QuickBooks Connect San Jose 2018: Connecting with the Community

I’ve had the pleasure of attending QuickBooks Connect San Jose since its inception five years ago. Despite the bustle of the conference, I always leave feeling energized.

QuickBooks Connect provides me with the opportunity to connect with our incredible Hubdoc partners and advisors who are embracing automation to do amazing things for their clients. As someone who’s had the privilege of witnessing the successful cloud journeys of many of our Intuit partners, I’m thankful for the opportunity to check in, catch up, and learn more about how we can support their goals as they continue to evolve.

QuickBooks Connect San Jose 2018 was one of my favorite QuickBooks events so far – this year, the hunger for learning and development and the excitement for the future of cloud accounting was more present than ever. For me, this manifested in three exciting ways, which you can read below.

1. The community thrives when we learn from each other.

A theme that was explored in-depth at the conference was around embracing failure to achieve success. While it was inspiring to hear stars like Mindy Kaling and Alex Rodriguez tell their stories, I loved that the event also provided the opportunity for advisors to learn from each other.

Before attending, I was thrilled to see several familiar faces on the speaker lineup, including Nayo Carter-Gray, Bob Wang, Dawn Brolin, Mariette Martinez, and Donna Woronka (to name just a few!) – who better for advisors to learn actionable tips from than their peers?

Firm of the Future 2018 winner, Cloud Bookkeeping Services, led by Tanya Hilts (congrats, Tanya and team!), exemplifies this mentality by dedicating their time to bettering the bookkeeping community through education. In addition to offering cloud-savvy client services, Tanya and her team help to develop the community through their Bookkeepers Bootcamp and Business Bootcamp.

Although QuickBooks Connect has always done an excellent job facilitating sessions with forward-thinking advisors, a willingness to collaborate and connect as part of a thriving community was in the air. This is what makes it so easy to love the Intuit community – they embrace the fact that they can learn from each other, and that the community is better for it.

2. Advisors are focusing on building a better client experience.

Over the years, it’s been fun and rewarding to see our Intuit partners grow from serving just a handful of clients on the cloud to having dozens (if not hundreds!) of fully cloud-enabled clients.

In conversations with Hubdoc partners, I’ve noticed a couple of things that have allowed them to maintain an incredible client experience while supporting this fast pace of growth.

The second is establishing a standardized technology stack to automate administrative tasks so that client interactions can be more productive. As a result, advisors can offer greater value and build a better client experience.

Which brings me to my final observation...

3. Technology is helping firms keep their people first.

Although automation is important, advisors are focusing less on the technology itself (after all, every technology stack is different), and more on people – learning from their peers, building a great experience for their employees, and helping their small business clients thrive.

Maybe it’s because we’re all gathered face-to-face under one roof, but conferences such as QuickBooks Connect make it abundantly clear that the foundation of every firm is made of relationships.

I think I’ll speak for many when I say that Brad Smith said it best: “You win minds one-to-many; you win hearts one-to-one.”

Thank you to the Intuit team, the QuickBooks community, and our amazing Hubdoc partners for another incredible QuickBooks Connect!

Bookkeeping tasks that used to take hours now take only minutes to complete.
Learn how to win back time & improve your client experience in our ‘Hours to Minutes’ guide.

About the Author

Jamie is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Hubdoc. Prior to Hubdoc, Jamie was the co-founder of Sparkroom, a marketing analytics and lead generation platform for higher education. Previous to that, he was a practicing attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto and Torys LLP in Toronto. He is a graduate of the JD-MBA program at the University of Toronto and has a degree in International Relations from Brown University.

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