"From Lead to Final Payment: How QuickBooks Online Advanced Is Rebuilding the Construction Workflow"

Inside the Inner Circle: What I Learned at Get Connected Toronto 2026

Last week, I had the chance to attend Get Connected Toronto 2026, Intuit's annual gathering for the Canadian accounting and bookkeeping community, held at The International Centre in the Greater Toronto Area. Two full days of keynotes, breakout sessions, and conversations with some of the sharpest minds in cloud accounting, and honestly, I came away buzzing.

A Room Full of People Who Get It

There's something genuinely energizing about being in a room full of accountants and bookkeepers who are just as obsessed with workflows, automation, and client experience as I am. The keynote from Shawn Kanungo, an innovation strategist who spent over a decade at Deloitte working with leaders on disruptive innovation, set exactly the right tone. It wasn't a sales pitch dressed up as inspiration; it was a genuine look at how generative AI is reshaping the way we think about our work, our clients, and our value as advisors rather than just number-crunchers.

Getting Pulled Into the Inner Circle

One of the real highlights for me was getting invited to an exclusive lunch with some of the key players at Intuit to discuss the future of the product and the opportunity to provide our feedback. My account manager, Katelynn Ross has been amazing in bringing me in to the inner circle and if you've ever wondered whether it's worth building a real relationship with your software account rep rather than just clicking through renewal emails — the answer is yes, a thousand times yes.

Katelynn brought me into a few more in-depth conversations than I think I'd normally get access to, and it gave me a much clearer picture of where QuickBooks Online Advanced is actually heading — not just the headline features, but the why behind them. It's one thing to read a product update email; it's another to sit with someone who genuinely understands the roadmap and can talk through how it actually plays out for a specific type of client.

The Big One for Me: Construction Clients

As a bookkeeper who works with a fair number of construction and trades-based business owners, the session that really stuck with me was the one built specifically around this industry. The premise was blunt and completely accurate: most construction business owners are juggling seven or more disconnected tools just to manage leads, estimates, and invoicing — and that fragmentation is exactly what shows up as a mess in their books later.

What QuickBooks Online Advanced is building toward is consolidating every phase of a construction project — from the very first client inquiry through to final payment — into one AI-powered platform. A few things that stood out from the live demo and the conversations around it:

• From lead to client, in one place. Rather than tracking a prospective client in a separate CRM or spreadsheet before they ever become a "customer" in QuickBooks, the goal is to manage that early sales pipeline stage — first inquiry, follow-ups, initial conversations — without it living in a disconnected tool that never talks to the accounting side.

• More flexible estimating. Estimates can include attachments like photos or contracts, and clients can be offered the option to pay a deposit directly online when they approve the estimate — which means projects get secured faster and cash starts moving sooner, rather than waiting on a signed PDF and a separate invoice.

• Real flexibility on client agreements. Construction projects change — scope shifts, change orders happen, and the agreement at the start of a job often doesn't look like the agreement by the end. The direction Advanced is heading in makes it easier to update estimates and reflect those changes without it becoming a reconciliation nightmare for the bookkeeper down the line (hi, that's me).

• Job costing and progress billing, done properly. Real-time visibility into project profitability, with the ability to bill clients incrementally based on milestones rather than waiting until a job wraps to find out whether it actually made money.

• AI doing the unglamorous work. A consistent theme across sessions was Intuit Intelligence quietly handling more of the manual data entry and reconciliation work, so the actual time accountants and bookkeepers spend with clients goes toward strategy and advice — not chasing down receipts.

For my construction clients specifically, this matters enormously. Most of them didn't get into the trades because they love admin — they got into it because they're builders, contractors, and tradespeople first. The less time they spend stitching together leads, estimates, and invoices across five different apps, the more time they have to actually run their business — and the cleaner the data is when it lands on my desk.

Why This Matters Beyond the Tech

It's easy to treat events like this as just a parade of new features, but what I actually took away was bigger than any single tool update. The direction is clear: the line between "running the sales side of the business" and "running the financial side of the business" is disappearing. For bookkeepers like me, that means the value we bring isn't just clean books anymore — it's understanding our clients' entire operational flow well enough to advise on it.

That's exactly the kind of advisory-led, cloud-based approach I've built Tidier Books around — so seeing the platform itself heading in the same direction is genuinely exciting, not just for my own practice, but for the construction clients I get to support along the way.

If you're a construction or trades business owner currently juggling a pile of disconnected tools, or you're curious how QuickBooks Online Advanced could actually simplify your sales-to-cash process, I'd love to chat about what that could look like for your business.

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