From My Kitchen Table: Intuit’s® Virtual Conference Offered Great Training

Intuit ProLine News Central Accountant's Blog.
Posted Oct 28th by Shelly Robbins

Yesterday I spent most of the day utterly absorbed in a huge QuickBooks conference, boning up on my skills and bumping into my buddies. I went with Christine Bogard, another ProAdvisor who’s been in the program “forever”. I thought it would be good to get to know her better. We’d seen each other at trainings over the years but we never really talked until we met a QuickBooks “meetup” . When I heard her intro at the meetup I thought “I have clients who need a CPA like her”, so I sent her an e-mail and asked if she wanted to share notes at the big 2-day annual "What's New in 2012 from Intuit" conference.

She said “yes” and we decided we’d meet during the first break, right after the first session. The session was amazingly good because it had 2 of Intuit’s top-shelf speakers and it was fun to hear them bouncing off each other showing us the latest features and adding their own time-saving, practical uses for them. I was pretty excited by the end and looking forward to sharing notes with Christine.

Did I mention there were more than 500 other QuickBooks consultants at this conference? So you’d think it would be a little hard to find her and start chatting, right? Not really. This was the annual 2-day Virtual Conference, and I was attending from my kitchen table. A little sun graced the flower beds outside, the hummingbirds danced at the feeder (I am not kidding-this is why it is SO hard for me to leave my kitchen table), and I found Christine instantly in the “Who’s Here” box.
“ How you doing Christine?” , I chat.
“Pretty cool format”, she says. “How do we get the CPEs?”
“Let’s head over to the Networking Lounge, someone there will know”.

I can tell Christine is excited and I understand why: I was pretty amazed my first year at the annual “What's New” Virtual Conference. It’s like walking into a big conference at a hotel or stadium with lots going on, but when you are ready to check out a training or a room or a booth, you are instantly transported there. Pop in and say “hi: to someone, then pop back out. As soon as you enter a room you instantly know how many other people are there, who they are, and you can see everything they’ve been talking about.

We found everyone in the Networking Lounge asking the same question Christine had, so we hung out for a few minutes until it was answered. Then I got distracted when another QuickBooks consultant from my “meetup” sent me a chat, “How is it going with the local training that our meetup is putting together?”. Our group is so nice. I let her know that we’ve got almost 70 people registered, so we’re doing great. It will be good to see her there, I say, face to face, but it was nice bumping into her from my kitchen table too. It’s hard to say which is best.

The only hard part going to the Virtual Conference was tearing myself away from it. I had been to MB Raimondi and Laura Madiera’s “What’s New” in the morning and I wasn’t planning on going to the follow-up course just for ProAdvisors but I popped in and it was so good I stayed. You’d think I’d had enough of “What’s New” by then, but super-star teacher Michelle Long was teaching the afternoon! Surely I would absorb something from going to her session too, and I’d bump into more friends from my meetup, so there was plenty of sound rationale for staying through the afternoon, from my kitchen table.