Tech news: Intuit announces Intuit Assist for QuickBooks

Intuit announced the release of the AI assistant Intuit Assist for QuickBooks. Among other things, the assistant is capable of capturing updates in various places such as email, electronic documents or even paper notes to automatically turn customer conversations into estimates or invoices. By forwarding an email from a customer or uploading a photo of a handwritten note or document in the QuickBooks app, Intuit Assist can auto-generate an estimate or invoice for business owners to review, send and close deals with clients. Similarly, with the Intuit Assist powered email-to-bill feature, business owners can forward emails, drag and drop files, or scan a QR code to upload images, and Intuit Assist will enter the details into a bill form. The AI also detects past due invoices and automatically drafts personalized invoice reminders that are uniquely generated based on the client history and invoice status. Intuit Assist also extracts details from receipts and auto-populates them in QuickBooks by expense category, payment account and vendor. Additionally, Intuit Assist can automatically match transactions made through other products across the QuickBooks ecosystem, such as invoices paid using QuickBooks Payments or bills paid via QuickBooks Bill Pay, with the corresponding bank transaction. It also helps streamline the setup process for customers who are new to QuickBooks, showing them how to connect with a live human expert who can walk them through the platform and help customize it for their business needs. These live experts can also help customers personalize their chart of accounts and guide them through monthly categorization. From the QuickBooks home page, customers can access a new Business Feed offering a dynamic proactive view of their business, highlighting the work that Intuit Assist has done for them to review.

Big four firm Deloitte announced, as an extension of Deloitte and Workiva's existing alliance and environmental, social and governance accelerators, the release of  four new sustainability-focused accelerators to help organizations streamline regulatory compliance activities required under the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. The new accelerators include CSRD Double Materiality Accelerator, a workspace accelerator preconfigured in alignment with Deloitte's double materiality methodology, designed to help enable implementation of CSRD double materiality assessments. Financed Emissions Calculator, a Deloitte-built calculator accelerator, sits on the Workiva platform that helps organizations streamline Scope 3 greenhouse gas Category 15 financed emissions. The calculator tool leverages the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials' framework for GHG emissions reporting to increase transparency in calculations. European Sustainability Reporting Standard Mapping Accelerator enables clients to conduct more efficient ESRS gap assessments on the Workiva platform. After completing a double materiality assessment, the accelerator can be used to map existing Global Reporting Initiative disclosures to ESRS reporting requirements outlined within the CSRD to identify gaps in disclosure requirements that may require future remediation. The Activity Log Analyzer provides a workflow tracker accelerator designed to maintain a complete log of workspace-specific user information and activities from the Workiva platform to help organizations monitor and track ESG activities. The accelerator can be tailored to a range of use cases to help clients identify and monitor user activities across other initiatives. Available now in the Workiva Marketplace, the new Deloitte-built accelerators are offered along with Deloitte's advisory services and are designed to help expand and enhance organizations' sustainability-focused governance, risk and compliance controls and automation functionality within the Workiva platform.

Big Four firm KPMG expanded its partnership with Google through a $100 million investment in the Google Cloud Alliance, which KPMG estimates will drive $1 billion in incremental growth for the firm. KPMG noted that bookings for its Google Cloud practice have increased tenfold in the past two years, and in April 2024 the firm created a Google Cloud Center of Excellence to centrally align its product development, industry expertise and technical resources for enterprises. With the new investment, KPMG and Google Cloud will collaborate on new solutions that will help clients solve complex business challenges, focusing on data modernization and responsible AI adoption across industries. To support this initiative, KPMG will focus on increasing both its Google Cloud and gen AI certifications and will make Google training and certifications available throughout the firm. The expanded alliance will focus on bringing Vertex AI and Gemini models to financial services clients, enhancing patient support for health care providers via Google Cloud's Healthcare API to improve the detection and treatment in areas like disease detection and care management, and optimizing consumer and retail experiences with new gen AI use cases, such as creating a 360-degree view of data using Google BigQuery.