If you’ve logged into QuickBooks Online recently, you may have spotted a new little blue circle or perhaps you saw the words “Intuit Assist” pop up. That’s QuickBooks’ way of letting you know that AI-powered features are rolling out. For many small business owners, the idea of AI in their bookkeeping software can feel overwhelming or unclear. So what does it actually do? Should you be worried? Or is it something that can save you time?

Here’s the video version: https://youtu.be/y3AOCTY-uEI?sub_confirmation=1

What Is Intuit Assist in QuickBooks?

As of August 4, QuickBooks began rolling out Intuit Assist features across accounts, and these tools will become standard after September 30, 2025. While you can currently opt out, these features will soon be part of your day-to-day workflow in QuickBooks Online—so it’s worth understanding what they do now before you’re automatically opted in.

In this post, I’ll walk you through three key features: invoice reminders, the invoice creation assistant (also called the Payments Agent), and business feed suggestions.

1. Smarter Invoice Reminders (That Don’t Stop)

QuickBooks previously allowed for automated reminders, but they would stop sending after a certain date. Now, with AI, the system detects overdue invoices and drafts custom reminder messages based on how late the payment is.

You’ll see a blue icon next to the invoice, and the draft message is often more specific than the old templates. For example, if an invoice is 44 days overdue, the system might generate a message that reads “Urgent – Please pay your overdue invoice.” You can click “rewrite” to see alternate versions of the message or edit it yourself before sending.

This not only saves time—it helps get you paid faster.

2. The Payments Agent: AI-Powered Invoice Creation

One of the most useful features I tested is the Payments Agent, a tool designed to speed up how you create invoices. Instead of manually selecting the customer and entering line items, you can simply type a quick instruction—like “Please invoice Bill’s Windsurf Shop for 12 fountains and rocks”—and the AI generates the invoice for you.

It fills in the customer’s details, pulls the right items, and even shows recent payment history. For example, it might tell you that this customer tends to pay 21 days late and suggest changing payment terms to “Due on Receipt” or enabling online payments.

You can make adjustments to quantities or add new items, and if you’ve already uploaded inventory or services, the system will pull those in for you. It’s intuitive, fast, and helpful—especially for busy entrepreneurs juggling multiple tasks.

3. Business Feed Suggestions: A To-Do List (Sort Of)

The Business Feed now includes AI-generated suggestions for what you should work on next. It may recommend following up on overdue invoices, categorizing transactions, or uploading receipts. It can even estimate your net profit over the past month—though the usefulness of that feature may vary depending on how up-to-date your books are.

In my opinion, these suggestions are a helpful prompt if you’re unsure where to begin, but they won’t replace your regular bookkeeping processes. Still, if you’re new to QuickBooks or easily overwhelmed, this dashboard feed can offer structure and reduce decision fatigue.

Are These AI Tools Worth Using?

The short answer: Some are!

The invoice creation tool is impressive, and the reminder system is more dynamic than ever. If you’ve been manually chasing overdue invoices or creating invoices from scratch, these updates can save real time. The business feed suggestions are less groundbreaking but may still help guide your workflow.

As always, you’re in control—you can edit messages, choose whether to use the features, and continue working the way you prefer. But with the September 30 deadline approaching, I recommend taking a few minutes now to explore the tools and decide what works best for you.

AI in bookkeeping doesn’t need to be scary. These new Intuit Assist features are designed to help small business owners reduce busywork and stay on top of their finances. As more features roll out, I’ll continue testing and sharing walkthroughs so you can make the most of your QuickBooks Online subscription.

If you’ve tested any of these new features already, I’d love to hear what you think. Drop me a note!

And if you want to see a full demo, don’t forget to watch the full video above. Cheers!

– Kerry

My Cloud Bookkeeping

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Hi Kerry here from My Cloud Bookkeeping. I work with small business owners and entrepreneurs and help them to utilize QuickBooks online to keep their business bookkeeping up to date and make accurate up to the minute decisions to manage their business finances. Often when we hear about ai, it's a little scary.

What does it mean? What will the AI be doing in my QuickBooks? And what if I don't want it? More questions than answers. So what I'm hoping to do today is show you some examples of what Intuit Assist is doing so you'll be able to understand and hopefully remove some of the fear of the unknown. So QuickBooks started rolling out that little blue circle thing on August 4th.

You've likely seen it when you log in to QuickBooks, or perhaps you've seen it with the wording into an assist, and you may have decided to opt out, deal with it another day so you can continue to opt out until September 30th and after that date. All the AI features will be live and active in all QuickBooks files.

So in today's video, I'm gonna walk through three features that are operational. Now, some are still in beta, some are not available for me to test yet. So as the new features do come on board, I'll add in some new videos and be sure to have that little bell on so that you'll be notified. The first feature I came across was the option to create an invoice reminder.

Now you can automate invoice reminders and uh, I've had that set up in the past. Have another video on it. However, once the date of the automated reminder has passed, there will be no more reminders set. This is a quick and easy feature. Let's see how it works. You can see here this little blue symbol that shows it's an AI assist, one of the new features.

It says, let's, it's created a reminder for Bill's windsurf Shop oh, who owes us $85. And it's drafted this up. Now. It's gonna be a surprise what it looks like. 'cause I have not previewed this yet. But let's click and have a look and see what it says. I. Okay. Generating a message. This is pretty cool. Urgent pay overdue invoice, uh, 44 days overdue.

It completely makes sense. Look at that. It's just generated it by itself. Now, previously I've had automated reminders set up, but after a while they stop. So I could see how this could be useful. The other interesting thing is it's written it in a way. That is different to the default message. So let's have a quick look and see what the default message is.

Oh yeah. See, this is just kind of a nice reminder. The other one was a little bit more TSE, I guess, because it was 44 days overdue. Now let's hit rewrite message and see what it says. Okay, it's goes back to that urgent Again, let's click rewrite just for the fun of it and see what it does for our third time.

I don't really know that that's any different. And you, of course would be a, oh, we are eager to build a healthy business relationship. Look at this. That might be what it's changed. So you of of course could change this. Um, you know, we are not going to send you fountains unless you are going to send the fountains.

If you don't pay, I dunno, whatever you wanted to write in here, you could. And then you just hit send reminder and off it would go. So that's kind of a, a cool AI tool to help you to collect your money a little bit more quickly. So while we are looking at invoices, I tested out the invoice creation assistant.

They call it the payments agent, and I love it. Now, one of the AI intuitive assist features is this. Payments agent and it's intended to get you paid faster or sooner, um, by helping you with your invoicing. So you can see along here on the left hand side, there's some information about. Some customers, 12 invoices were overdue in the last 12 months.

Payments 23 days late on average. Now, I thought this would be interesting if it was to do with a particular customer. We'd pulled up, but it's kind of generic. Maybe it's interesting. But what I wanna test out today is this autofill feature. So you can use files, images, if you take a photos of something.

Or text. Now I'm going to play with the text thing and let's see what we'll write in here. Um, please invoice bill's windsurf for 12 fountains and, um, rocks. Let's just see what it can do with this. I'm not too sure if that'll be enough information or not. I'm testing this out as we go, so let's see what happens.

It's extracting and working. It's definitely taking its time thinking and here we go. We have bills. Wind surf shop. We have, uh, rock fountain, 12 of them. Okay, well that's not bad. This is good. Oh, and here we go. Now here's the information about this specific customer. Um, since July 20, 25, 21 days to pay one paid invoice and one not due yet, and one overdue.

That actually kind of is useful. So it's suggesting that we send a reminder, update the terms to. To do on receipt and then, um, online payments, which QuickBooks always want you to do. This is great. Uh, the description fountain with rocks. I was actually intending to also sell some rocks to them, so let's just grab the rocks in here.

Hey, maybe we don't have rocks. That's why it couldn't do it. Maybe it's a concrete I needed to sell. Here it is. So I can easily add in this concrete if I wish. Uh, let's say it was $5,500 worth of concrete and there's our invoice. That actually was pretty cool and pretty easy. Uh, I've looked at deposits on a separate video.

If you want to take a deposit from these guys, 'cause it's a large amount and they're late paying, we can do that. Maybe take a $500 deposit, then they'll owe 3,300. But yeah, that actually. I, I don't dislike that. What do you think? Thirdly, when I went to the main dashboard, the business feed had a lot of suggestions.

Let's check those out. So let's take a look together and see what this AI suggestion for the business feed is. So we'll click through here and see what it comes up with.

So they've projected a net profit for the last month. Well, they said they've calculated it, but with so much to review, I don't really know how useful that is. So I guess the only thing I would say about this is that it is a prompt for you to go and categorize your transactions. I'm not too sure how useful that is.

You probably know you have to do that. Overdue invoices. Okay, this is useful. $1,500 worth of invoice and I've. Created a separate little video showing how the AI for the reminders work. I think that's kind of cool. So that's a separate thing that you can see. Um, a suggestion to add late fee fees to your invoice.

Great idea. That's something you can set up within QuickBooks. I'm pretty sure I have another video on that. If not, I'm gonna add that to my list. But if I do, it's gonna be, we'll put a reference in the, the top corner there. Okay. Uh, it's letting you know how much money you got in this, this last week, which is not a huge amount.

Uh, and then prompting you to upload receipts, which hopefully you would've done anyway. I don't know that there's a lot here that's really all that useful. Uh, I guess if you're the sort of person who doesn't know what to do next, this would be a great page because it would tell you, Hey, go and categorize your transactions, follow up on your invoices, maybe add some late fees, bring in some extra money.

And then upload any receipts. So maybe it's a kind of a cool to-do list if you're not too sure what to do next. But other than that, I don't really see that there's a lot of value to it. I'd love to hear what you think. Now, I'm not sure if they're going to improve with time. It likely doesn't help. That I'm not in a real file.

And as I mentioned, if you're looking for a to-do list that's relevant for your business, this may be very helpful. So hopefully looking through these three new AI or Intuit assist features will remove some of the mystery from the new assistant. I'd love to hear what you think and what features you try out.

As more and more options are rolled out. I'm gonna keep you up to date, so if you see something and I haven't written a video on it yet, be sure to reach out. So be sure to like, subscribe and ring that little bell because as I have more QuickBooks tips and rollouts, I'll be making new videos and as always, I would love to hear from you.

Cheers.

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