Intuit revamps QuickBooks Online ecosystem
Intuit is hitting its QuickBooks Online ecosystem with a barrage of upgrades and improvements that the company says makes its small business management platform more robust, efficient and easier to use.
The more than 100 product enhancements are being unveiled at Intuit's QuickBooks Connect conference, taking place this week in San Jose, California, and focus solely on QuickBooks Online.
Notable among the announcements is news that Intuit is partnering with cloud storage darling Box to offer a new document collaboration center inside QuickBooks Online Accountant. By having storage deeply integrated into QuickBooks online, accountants will be better enabled to communicate with their clients and share information, Intuit said. As an added perk, accountants who sign up for the service will automatically receive a free 10 GB Box account.
"Our partnership with Box is all about strengthening the relationship between small businesses and accounting professionals by making it easier than ever to share information," Wernikoff, the SVP of Intuit's small business group. "The new document sharing center in QuickBooks Online Accountant is a way of leveraging the cloud to make the accountant-small business relationship even stronger."
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On the developer side, Intuit is launching a payments API that will enable deeper integrations with Intuit's processing infrastructure. It will allow third party apps used by a small business to process payments using Intuit's merchant service, essentially helping the businesses get paid faster.
Intuit is also leveraging its recent acquisition of ItDuzzit, a cloud-centric integration platform, to offer a new tool that helps developers create more seamless integrations between web and mobile apps. Once an app is built, developers will be able to publish live on the new Apps.com in as little as two weeks, Intuit said.
As for tools used directly by the small business owner, Intuit has revamped the QuickBooks mobile app, adding a new way for users to categorize their expenses. Along with new swipe functionality, users will be able to take photos of expense source documents and automatically incorporate them into their system.
"We really understand that small businesses don’t want to do accounting," Wernikoff said. "It's a byproduct of running a business, but it's not something that most of them feel comfortable with. By giving these tools to accountants, we are essentially making accounting invisible."