WSW QuickBooks Price Increase
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Dan DeLong: welcome to another workshop Wednesday, brought to you by school of bookkeeping.com, which is Casual Conversations for Serious Workflows. Ah, like that little caption there. We start a little tagline here. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. So today actually joining us is we're graced by Matthew Fulton [00:01:00] of is it, I always get it wrong.
Is it Pathway Parkway?
Matthew Fulton: Parkway Business Solutions, but primarily QB Community Live the Facebook group, but yes. Oh,
Dan DeLong: Thank you for joining us and we're honored that this is your first live stream for in, in quite a while, so I appreciate you using this as a I
Matthew Fulton: was here, man. Try to get used to doing this again, so get me back into fighting weight.
Thank you.
Dan DeLong: That's right. You look good. Talk a little bit about you, Matt, as far as the your QB community live, and then the projects that you got working on just to, for those that don't know who the heck is this guy?
Matthew Fulton: Thank you. So after basically taking a, about a year and a half off.
Trying to reset myself, figure out, I think a lot of accountants out there have been starting to feel burnout, that type of thing. And I ran into it pretty quickly, so I took some time off to readjust and find where I want to be [00:02:00] reentered and been coming back. Focusing back into the QB community live group to build that up.
Love working with community, helping share knowledge with others. So that's a, a cornerstone for me. And then I'm also doing a lot of work with different app companies to try to help them, better connect with the accounting community and making sure that the stuff they're doing.
Connecting to accounting apps is correct. For example, ledger Sync is one I've been working with some time now and helping some of the stuff they're doing on the backend.
Dan DeLong: What is what is Ledger Sync? For those that don't know.
Matthew Fulton: Good question. So LedgerSync is, it's a great application that basically gives you a unified dashboard for all of your, as an accountant, for all your different clients', accounts, bank accounts, financial accounts, so forth.
So you log in there, have your clients connect, and it pulls in all your statements, your transactions, and. For the institutions that allow it, the check images as well. So you're not having to log in back and forth to all these different locations all the time. It's all secured in one place. You can have your team members in there, so you're not having to share [00:03:00] passwords that way.
It's just a major time saver that way. Trying to fetch all this data. Love it. We've been working with them for years.
Carrie Kahn: Yeah, we actually used it for a short while. With desktops. So it was a while ago.
Matthew Fulton: Desktop especially, it's a no-brainer with desktop. Love it. So it's, so staying in the accounting realm I love this environment.
I love what I do and just finding new and exciting ways to chase my passion instead of just chasing clients all the time.
Dan DeLong: Good deal. And you had created a really nice video about the topic that we're gonna be talking about today the QuickBooks pricing update or pricing changes.
And and I reached out to you and said, Hey, like, why don't we just, why don't you just come on the workshop and we'll just we'll just. Join link arms and unpack it. Unpack it together. Since you, you have a good understanding as to what the changes are, the dates and everything.
So I appreciate you being so gracious to join us here today. [00:04:00] Thanks again for joining us here. Thanks. Do you have a, for having a link, do you have a, do you have a link that we could share for for the video for those that, that might wanna. Yeah, you'll review, Matt's take on the pricing
Matthew Fulton: change.
I'll grab that and yeah, we'll get that over to you in just one quick second here. It's on my Okay. Primary profile. But yeah, we can definitely get that shared over, okay. Perfect.
Dan DeLong: So this is what we're talking about here today is this seems to be a, an annual conversation, right?
Where and it's not, it's not limited to to QuickBooks, right? We're fielding a lot of these conversations with other apps that, that we're working with. And maybe, when you started with a company or working with a company, you were in a really.
Great plan, and a lot of them are now going yeah, we've changed our prices five times since then. We're kicking you out of the the legacy account that you were in. But this is now a [00:05:00] con, seems to be a yearly conversation that that we're having about the QuickBooks online pricing changes.
So we want to unpack that and see. And really just talk about how that impacts companies. So let's go ahead. We have a blog here on on school bookkeeping where we've broken it down By product type. Because it's not just QuickBooks online.
It does have to deal with payroll and and payments, which is which was, I didn't realize that was coming either. And that seems to be, on looking at it from my perspective that seems to be the biggest change. Would you agree, Matt?
Matthew Fulton: Yeah, I do. And so one thing I always like to say when it comes, like these pricing increases.
As somebody that's worked on trying to develop my own app at one point in time and then working with different companies, there is a reason they have to do this. Like software development is not cheap. It takes time and energy and time and money and money and time [00:06:00] to do these things. So these increases, it's because, look, there's increases all the way across.
So the software side of it, we actually saw pretty minimal increases this year. And I agree it's more in the payments plan structure is where we saw a lot of the changes.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. So let's go through the QuickBooks Online pricing changes, which seem pretty straightforward. It only seems to be essentials and plus and self-employed.
Do you do you deal a lot with with self-employed in, in your. Practices or no?
Matthew Fulton: We've had some people that started off with self-employed, but we've always been excited to see when we're able to help them evolve their business up into a higher level product. Trying to really get them into more of the simple, smarter essentials where they can start tracking more aspects of their business.
So yeah, we've avoided self employed at this time.
Dan DeLong: Yeah, I think I think that's a pretty common from the accounting per perspective, accountant, a [00:07:00] bookkeeper, right? You can't even reconcile the account, right? Yeah. That's like a, that's like a deal breaker for a lot of accountants.
Carrie, do you agree with,
Carrie Kahn: if you can't reconcile, that's, then you've just had garbage? That's, you can't.
Matthew Fulton: You nailed it. Tell us how you really feel.
Carrie Kahn: Too much room for error. You've gotta know if you've got duplicate entries, which can happen. We were talking about.
Using apps like Ledgers Sync, but things happen and you get the same, a bank connectional fail and you get duplicates and things like that. You've gotta be able to balance that out and make sense
Matthew Fulton: of it. It's just the nature of the beast. And so what I find is with Simple Start is starting at least there.
That evolution of a business is so easy. It's just a click change and you can upgrade and add new features on. So yeah, that's again why we. Except
Carrie Kahn: for self-employed.
Dan DeLong: So self plan never had a really good pathway to to upgrade. It was either you, [00:08:00] there, there was a point in time where you could click update, upgrade and it would go into the Q B O ecosystem.
But it It was hit or miss. It was more of just reconnect the bank feeds and start over.
Matthew Fulton: Sorry.
Carrie Kahn: Yeah, let's start
Dan DeLong: over. But those are increasing as far as the monthly price increase it makes it's real easy to, it's five bucks right across the board. Yep. With the exception of simple start in advanced.
Right.
Carrie Kahn: So leaving everything with a zero on the end. I'm 20, 30, 40.
Matthew Fulton: So until next year, pretty much still
Dan DeLong: be having this conversation next. Yep. All as far as the dates of when this is happening, so August 1st, new subscriptions will we'll see the new pricing, September 1st. So if your billing starts if you're a current subscriber your billing will increase after sep September 1st.
So always the question is, why [00:09:00] August 1st? Where did this date come in? Oh, I know the answer. Yeah, go ahead Carrie. Can I answer? Go for it. Ooh.
Carrie Kahn: That is Intuits fiscal year. So most everybody is, 1231 as their ending. January one will be their beginning of their fiscal year, but in, in Intuits land it's August 1st.
So all the big changes is they say Happy New Year and things like that, because that's their new, that's their tax year,
Dan DeLong: that's their new. Yeah, that's their new fiscal year. So we do have a link to the the Intuit firm of the future article here. So if you do have a question about. That, that's more directed towards Intuit.
You can certainly, check that out here off of our blog. So annual pricing there is a, there is an increase across the board for those that are impacted by this price increase. So you can see that that, that play out here. So that brings up an interesting [00:10:00] option, right? So if you are a current subscriber and you're on monthly billing if you do switch, To annual billing right before the price increase.
You could feasibly get in on today's pricing for a year at least to try to avoid the price increase at least for a year. There's a good point, an option there, right? But do it now before, before it increases. The challenge of the of that is that if you are in a promotional pricing, like if you're in your first year by doing that, you're going to typically lose the promotional pricing when you switch to to annual.
So that's one option that you have to, maybe. Save for a couple months, save for a little bit because you actually do get a 10% discount on the annual pricing. You're actually avoiding. The [00:11:00] dis, you're getting a discount on that and you're also avoiding the price increase until the next renewal time, which would potentially be a year from now.
Matthew Fulton: And key thing, which you touched base on is if you do, even if you have promotional pricing now, that will still be honored through the end of that promotional pricing, even with these changes. So as the changes occur, that promotional pricing stays the same until that runs out and then, any pricing would take effect on everything we're talking about today.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. But that your base price, unless you make a
Matthew Fulton: change. Exactly. Exactly. You have to be
Carrie Kahn: real careful. If you change it from monthly to annual, you have to be careful or flavors, if you change from, upgrade, you can lose that promotion.
Great point.
Matthew Fulton: Great point. So then the payroll's another area that they started to do some changing this year as well, right? This one was, I found, was a little bit more, a little bit more complicated unless you slow down and read it right. The, [00:12:00] because basically the core pricing, what they did is they changed the price per employee at the core pricing.
But the on the premium. It was the base that changed. So core starts at 45 for the core amount, and then your per employee price. What is currently $5 per employee, that's changing to still the same 45, but your per employee will be $6 per employee per month. And then the premium. The premium has a base, current base of 75.
That base is going up to $80, but the per employee at $8 per month does not change at all. And then Elite no changes on that whatsoever.
Dan DeLong: That stays the same. Yeah. So big takeaway there is that advanced. Adva they're top tiers right between payroll and QuickBooks Online are not changing at all.
It's just the other lower [00:13:00] levels of both payroll and QuickBooks online are with the exception of simple start. But yeah, in. In core it's the, it's just the employee, whereas payroll, it's, it is just the base I'm sorry. And the premium. Excuse me. Yeah. So what is your what is your thought on the strategy there, Matt, as far as these two different changes?
Because what I'm looking at is okay, now if I compare premium payroll to. To core. Now my per employee charge is really only $2 difference, and if I do have time tracking, because that includes the time time tracking feature, really that's only $2 for per each employee for time tracking.
Matthew Fulton: I, I think that's exactly what they're trying to do, is they're trying to slowly. I wanna say creep the prices or get the prices somewhat closer together, where the value add of going [00:14:00] up to premium is just a no-brainer because of that time tracking capability. You know when you start combining the QuickBooks time with QuickBooks Payroll and QuickBooks online?
That functionality, it just saves a lot of time trying to process it. Ah, no pun exactly. Time and money, so yeah, from that side, I think that's definitely where they're going with it. I also feel that, that per employee price, if you go too much higher per employee, that people noticed that faster.
So I think that's why that the, at the higher ones, that didn't change as much. Because I can rack up quickly. If you've got 15, 20 employees that's a much bigger increase from that
Dan DeLong: side. Yeah. And that's always in my my thought about the upper tiers of the payroll is that, this per employee charge is whether or not they're time tracking or not.
Yeah. So if you have 20 employees and only 10 of them need to track their time. [00:15:00] That val value, and somewhat diminishes because I'm with Core and be, another time tracking system would've been would be more economical for me, even though it's not, bundled in it, it loses some of the luster of the value when it's not being used by half your employees for.
Matthew Fulton: Yeah. And unless you start using it for stuff like projects and you're trying to actually allocate even just those 10 people, where is their time? What's that expense? And if you're tagging it to a specific client and a specific project that's a huge win by using the QuickBooks time portion of it.
There are other time tracking apps that you can do some of this with, but it's. It's just not as efficient. It just really isn't because they don't have the same access to the projects area as an api, you have to, it, it has to be done completely different where you have to create it first and then pull it over to a different time tracking app.
Dan DeLong: Yeah, that's that's, the more that things are integrated, the more. You can get out of [00:16:00] QuickBooks when you're bundling those things. We, we love payments, we love the, some of the payroll functionality. But yeah, it's that, that is where Intuit has a distinct advantage because they can play with the API more so than what the, what other apps can work with.
Matthew Fulton: Yep. They're sucking us into the intuit spheres I like to call it. So the dates wise, same concept on that. August, like your, sorry, the August of September 1st is, are those magical dates again? Your August 1st is gonna be it, basically August 1st is almost always everything that's client build on that side.
So your, your payroll core changes, client build subscriptions August 1st and the premium client base subscription September 1st is anything that's being accountant build is where that change happens,
Dan DeLong: now this one was this was a a sneak in here that I didn't this little they're introducing an [00:17:00] annual billing for customers who have client subscriptions.
They can switch to annual billing for payroll. For billing and subscription? Yes, cuz it's in the payroll section. Payroll, yeah.
Carrie Kahn: Okay. That doesn't make sense to me cause payroll is Typically payroll is, I'm not sure, I'm not sure
Dan DeLong: how that's gonna play out, right? Because monthly, because employees, they add, they subtract mid annual.
I'm not sure how that's gonna play out with with an annual billing.
Carrie Kahn: If it's just the base monthly fee that would work. It's the the per employee, there's no way that could be annual. That would have to just be as going, might be a
Dan DeLong: hybrid.
Carrie Kahn: Yeah, it would be a two billing thing. So that's,
Matthew Fulton: I like that sounds like a reconciliation nightmare.
Dan DeLong: You know what happens? My favorite word, but that's part if you add or fire an employee, mid annual billing cycle, what happens? Do you get a I don't think that
Carrie Kahn: I, unless I'm [00:18:00] missing something, I think that the. Employee thing would not be annual. That would be, yeah. Separate,
Matthew Fulton: Employee I've already paid for you for the whole year in QuickBooks, so I'm just gonna have to keep you on.
Yeah. We're just, there's
Carrie Kahn: no way that part's annual.
Dan DeLong: I could be wrong. You can't leave now. You already paid for you, you gonna give your half months notice because we're still, you've still paid for. I wonder if that's in here. Let's see. This is the FAQ. Let me get to, here we go.
Discounts. Yeah, so there's not much about that. Here on the FAQs, on the firm of the future, just talking about annual billing, right? Who pay for their own subscriptions. There's an asterisk, so let's. Usually down at the bottom. Limit time discount from our subject to additional terms additions. Yep.[00:19:00]
So no answer there on the F faq if any Intuit employees are listening or watching, we would like a little bit more's
Carrie Kahn: agree, Landon's agreeing with me.
Matthew Fulton: We can pull back up on this and put some comments on it. Cuz I, that was something I was. I totally missed that one as well. So good catch.
It'll be an interesting one. See how that, it's just the bit, the monthly, I
Carrie Kahn: just know I'm
Matthew Fulton: right there. So the biggest area, I think is the next one, right? Is the, that merchant processing and all of that. This is where everybody I feel needs to pay the most attention to it and most specifically ach.
I will say that when I looked at the pricing that their new pricing that they'll be doing, and I try to compare it to a Stripe, a square, and a PayPal Intuit's pricing is still coming in just below everybody else's to where. They obviously did their research onto that side.
They're inch inching a little bit closer, but they're still [00:20:00] below. The ACH though, that's the area, depending on how it's set up where your pricing could dramatically
Dan DeLong: increase. Yeah. So let's go down to the standard rates so that you can so that we play that unpack this, and that this was another one. One of those annual billings that kind of just snuck in here with with little fan air, but it has huge applications. So it's looking at the standard rates currently. Some of the things, across the board the per transaction fee is being eliminated.
There was a monthly. Option. Yeah. Which will give you lower rates for the monthly fee that's being eliminated. So simplification of the transactional fees is definitely what's driving all of this, as far as what what options are available.
Then, now we have really two, right? You have the [00:21:00] pay as you go standard rates, or you have the pay as you go. ProAdvisor preferred pricing which is if have a pro ProAdvisor referee refer your account, then you get lower rates off of that. So yeah, the big thing there is that the invoicing ach, right?
So currently it's 1% with a maximum of $10. New pricing for existing customers that max is now being increased to $15. If you're charging somebody an ACH of $5,000, the maximum you would pay today would be $10 on that. On that ach, that would be increased to $15 for existing customers.
But new prices for new customers as of September 1st. It's just a flat 1%. So if it's $5,000, that fee is now 50 50 bucks.
Matthew Fulton: Yeah. So to that's [00:22:00] stress and like you just said, and to stress this part, what this is a hundred percent saying is as of September 1st, if somebody brand spanking new comes in that has never had a merchant processing account, they come in and connect they would be, that cap would go away and it would be a 1% for whatever charges they go through per transaction if they already have an account.
They, and they're already connected now that Max becomes that 15, like you said. So the only way around this is if you bring on, let's say a client as an accountant comes to you and they set up their own merchant processing after that September 5th, they can. Connect to your accountant, ver they can run through you, basically your provisor program, but both you and the client will have to call into it merchant processing to make that request for [00:23:00] to, for that change of course.
Dan DeLong: So we've and we've talked about this in a prior workshop where we, where we've talked about the new accounts getting this half half created QuickBooks account just as part of the whole setup interview process. Where of course, by doing that, now you're.
You're getting, you're opting into the standard rates at that point. So you definitely want, if you're working with an accountant or if you are an accountant and working with a client you'll you could be a lifesaver, especially if they are. Potentially going to be using ACH to saving them a lot of money, which could potentially offset these other increases that are up here, right?
So if they're doing high volume ACH transaction, that will definitely cover the cost of the pricing increase. By saving them some funds there. And we have [00:24:00] on school bookkeeping, we have, we've we love payments, we love QuickBooks payments, cause it's a big time savers the.
Doing your billing and your bookkeeping at the same time is a phenomenal time savings, right? So after you send the payment or send the invoice, you're pretty much done right with, especially with QuickBooks online, because it'll create the payment for you. It'll process the fees, it'll automatically reconcile the transaction.
They pretty much, after you. Send it, set it, forget it, type of thing. Those things they should be automatic. Doesn't mean that they are. But we have we have a QuickBooks Payments course that's available. It's totally free to to review. And if you are an accountant or if you are a client and you would like to participate or opt into these ProAdvisor Preferred Franklin, because we'll talk a little bit about that [00:25:00] notice.
It's still capped at at the maximum of $10 from here, right? So even those. Changing over, like if you were brand new, definitely, do this. And then there's existing ones you really can't change. Those types of things, especially if you've been using it for, for quite some time.
You wanna catch it pretty early. But if you're brand new and you wanna opt in to the ProAdvisor preferred pricing these are. These are significantly less than the standard rates, especially with the with the ach. Matt you would agree with that?
Matthew Fulton: Yeah. So when it comes to even just the merchant processing, it's across the board.
It's almost 0.2 below everything. Otherwise the card reader's 2.5 for the standard merchant processing outside of us. We've got 2.3. The Keans 3.5. We've got 3.3 invoice card wise is 2.99. For everybody else we're at 2.8. [00:26:00] So you're saving money there. And then the ach, like you said, that's, it's a no-brainer that the max of a $10 cuz it's so easy to hit that $10 max, so easy.
The one, so one question I've had a lot of people ask me is, Hey, how do I know which of these plans I'm currently on? Where can I look and try to find what, what I'm currently paying? The best answer, maybe you guys have a different answer, but the best answer I've had is inside your QuickBooks Online Company file, you can go into the, gear icon, go to your company settings, go to payments, and you'll be able to see your statements right there.
Pull up a statement and look at what your charges are on there. To be able to evaluate where what you're being charged in comparison to what you're seeing as these current rates is gonna be one of the fastest ways to really figure out what kinda a change you need to make.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. It doesn't list out there standard versus ProAdvisor, but you can see based off of, comparing your statement to what you see here in, in our blog or on online, you can [00:27:00] determine, okay, I've I see 2.9%.
Yeah. For an invoiced transaction. Okay. Then I know I'm on the, the ProAdvisor as opposed to. And that was a bad example. It's the same keyed in, right? We'll go with the keyed in option. And keyed in is is not necessarily keyed in, right? Like the recurring transactions are actually considered to be the keyed in rate rather than good point invoice.
So if you have a recurring transaction where you're recurring billing for a subscription or something like that will be considered the keyed in rate versus the invoice because the risk is still there, right? Is even though you have it saved and it's it's PCI compliant and you can't see the credit card number, there's things of that nature.
Anything could have happened between, the last time it was charged till now. The risk is. The further you are from actually holding the [00:28:00] card, it gets a little more riskier of a transaction. So they have to pay for that for that risk. They roll that risk into the transaction fees.
Cuz as we talked a couple weeks ago, there could be a dispute and then there's a potential dispute process. Yep. Which I am currently undergoing with with my situation, with my client that I charged twice on the same day legitimately, but I still needed to prove that.
Matthew Fulton: Yeah. They even have a new dispute protection also, don't they? That
Dan DeLong: they're offering. Yeah, we did talk about that also a couple weeks as well. So there's the dispute protection where you pay an additional 0.99% on every transaction, but then you don't have to, you don't have to prove that your charge was legitimate or not.
They'll just they'll just pay it. And and you move on.
Matthew Fulton: So more of the story is if you have these recurring [00:29:00] invoices, get 'em all over to ach. It's obviously gonna be able to save you money. That's a
Dan DeLong: lot. You're save you money until there's a dispute.
Matthew Fulton: Good. Yeah. That's definitely a possibility. Or,
Dan DeLong: or a bounced ach.
Carrie Kahn: ACH are not my preferred. Method because it takes, it just, yeah. If it, if they dispute it is, it's ugly. So it's much cleaner when you're dealing with that and then you
Dan DeLong: have that nasty needs attention alert on your dashboard that you have to figure out how to correct. Just because it's a dispute that too.
Yep. We've done that too.
Matthew Fulton: So one of the things actually that was brought up in the meeting when we first learned about these upcoming changes was the fact that Intuit is actively working and improving the process behind the scenes of how. You interact with your merchant accounts. So making that switch over from, a client subscribed one to an accountant version, they're expecting by [00:30:00] end of end of their fiscal year, end of this year, that process is supposed to be dramatically improved.
So you don't have to sit, you're not calling them on the phone with the client saying, Hey, blah, blah, blah, blah. So in the future months, we should see improvements to that
Dan DeLong: for sure. And is there and I missed because I was looking at the at the blog itself, you were saying, is there a time limit on of switching those those things over?
Matthew Fulton: Like how long No, just shared with us. It's a good question that we'd have to follow back up on, but they didn't share that with us. They did. If somebody had been set up for six months and then they came into you, fundamentally what we, what I heard will reconfirm is you can still bring them over at any point in time.
That process I. It, it's not easy peasy, like super fast and like slick. Yet, maybe it will be improved. But if they're doing a lot of processing and it's a great value add for the client,[00:31:00] you both have to be on that same phone call with the Intuit merchant processing to, to make it happen.
So take some doing.
Dan DeLong: It does take some joy. I appreciate you joining us today, Matt. It was really really great to have your insight. Carrie any final thoughts on on anything that we've talked about here today?
Carrie Kahn: I think this just really can, really gives highlight to how valuable a pro-advisor can be to their client with that special pricing.
So hopefully people have picked up on that that piece as well.
Matthew Fulton: Amen.
Dan DeLong: All right thanks again for joining us, Matt, and thank you all for for tuning in. We are gonna take a little bit of a break because on the weekly workshop Yeah. I'll be somewhere in the Pacific. My son is Is in the Navy and he's invited me to join him on an aircraft carrier for a few days.
And on top of that, we have scaling new heights, [00:32:00] which I won't be able to go to.
Matthew Fulton: I'll be there. I'll be there. Yeah, we,
Dan DeLong: We'll pick this back up after the 4th of July. So we'll see you in a few weeks with the workshop and you all have a great day and we'll see you next time.
Thanks for joining, Matt.
Carrie Kahn: Everyone have a good week.
