QuickBooks Usage Limits

Good weekend, Linda!

I was waiting to correct you. Ha!

So we're doing public service announcement day basically, right?

Yeah, we've been seeing lots of stuff on Facebook about the usage limits that we got notified about on the beginning of February, February 4th, I think we got the ProAdvisor email. So, and I just noticed too, this just started coming up last week. I started seeing it in some of my client files. So I'm going to share my screen, show you what I'm seeing, and then we can go through it. So I saw this box when I went into Chart of Accounts and it says, you know, you got 108 accounts. And then if you click here to learn how to manage it, it just brings you to a very, very long support page. But basically, to manage your limits, you're going to have to— if you're— if it's 250 now, so if you're at that 252, you can stay at 252.

Let's step back real quickly for a moment. Sorry. So what we're talking about is with the recent introduction of QuickBooks Online Advanced, they have implemented some usage limits for the QuickBooks Online Plus users. Intuit believes that the Advanced takes more to that medium-sized enterprise that can benefit from higher-level features. I believe their words are from the 10 to 100 type employees. And to make the— draw the line in the sand, that's what we're talking about is the usage limits that we're going to dive into at this time.

Right. And it's the— they said that they're doing this because they want to move people to Advanced because it's for the top 5% of all the QuickBooks users. It's not just for Plus, it's for Simple Start and for Essentials. They're going to be bringing you down to lower down your amount of chart of accounts. They're going to be doing some user things to the Plus version. Before you could add over the 5 and now it's 5. So it's very similar to Desktop.

Okay.

So people probably see this. Also found as I was going through the file, you might find it On the Manage User page. So when you go into the gear and Manage Users, you might see it here. Again, it just takes you to that support article. And the big one was this, the Usage Limit page, which shows you billable users, chart of accounts. So you can see I've got plenty of room here on this particular file. Actually, actually think after looking at this, I probably want to take that client back to Essentials. They don't really need the users that they have here. They probably can go back. They're not using classes. They thought they were and they're not. So, I mean, and there's plenty of room on their chart of accounts too. So, you know, and here's the ad for Advanced. So limited, unlimited chart of accounts, all the things they told us when they wanted us to move from desktop to online. Unlimited, come to us. And so we all did. We all did. And then they went, oh, change the rules. Basically is what happened, what's happening here. Okay.

And now you had something to kind of show the differences between The— or the changes at the different levels, I believe, right?

Yep. So, um, right here, this Word doc, I just really quickly, just to show that we have, you know, Advanced— what Advanced has. Advanced does have Fathom in it. It's expensive program though. I mean, in the long run, if it's from mid-market and they're someone that's maybe an Enterprise moving here, it's actually going to be a cost savings for them because Enterprise is super expensive or maybe close to it. You get Fathom, which is amazing reporting, and I can't wait till they give us a test So we can actually see that. You can import invoices, so you can actually put them in an Excel spreadsheet and bring them in. Then you can also customize your user permissions so that you can fine-tune them just like Enterprise. You can bring them down to like just the accounts payable clerk and the accounts receivable clerk, and you'll have all the other— Yeah, which is really— I mean, that's what you need when you get into that size, right? You get into that size file, you probably want that. And you get the priority circle support, which we already have ourselves because we have We're in that area where we have that kind of—

The important parts of it as well, because you drew this to my attention earlier. Simple Start will now include 1 user. Again, that's a small business, solopreneur type situation. 1 user. You still have the accountant access again. The accountant, when they're set up and provided access as the accountant, doesn't count towards your users that same way. I believe it's 2 accountants, correct? For everything?

Right, an accountant and a bookkeeper. And then—

An accountant is a firm, is an important thing to say. So when you connect it, your whole firm receives access, whoever is allowed that access, just to be safe. So you can have a bookkeeper and your tax professional both have access appropriately to the books. And then Essentials, it now goes up to 3 users with unlimited time tracking. Now that makes sense. They're thinking it's, you know, smaller business. You got the owner, 2 employees, they can track their time.

Yep.

So forth. But no report-only users. So that's an interesting change. That used to be unlimited report-only people. And then Plus, which is where really the dramatic changes are coming into play now, like you said before, this is really being limited to 5 users plus 2 accountants. So again, you don't want to have— don't invite your accountant as a user and as an accountant. You're just eating up your users. Unlimited time tracking and the reports as well. But this is where the limits really come into play, that you will have the user count, you're going to have 40— I'm sorry, 250 chart of accounts that you can do. And then for your classes and locations, you can do up to 40 of them, right?

Right, combined. Yep.

So do you mind if I share my screen to show you how horrific it is for us?

Yes, go for it.

So what this has to do with— we're gonna— I'm gonna do a flip around here and show my side.

Yikes! Your screen's not as pretty. Well, it's actually very colorful. It is red and green.

Very colorful.

Very red.

We did something unique that we were We basically mapped our chart of accounts just like— nice—

the classes.

It's fine. Luckily, if it just pops out that way, you can usually get right in if you refresh, which is great. Anyways, so for— exactly, for chart of accounts, basically what we're having to do is all of our classes down here, we had 167 classes because we were mirroring the chart of accounts instead of having a whole a slew of subaccounts, everything else. So what we're having to do at Parkway is I'm going in and taking all my classes and actually transitioning them into the chart of accounts as subaccounts to reduce that number down for all of our people. Classes versus locations. Locations, of course, is the ability you can actually have different invoice types. You can set up literally 2 divisions, different locations for different reporting. Much like classes, but you get more easy adjustment on the documents through the program.

And if you're like me and you have to do this manually, you're actually going into the chart of accounts and going over and cleaning it up and edit and delete. But if you're like you—

Yeah, we're pretty good with like big data projects. And one of my favorite tools is a company, CData, that what it allows me to do is to literally pull the different aspects of QuickBooks Online into Excel because us accountants like Excel. So initially we can see here I've got my 93 standard chart of accounts. I've got my class list. I know this is just Excel mumbo-jumbo for most, but you'll see the structure of it here, right? The parent and child type setup.

Mm-hmm.

To reduce this down, I'm having to take all of these classes And I'm restructuring everything under the chart of accounts where they would normally fall into. So I would end up coming in and adding these items, these accounts in, and then using the tool to reclassify everything from this year forward under the subaccounts. And then we'll redo our workflow for the entire year. The other thing to keep in mind with that, though, If you're having to make these kind of changes, it's also requiring me to go back in and modify my bank rules. So we're having to take all that stuff out, put them back in, as well as any custom reporting that we had done as well. So fortunately, we've got some tools. If there are people out there that are interested in getting some assistance on it because it's a hefty project, reach out.

We can see how we can help you out and Maybe I'm going to ask you if that's a service that you guys provide at Parkway, because it's something that—

No.

It is now, right? No, but I mean, if you have a lot— if you're an accountant that has not the similar structure, well, maybe the similar one that you have, but even people who've got the bigger limits that maybe they— I've got a guy right now that's really close to the edge and he doesn't need to be. But, you know, this is going to be my education time to get him to kind of reduce it. But if there are people out there that do something similar that didn't work, I mean, I'm sure that's something you can offer to them.

Yeah, most people, if you're hitting the class limits, most people are going to end up switching a lot of that stuff over into chart of accounts because it's usually what would make sense, shrinking and condensing this stuff. For everybody out there, your accountant does have unique tools called a reclassify tool that's hidden on the backside. And they can help with that process, but it still takes quite a bit of time because you have to choose the period and you have to click the boxes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, if you're finding you're hitting those limits, you can reach out to your accounting professional and maybe they can help you, but it will take a bit of time to do it.

Yeah, because you only get like 100, I think, on that page. If you go over 100 on that little reclass page, you have to keep shrinking the date range till you get that little box to populate so you can moving over. So it is a bit of— it is a little bit of work, but it's doable. You know, it's just that if you're— this is a great time to clean up your chart of accounts, I guess, house spring cleaning.

So the last part we should actually add to this— I'm going the extreme way where I have to move everything over. Okay, guys, but for you to— you can fall under the limits that you were talking about briefly earlier. If you're above the limits, they're not going to just automatically bump you, but you'll be stuck at that level. If you decide that you're going to add a single extra class or an extra chart of account or any of those things, it's going to basically force you to upgrade. It's going to say upgrade now, upgrade now, upgrade now, or you're not going to be able to do it. You can reduce things down. So if I'm at my 270 accounts and I reduce 5 of them to 265, that 265 becomes my new limit.

Yeah. So you're not going to cheat the system to get back where you were. You'd have to actually get below the 250, then you can start working with it.

But yeah. And anybody who tells you, well, just edit them and modify it. So, oh, just change it to a different name and reuse it. Your historical information will be changed that way. So please think twice before you do that.

Yeah, that's for sure. But yeah, so, and if you truly, if you're at 40 classes, maybe you do need to be in Enterprise. I mean, other than the scenario that you're doing it, most people, if you're that big, I'm thinking you need to be in Enterprise. Advanced. So if you're that big of a company, you probably need the mid-market package is what this is for. You know, the SKU, but—

Retail $150 versus $60. So it's a bit of a bump up. I will say is they're coming up with some new features inside of it. One of the biggest ones I'm excited about, custom fields, a custom dropdown field. Why that's exciting and important? If you've ever wanted to be able to track your sales by employee, if you've ever wanted to do sales commissions, anytime that you've used a custom field and you're manually typing stuff in, if you ever try to run a custom report off of that, you have to deal with typos. So if you get the dropdown, you can get rid of the typos because they're static choices that you set. And now you're going to— I guarantee you'll save over an hour on that easily.

And I think it's going to be— I mean, you know, Enterprise is a great program, right? So I think we're going to start to see maybe some of those features being added in that are in Enterprise into Advanced. I'm just assuming that that's where they're going with it. So yeah, whatever they can get in there. But yeah.

All right. Well, guys, hope this video was helpful. Again, if you need some assistance on it, you can definitely check us out at QB Community Live in the Facebook group. Again, that's QB Community Live, and/or reach out to Linda or myself. And as always, here's wishing you a very successful week.

Bye now.