The Software Mistake That's Quietly Costing Your Clients Money

The Software Mistake That's Quietly Costing Your Clients Money

With Alicia Katz Pollock, Owner of Royalwise

What happens when a business owner thinks QuickBooks is easy enough to run on their own, and it isn't?

In this episode of Canopy Practice Success, Alicia Katz Pollock, the "Queen of QuickBooks" and owner of Royalwise, breaks down the gap between what Intuit teaches and what firms actually need to know. She walks through the most common (and most expensive) QuickBooks mistake she sees, why certification only gets you to the fundamentals, and how she built a training business that goes far deeper than any 10-minute tutorial.

The conversation covers how Royalwise evolved from in-person classes to a national training and coaching community, why firms are shifting from bookkeeping into advisory, and how AI-driven reporting tools are finally giving bookkeepers the data they need to have real advisory conversations. Alicia also makes the case for niching by client style or size, not just industry.

Whether you're a bookkeeper looking to move into CAS, a firm owner deciding whether to train your clients or do everything for them, or someone who just wants to get more out of the software you're already paying for, this episode is packed with practical, real-world takeaways.

What You'll Learn

• Why the banking feed and Undeposited Funds are where most QuickBooks errors start, and how they lead to duplicated income and overpaid taxes
• How Royalwise grew from local, in-person classes into a national training and coaching business
• Why Intuit's official certification only teaches the fundamentals, and what a deeper, real-world curriculum adds
• How custom-branded training portals let firms offer education as part of their service menu without building it themselves
• Why a niche doesn't have to be an industry, and how client style, size, or life stage can define your specialty
• How new AI-powered KPI boards and anomaly detection in QuickBooks Online Advanced are opening the door to advisory work
• What separates a pro advisor from someone who just knows which buttons to click
• Why hands-on practice, not just watching videos, is what actually builds confidence with the software

Connect With Alicia

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliciakatzpollock

Subscribe to Canopy Practice Success

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and follow Canopy Practice Success wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Canopy Host (00:01) Welcome to another episode of Canopy Practice Success. Today on the podcast, I'm excited to welcome Alicia Katz-Pullock. Alicia is a nationally recognized QuickBooks expert, educator, and community leader who's helped thousands of accounting professionals rethink how they use technology, support clients, and build confidence in their work. She's known for making complex accounting topics approachable, practical, and empowering.

Alicia is also the host of the Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants podcast and the author of several books. Today we'll talk about Alicia's journey, the evolution of accounting education, and what firm leaders need to understand about tech, training, and client experience in a rapidly changing profession. Alicia, so nice to have you.

Alicia (00:47) Thanks for having me, Casey. I'm really happy to be here.

Canopy Host (00:50) I would love you to give a quick synopsis of your experience, because we mentioned a podcast, we mentioned some books. Give us a quick background of all of these things you've produced, because you're quite an expert in several things I really want to dive into today.

Alicia (01:09) Sure, absolutely. So I'm known as the Queen of QuickBooks, but it's not just a name — it's an actual title I earned at QuickBooks Connect in their Tips and Tricks riff-off. The first year my team won, and then the second year they pitted the three of us team members against each other, and I came out on top. So I have a literal crown. I'm literally the Queen of QuickBooks.

Which fits perfectly, because my company's name is Royal Wise, and our logo is an owl wearing a crown. It all kind of dovetails and fits together.

What we do at Royal Wise is QuickBooks training and Apple training. We're a husband-and-wife-run company — my husband does the Apple side and I do the QuickBooks. I have a master's in teaching, and instead of teaching seventh grade English, this was my jam.

I've been a computer geek since an early age, and I started developing this QuickBooks curriculum, and people started coming to it in droves. We've been developing deeper and more complex content ever since. We have over 75 different QuickBooks classes. I've written three or four books on Amazon, and I write this giant 600-page click-by-click textbook for a company called Questiva Consultants that's used in schools and colleges.

Canopy Host (02:40) Look at all those dog ears. I was going to ask — a printed resource on a piece of software cannot be easy to maintain.

Alicia (02:56) No, it definitely turns into a labor of love, because the updates are constant. That's why people flock to Royal Wise — I'm staying on top of the content. Right now I'm in the process of what we call the Great QBO Refresh, where I'm literally re-recording all of our content in order from the beginning, starting with the basics and going deeper and deeper into the content.

Canopy Host (03:23) Why? Is QuickBooks not doing this themselves? Are you doing it differently?

Alicia (03:28) The training that Intuit offers is really well expressed, but very basic — very fundamentals. Here's how to make an invoice, here are the buttons to click. That's what certification is: knowing what buttons to click.

What I bring to the table is real-world case studies, best practices, and expert tips and tricks from the trenches. Because I've been a geek my whole life, I'm interested in all the little efficiency strategies. So when I teach a course, you could watch one of Intuit's 10-minute videos, but I'll talk for two and a half hours about the same topic.

Canopy Host (04:13) I love it. So talk to us about how you found those real-world, in-the-trenches examples.

Alicia (04:20) As I mentioned, I started as a seventh grade English teacher, but I'd been a computer geek my whole life. My jam was being Microsoft Office certified — Word, Excel, PowerPoint — and Apple certified, in the Apple Consultants Network. For a long time I was actually going to homes and offices helping people use their computers and technology, and that's where Royal Wise started, going back about 20 years.

Then people started asking me about QuickBooks Online — "well, if you can help me with my Excel, can you help me with my QuickBooks?" At first my answer was, well, I'm a QuickBooks user, I use it to run my own companies, so I knew it from the user perspective. I found I enjoyed those support calls more than anything else.

At first I thought, well, I'm not a bookkeeper, but I started learning the bookkeeping and having other people check my work to make sure what I was doing was good. They told me, "Alicia, this is rock solid — you have a knack for this." Then when QuickBooks Online came out, there was more and more interest in the QuickBooks side.

In 2011 we started Royal Wise. My husband, Jamie, had his own web hosting company, and I was doing all this other support. We joined forces — this was before we got married — and at first it was just whoever was available first would take the call. Then the QuickBooks calls started coming in, and we decided Jamie would be the Apple guy and Alicia would be the QuickBooks gal. That's where things really started exploding.

Canopy Host (06:17) What a dynamic duo. What are some of the most common mistakes you've seen, and what are some of the greatest hacks or efficiencies you've found? I'd love to hear both ends of the spectrum.

Alicia (06:35) Both roads lead to the banking feed, really. The banking feed is the hub of QuickBooks Online — it's the place where you go to either enter your data or verify your data. QuickBooks is not easy to use, even though Intuit used to run that marketing line, "so easy that anybody can do it." They discovered that wasn't true and they've since dropped it, but that's still the impression people are left with.

So business owners will fire up QuickBooks Online and start categorizing transactions willy-nilly. A lot of the time they'll duplicate their income, because they don't realize their invoices, payments, and sales receipts need to go to Undeposited Funds to match the banking feed. They take the income, and then they enter the income again from the banking feed — and wind up with duplicated revenue, paying more taxes than they need to.

Canopy Host (07:38) This happens commonly?

Alicia (07:43) It happens still, because Undeposited Funds is a concept business owners just don't know about. That's where all of us — pro advisors, bookkeepers, CAS teams — really come into play. We have to teach people to put their payments into Undeposited Funds and then either match them to the banking feed or create a deposit that combines the individual payments into your lump sum.

Canopy Host (08:11) As a non-business-owner and non-QuickBooks expert, I think I'd fall into that same trap. I've always appreciated finance and accounting — it's not something I pursued, but it's so valuable when done right. It's wild how unintuitive it can be, especially in the modern world. I remember watching my mom balance her checkbook with a yellow highlighter — very manual. Things get more complex with businesses, expenditures, AR, AP. I'm sure it's easy for a small business owner to lose sight of where things are going digitally.

Alicia (09:15) Right. QuickBooks solved the problem of hours-long reconciliations, but it opened up different problems, because business owners don't know what they don't know.

That's where all of my training started — with small business training. This book —

Canopy Host (09:39) Hang on, it's called QuickBooks Online Bootcamp: From Setup to Tax Time.

Alicia (09:44) Yep. This just came out on Amazon, but it's the newest edition of a book that's been out for 10 years — it started as the original handouts for a class I taught for business owners, back when it was live, in-person classes.

While I was teaching that class, the business owners loved it, but I realized I could only teach people in Portland who could get to that location on that day. Then Zoom was invented, and we were actually early Zoom adopters at Royal Wise — but the world didn't catch up with us yet. People said, "why would I do a class online? That doesn't make sense, I want to be in person." Then COVID happened.

The first thing Royal Wise did when COVID hit — because my husband Jamie's Apple training clients are mostly seniors, and he didn't want them to be isolated — was a free Zoom training for the whole Royal Wise community. We had 85 people attend, with an average age close to 85, and most of them had never been on Zoom before. Everyone was going, "is this thing on? Can they hear me?" all at the same time. It was hilarious.

We really made it a point to bring technology into people's lives in a way that kept them connected. And once the world got used to Zooming, Royal Wise just started going through the roof, because now people could join a class from anywhere.

Canopy Host (11:39) So are you teaching small businesses and accountants?

Alicia (11:47) Because I started with small business owners and QuickBooks, the rise of the internet, then social media, is what put me in front of bookkeepers. Originally my audience was small business owners, but social media brought the bookkeepers and pro advisors flocking to us. Now my classes are probably 90% bookkeepers and CAS teams, and 10% business owners — but we want the business owners back too.

We want to make it clear to participants that if you're a bookkeeper learning how to do this, you can absolutely send your clients to our classes too. Some people love providing training as part of their practice; others don't want to do it, aren't good at it, and hate answering the same questions over and over. That's where we come in — we partner with CAS practices and bookkeeping firms to train their clients.

Canopy Host (12:58) I heard someone recently say they don't even want their clients in their own QuickBooks. So — playing devil's advocate — why would a firm want the opposite: their clients deepening their understanding of QuickBooks?

Alicia (13:21) There are different styles of bookkeeping. Some is full-service, where the bookkeeper is doing everything for the business — either embedded as an employee or the firm handles all AR and AP services. But millions of small businesses don't even have a bookkeeper, or their bookkeeping is limited to bank feeds and reconciliations, reviewed monthly or quarterly just to make sure everything's in the right bucket. Those businesses still have to make their daily invoices, because the bookkeeper doesn't know the day-to-day of what's happening inside the business.

So there are probably more DIY small businesses who need training than there are businesses who just want the accounting firm to take care of everything.

Canopy Host (14:21) So how might a firm build a training option into the services they're already offering — bookkeeping, accounting, advisory? Why would they pair these things together, or how do they play well together in a firm's book of services?

Alicia (14:50) One thing we pride ourselves on is being incredibly flexible — we can deliver content in whatever way is right for the firm. Sometimes it's just sending clients the link to a class. Sometimes it's joining our affiliate or partner program, where you share the links with your affiliate code and get a 10% revenue share for spreading the word.

We also do customized portals, for firms that want to lean into training as a service — you give us your branding colors and logo, and it's still powered by Royal Wise underneath, but the color scheme is yours. You can have full control over assigning classes to business owners and adding your own customized content.

One thing I do is make custom courses for each of my clients and put recordings of our own sessions into those courses. So every client has their own login with their own course and their own recordings — if I teach them, say, how to fix their sales tax setup, they can rewatch the recording of their own sales tax session as well as the generic sales tax class.

Canopy Host (16:26) You've clearly identified a gap in the market between what Intuit offers and what you offer. Why is it dangerous for a business to only be educated on content from Intuit?

Alicia (16:50) The content from Intuit is really surface-level and generic — it's not comprehensive enough to account for unusual or even uncommon circumstances. They're teaching to the lowest common denominator: here's the one perfect way to do this one thing. If you have any variation, their training isn't going to handle that.

Canopy Host (17:22) What about leveling up employees? How does this supplement networking, events, coaching, and mentoring? You and Royal Wise have interacted with countless businesses by now — you've seen the trends and the common problems, and you have recommended solutions. What role does this play alongside networking and mentoring as means of advancement?

Alicia (18:11) We're NASBA-certified, so you can get CPE for taking our courses, and any given course isn't a one-hour high-level overview — it's usually a three-hour deep dive. So first, it checks that box quickly.

Second, when you're networking or at a conference, it's mostly soft skills — firm development, personal development. We're focused like a laser on software. With QuickBooks, between the constant changes in the software and the fact that once you're in a routine you forget to look around at other features, QuickBooks often does things you had no idea it could do. We focus on every detail of the software, but with a goal: to make you efficient. If you spend three hours in my bank feeds class, you're going to learn efficiency strategies, shortcuts, rules, and automations that save you literally 25 to 30 hours a year, if not more. My whole goal is to make you as efficient as possible.

Canopy Host (19:51) I've heard a stat — I'm pulling this from memory, no source — that we roughly use about 10% of the software we buy, and 90% of the functionality just sits there collecting dust. It's not uncommon for humans to buy something they're not fully utilizing.

Alicia (20:20) Right, and there's utilization, and then there are strategies you don't even know are there. Here's an Easter egg in QuickBooks: when you're in the date field, you can type the letter "T" and it takes you to today.

Canopy Host (20:38) Hotkey stuff like that.

Alicia (20:40) Yeah — or if you're typing a date, say we're recording this in December and I want to put in December 21st, I can just type "21" and it fills in the 12 and the year. That's the kind of strategy you get out of my classes.

And then there's the utilization piece — because QuickBooks is under constant, rapid development, you may have turned to third-party software for something QuickBooks didn't used to do, but now it does. Maybe you don't need that third-party app anymore.

Canopy Host (21:17) So you're fairly educated on the whole ecosystem of software that surrounds QuickBooks too.

Alicia (21:26) Yeah, absolutely.

Canopy Host (21:29) It's constantly evolving — my world is SaaS, and I see new vendors popping up all the time, which is fun and wild, but it presents challenges.

Alicia (21:42) One thing I've recently started doing is bringing app sponsors into my longer, deep-dive classes. For example, I just did two three-hour sessions on reporting in QBO — the first was the basics of running and reading reports, and the second was the deep dive into customization, pivot tables, grouping, filtering, and creating custom reports. But there are still things QuickBooks can't do for reporting, so I brought in one of the apps I work with as a sponsor, and they did a live demo at the end of the class. Moving into next year, my idea is: here's everything QuickBooks does, and here's a focus on something QuickBooks doesn't do, and here's a possible solution.

Canopy Host (22:40) That makes me think about advisory, especially with your reporting example. How do you feel a deeper understanding of QuickBooks — and the right third-party solutions — helps a firm level up to make the leap to CAS, or deepen its confidence in offering CAS?

Alicia (23:03) That really points to a shift in the industry. I've been doing this for 20 years, and I've been speaking at QuickBooks Connect, now Intuit Connect, since 2015. Back then, it was all "let's teach you how to use QuickBooks" — all-day certification training. After a few years, it moved into advisory — lifting pro advisors up and upgrading their skills so it's not just using the software, it's advising. In the last five years, the talk has all been about CAS, CAS teams, and moving CAS into the tax space.

Along the way, that means people who used to think of themselves as "bookkeepers" now need to think of themselves as pro advisors and move into advisory. But other than learning to read a report, they didn't have any tools to actually do advising. You can run a P&L, but unless you know to spread it out by percentage of column, percentage of row, percentage of income, and percentage of expense, you have no way of doing real advisory. That's what I started teaching in that advanced reporting class — how do you actually take a P&L and figure out what's happening inside it?

Canopy Host (24:39) Do you think a bookkeeper or accountant servicing a wide range of clients needs to focus on a handful of industries to offer real advisory — which I'd always encourage — or is there another way to go about it with an existing client base, using functionality within QuickBooks to hop up a rung or two on the advisory ladder?

Alicia (25:29) There are two pieces to unpack there. First, on the advisory piece — that's where Intuit is leaning in with new AI tools. The AI is now taking the data and surfacing conclusions you can draw from it. I encourage any bookkeeper who doesn't know how to do advisory to start looking at the new performance indicators and KPI boards in QuickBooks Online Advanced, or the new anomaly detection in the regular reports and the business feed. It's beginning to surface information you can use to talk about what's happening day-to-day — information we never had access to before — so now you can have a reasonable conversation without actually working inside the business, just from looking at the reports.

On the niche piece — they say the riches are in the niches, and you do really well by picking an industry you resonate with or have some history or passion for, because then you become a real insider on the nuances of that business. But a niche doesn't have to be an industry. A niche can also be a style — you can niche in therapists, in mom-and-pop shops, in businesses by revenue, by number of employees, by sole proprietor, because they have their own struggles and their own opportunities.

For about three years I had a run of clients who were all Russian mom-and-pop construction businesses — the husband making glass doors, showers, railings, specialty work, and the wife keeping the books. I became a specialist, down to knowing what would happen with the church tithing they ran through the books, because it kept coming up. There's something to be said for your niche being the style or level of business, not just its function.

Canopy Host (28:01) I'm glad you called that out — it's easy to think about niches purely in terms of industry, but you can think in terms of category, like therapists, or even milestones, like a company moving from $10 million to $100 million in ARR. You could specialize in that stage of a company's growth. That still helps you deepen your expertise. Good call-out.

As we wrap up, I want to ask a couple of rapid-fire questions. What's the most underrated skill for accountants today?

Alicia (28:42) The most underrated skill for accountants today would be attention to detail — due diligence for yourself, much less review of other people's work, or having your own work reviewed.

Canopy Host (29:06) Education versus experience — how do they intertwine? Where do you see one mattering more, or am I spreading a myth?

Alicia (29:22) I'd say imagination is more important than knowledge. I can't answer this one rapid-fire, though, because what I do is help people with real-life, hands-on training.

One thing we haven't talked about is that Royal Wise has a community membership and a coaching membership. Community members get automatic enrollment in all the classes and a members' meeting every month where people ask me questions — instead of me providing the information, people bring a situation with a client and everyone learns from each other's experience. I used to think of those meetings as a throwaway add-on, but people tell me they're actually the most valuable piece of the program.

The coaching program is the hands-on part — we meet every month, and people bring their books to me and ask, "what do I do in this situation?" Every summer I run a hands-on training based on that giant textbook, where you're actually building company files from scratch and doing the work. It's one thing to listen to me fire-hose information at you — you can rewatch the video later when you need that piece — but it's something else entirely to have your hands in the books. I try to include that hands-on option in as many places as I can.

Canopy Host (30:56) It's not an either/or, it's a yes/and.

Alicia (30:59) Exactly.

Canopy Host (31:01) I love it. Thank you, Alicia — this was a delight.

Alicia (31:04) Thank you very much. I loved talking to you.