The invite, step by step
- Gear icon → Manage Users → Accounting firms (or 'Accountants') tab
- Enter the accountant's email → Invite. They accept from their inbox and connect through their own QuickBooks Online Accountant login
- That's it. QBO includes two accountant seats on most plans, they don't consume your regular user count
What accountant access can do (and why it's the right kind)
The accountant seat is full access plus accountant-only tools: reclassify transactions in bulk, close the books and manage the closing-date password, undo reconciliations properly, and work behind the scenes without cluttering your view. Critically, it's tied to their firm login, activity shows in the audit log under their name, and access ends cleanly when you remove them. Compare the common alternative, sharing your admin password, which destroys the audit trail, breaks two-factor, and makes offboarding a password-change fire drill. Never share credentials; invite.
The other roles, briefly
- Standard user: configurable access (all, or limited to customers/vendors), right for an office manager doing invoicing
- Reports-only (plan-dependent): sees reports, touches nothing, right for a partner or investor
- Time-tracking-only: employees entering time, nothing else
- Primary admin: yours, always. Transfer it to no one, a provider who insists on primary admin of your file is planting a flag you'll regret ( How Much Does a Bookkeeper Cost? A 2026 Guide for Small Business Owners covers the you-own-your-file principle)
Access hygiene when switching bookkeepers
- Remove the old firm's access the day the engagement ends (Manage Users → delete), the audit log keeps their history; dormant access is pure risk
- Confirm you hold primary admin before any transition starts, recovering a file from a departed provider's admin control is a support-ticket saga
- Rotate any actually-shared credentials (bank feeds don't expose banking logins through QBO, but if anything was ever shared outside the system, rotate it)
- Check connected apps (Gear → Apps), old integrations authorized by the old provider keep running until disconnected
What to expect when we're the ones you invite
Our onboarding starts exactly here: you send the two-minute invite, we connect under our firm login, run a read-through of the file's state, and come back with an honest assessment and a flat quote, before anything changes in your books. You keep primary admin, you own the file, and if we ever part ways, removing us is one click. That's how it should work anywhere. Bookkeeping Services for Small Businesses
Frequently asked questions
Is giving access safe?
Safer than every alternative: individual logins, audit-logged actions, no banking credentials exposed, revocable instantly. The unsafe version is the shared password and the emailed backup file.
My accountant asked for a 'backup' instead, is that normal?
For QBO, live access replaced backups; a request for exported files usually means Desktop habits. Nothing sinister, but the invite is the better workflow for everyone.
Can I limit what my accountant sees?
The accountant role is full-access by design, books are a whole-picture job. If you want someone walled off from banking or payroll detail, that's a standard-user configuration, not an accountant seat.