Switch back to main site : Click Here
Jason Staats recently ran through 11 QuickBooks tools every power user should know in his latest video. Three of them — Accruer, Wrangler, and Booker — make up FinOptimal’s product suite.
Jason starts from a premise most accountants will recognize: QuickBooks is where the work happens, but it wasn't built to do everything the work requires. His fix isn't to replace it — it's to extend it. The 11 tools he walks through close the gaps QuickBooks leaves open, from bank feeds to receipt capture to reporting, so a team can run a cleaner, faster close without leaving the system their clients are already on.
FinOptimal's tools Jason covers all cluster around the part of the close that's hardest to automate: the manual journal entries, accruals, and reporting that repeat every month. We’ve pulled together a quick summary of Jason’s take, plus some extra product context.
You can check out Jason’s full take in the video below.
Jason's walkthrough: type "for the period" with a start and end date into a line description "pretty much anywhere inside of QuickBooks," and as he puts it, Accruer "will automatically see that and then autopost journal entries accruing that transaction across the entire date range." His summary — "That's it. That's the app."
He also caught the detail most demos miss: change a line item's dates later and, in his words, "all of those journal entries will auto update." Payroll accruals, revenue recognition, prepaids, fixed assets — all driven from the description itself, without leaving QuickBooks.
What we’d add: The "that's it" simplicity on the front end is carrying a lot of accounting depth underneath. Accruer handles the cases that break homegrown amortization spreadsheets — deferred revenue, fixed assets, payroll accruals. And, paired with Wrangler, Accruer ties the schedule back to the balance sheet so the reconciliation someone usually chases by hand is already done. What looks like a one-line input is doing the work of a spreadsheet you'd otherwise maintain by hand every month.
Jason's framing: Wrangler "basically syncs your QuickBooks reports to a spreadsheet, which is very handy for custom reporting, like going beyond the PDFs of QuickBooks."
What we’d add: Going "beyond the PDFs" is really important for your firm. The reports stream in live and update on their own, which means client reporting without exporting, reformatting, or handing out QuickBooks seats. You can point live balances at your workpapers so they stay in sync, or run budget-vs-actuals that never needs a manual refresh. And read-only access makes it the easiest tool in the suite to get approved on the client side.
What got Jason excited was the two-way sync — the journal entries in the spreadsheet syncing live back to QuickBooks. As he worked through it in real time: "anything that you can automate in a spreadsheet can be pushed through automatically to the QuickBooks file."
Then he walked the combination that makes it click — Wrangler pulling a report into Sheets, Booker building entries that reference those cells: "you sync in the report from the QuickBooks file, the journal entries build themselves because they reference the report, and you instantly have posted your big, ugliest, hairiest allocation of the month."
What we’d add: that Wrangler-and-Booker loop turns the spreadsheet into an automation surface for the close, not just a staging area. Any transaction you can express in a spreadsheet — allocations, intercompany, recurring JEs from other systems — can post itself and re-run next month. It's the most flexible tool in the suite, and the one that most rewards building it around how a specific firm actually closes.
Jason featured the three tools separately, in a list alongside eight others. The context a top-11 rundown doesn't have room for: these three come in the same suite, built to solve the same problem — the manual, repetitive close work that repeats across every client book, every month.
Accruer takes the accruals. Wrangler gives you live reporting without the export-and-reformat grind. Booker turns the spreadsheet into a two-way pipe to QuickBooks. Separately they each earned a spot on his list. Together they're the close infrastructure underneath a firm that's trying to grow without adding headcount.
Interested in seeing any of these tools in action? Schedule a demo with one of our CPAs, and they'll show you exactly why so many accountants trust Accruer, Wrangler, and Booker to automate their close.
.png)
.jpg)