CPA Practice Advisor

NOV 2013

Today's Technology for Tomorrow's Firm.

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THE PROADVISOR SPOTLIGHT ONE OF THE THINGS THAT MAKE SMALL BUSINESSES UNIQUE IS THAT WHILE 80 PERCENT OF THEIR BUSINESS PROCESSES MAY BE COMMON, THE OTHER 20 PERCENT IS SPECIFIC TO THEIR BUSINESS, WHICH MEANS THEY NEED SPECIALIZED PRODUCTS AND SERVICES. ... THIS IS ABOUT MORE THAN JUST ACCOUNTING – THIS IS ABOUT SOLVING EVERY PROBLEM SPECIFIC TO SMALL BUSINESS Tere are hundreds of products that are targeted towards small businesses with the promise of helping owners manage the various tasks that must be completed on a regular basis, such as accounting, document management, workfow ma nagement , pay rol l a nd t a x compliance. However, many small business owners struggle to find the perfect product for their needs. Once they have identifed a solution, they ofentimes fnd it doesn't integrate seamlessly with solutions used i n ot her aspec ts of t hei r business, thus leaving them with two options: only use one vendor's suite of products w ith limited f unctionalit y for their specif ic needs or spend hours duplicating processes and manually entering data into numerous programs. Intuit (htp://www.intuit.com/) realizes how painful and tedious both options are and wants to help eliminate as many pain points as possible with its new open platform strategy. At the core of this strategy is the completely new and redesigned QuickBooks Online. "Currently QuickBooks Online holds a lot of data for small businesses, but the real focus is on how well that data integrates with other applications. By opening up our platform and allowing QuickBooks Online to integrate w ith other programs, we plan to solve a lot of process issues and problems for small businesses," said Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager of Intuit Small Business Financial Solutions. The new QuickBooks Online was built from the ground up with open platform integration capabilities, making it even easier for users to integrate with other programs. Currently, QBO is one of Intuit's fastest growing solutions with more than 1.3 million users worldwide. The embedded open platform is designed to provide small businesses with a customizable suite of solutions that will grow as their business grows and eliminate issues that are specifc to small businesses. "One of the things that make small businesses unique is that while 80 percent of their business processes may be common, the other 20 percent is specifc to their business, which means they need specialized products and services. Our open platform is about leverag i ng out side developers a nd experts to beter serve the needs of our customers. Tis is about more than just accounting – this is about solving every problem specifc to small business," said Wernikof. In line with its new strategy and t he new Q u ic k Book s On l i ne, Intuit announced last month the upcoming integration bet ween QuickBooks Online and Square (ht t p://squ a reup.com/). T he integration with Square, available November 19, will allow users to import their point-of-sale transactions from Square directly into QuickBooks. "As a provider of an open platform that strives to enable small business success, we realize and understand that our priority is to integrate and enable the use of products that aren't our own, even when they may compete with our products. Te Square integration is proof of our commitment to the open plat for m st rateg y," sa id Wernikof. Taija Jenkins is an associate editor for CPA Practice Advisor. November 2013 • www.CPAPracticeAdvisor.com 13

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