Over the last six fiscal years, Intuit has produced a dramatic increase in the profitability of its accounting professionals business. The segment, whose income comes from the sale of professional tax applications and QuickBooks Accountant and from ProAdvisor income, is not the biggest or the most profitable of the vendor's seven financial reporting segments. Still it has done well because of two factors that Intuit has cited as gains in operating income outstripped revenue growth.
And those were the good, old business factors of price increases that came while the company held the line on expenses. From fiscal 2006 through April 30, the end of fiscal 2010, operating margins for the segment rose from 47 percent to 56.3 percent while revenue rose by only 27.3 percent.
In fiscal 2010 and 2009, the only factor in revenue growth cited in Intuit's annual reports was price increases. The 2010 report reported operating efficiencies in product development and customer support while the 2009 reported listing relatively stable costs and expenses as factors that produced increased operating income as revenue rose.
In terms of dollars, operating income hit $210 million in the most recently ended year, compared with $136.7 million in 2006, with the growth in profitability interrupted only by a slight dip from 2007 to 2008, which was erased the next year.
The segment's revenue for fiscal 2010 was $373 million, up from $292.9 million record for fiscal 2006. The pace of revenue growth has matched company's overall performance recently with income from the reporting at 11 percent of Intuit's total for the last of the three fiscal years.
Bob Scott has provided information to the tax and accounting community since 1991, first as technology editor of Accounting Today, and from 1997 through 2009 as editor of its sister publication, Accounting Technology. He is known throughout the industry for his depth of knowledge and for his high journalistic standards. Scott has made frequent appearances as a speaker, moderator and panelist and events serving tax and accounting professionals. He has a strong background in computer journalism as an editor with two former trade publications, Computer+Software News and MIS Week and spent several years with weekly and daily newspapers in Morris County New Jersey prior to that. A graduate of Indiana University with a degree in journalism, Bob is a native of Madison, Ind