this working in our books less and less painful. So I hope that explains the labs and explains a little bit about QuickBooks Assistant, the new feature that's going to be unveiled pretty soon. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to drop me a line on Facebook, or a suggestion for another video, I will definitely do that for you. Again, this is Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. Bye now.
