Today's Technology for Tomorrow's Firm.
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20 April 2015 • www.CPAPracticeAdvisor.com THE PROADVISOR SPOTLIGHT SPONSORED CONTENT In the past few months, Intuit has announced several strategic partner- s h ip s , i nc lu d i n g a g re e me nt s w it h R e v e l , S ho p i f y, U b e r, S t r i p e a nd Bigcommerce. Tese partnerships all ser ve to en hance the solutions that a re a l ready av a i lable to QBO sub- sc r ibers, a nd come at a t i me w hen Intuit is mov ing its focus from merely creating a QBO ecosystem to some- thing bigger. "It all started about a year ago when we made the decision that we wanted t o c r e a t e a n e c o s y s t e m a nd o p e n plat for m for ou r users. Si nce t hen, we've watched as the online market evolved to depend more on partner- ships," said Avi Golan, vice president a nd genera l ma nager of t he I nt u it Developer Group.. In reality, there is no way any company can successfully ser ve ever y need of the 29 million U.S. small businesses – or the 600 million small businesses in the world – and do it with just one solution. You have to b u i l d a n e c o s y s t e m b e c a u s e t h e bot tom l i ne is about prov id i ng t he mo s t v a l u e t o t he c u s t o me r. T he product alone is not enough anymore." Intuit envisions an ecosystem that enables pa r t nersh ips to prov ide its customers access to the solutions they need to successf ul ly r un their busi- ness. Its goal is to help small business ow ners focus more time on actually running the business they love instead of performing routine accounting and payment tasks. "A s we were sta r t i ng to consider potential partnerships, we had to go back and f ig ure out what's our cus- tomers' main pain? Te next question was 'How can we make it beter?' Commerce is getting more and g row ing year-over-year. We looked at various opportunities and saw a chance to do two ty pe of integrations – accounting ledger and payments," said Golan. Te latest Intuit partnerships have been within the ecommerce space as the company looks to prov ide seamless integration w ith its platform. Trough the partnerships, all merchant transac- tions and payments will be fully integrated and updated into QBO, giving small business owners an even more comprehensive look at their cash fow. Automatic integration eliminates the need for double entr y or human error and frees busi- ness owners to focus on other aspects of managing their business. Once Intuit opened its platform to third-party developers, they noticed developers also started to focus their own strategies on developing for the evolving market. Intuit started hosting open development programs to encourage developers to create programs on the Intuit open A PI plat- for m . T h i s had led to a g row t h i n developer partnerships, from 1,000 to 12,000 just a year later. A nd now, Intuit has nearly 1,000 active apps on the QBO platform. Tat's 1,000 apps QBO users have to choose from to manage their busi- ness fnances in the way that works best for them. It's not just the quantity of apps that Intuit is focused on. Tey are also mak ing sure they are prov id i ng apps t hat w i l l br i ng va lue to t hei r customers. Each app goes through a v igorous veting process to ensure it meets Intuit's quality and security standards. Keeping data secure is a top priority for Intuit. In addition, they also want to make sure the apps solve the pain points that many of their customers have. Intuit uses cus- tomer feedback and industr y trends to see which areas apps are needed in and where. "As we started to roll out payment solutions, we found that there are still countries that do not have payment options. We decided the next step in executing our vision was to expand on a global scale as well," said Golan. Intuit plans to launch and expand its ser vices and development platform in to its global markets throughout 2015. In the coming months, global users can ex pect to see new tools and ser v ices rol led out i n C a n ad a , t he Un ited K i ngdom , Australia, India, France and Brazil. I t's been more than a year since Intuit frst announced that it would create an online ecosystem centered on its QuickBooks Online (QBO: www.quickbooks.com) solution. Since then, the fnancial solutions provider has seen tremendous growth as companies have partnered with Intuit to bring more solutions to QBO customers. Intuit Realigns QBO Vision with Recent Strategic Partnerships