Intuit Among the several ambitious ideas discussed at Investor's Day is Intuit's test of a program to help small businesses get financing. "It's a huge opportunity for us and we are just getting started," Smith said.
The executive did not give details. However, he said Intuit's plan utilizes the ability to see into a QuickBooks user's data. While many small businesses fail to get financing because of the owner's personal credit rating, the test aims to have lenders look at the business's operations—invoice, accountants receivable and cash flow. Using internally developed algorithms, Intuit has matched small business with lenders. Smith said there has been 70 percent acceptance of these applications with $45 million in financing committee. No details were given about participating lenders.
Smith also pointed to a strategic decision to view QuickBooks as a platform. Under that scenario, "all of these apps that a small business uses to flow in and out of QuickBooks," he said. "None of those applications work together. But they share two things in common: they have to get money from somebody and they have to pay somebody."
Smith, who said the average small business uses 18 applications, did not say how these products will be unified, but the remarks suggest Intuit has a plan to enable tapplications to integrate so data will flow in and out of QuickBooks Online.
Other broad goals outlined by Smith and other Intuit executives.
*Prepare 50 percent of taxes in the United States and Canada, in both consumer and professionally prepared tax returns;
*Make QuickBooks Online more accessible to companies early in their life cycle;
* Ensure developers can connect their applications to QuickBooks with greater ease;
*Boost the capability of QuickBooks Online for accountants.
During the same event, SVP Dan Wernikoff outlined what a common program might look like, without stating Intuit has such a product in the offing, but describing it as a vision. He referred to QuickBooks as a platform that helps small business run their resources that ties together other products.
The graphs that Wernikoff displayed also showed all areas of Intuit, including tax, as built around QuickBooks. And he gave a series of design criteria about an integrating platform.
"It needs to be very simple. It needs to be integrated across many, many applications. It needs to be a single cloud. It needs to work on all devices, but it needs to be a single source of data." Wernikoff said. He compared what Intuit sees as being a convergence of mobile and operating systems like iOS and Android. "We want it to be a single instance globally. We want it to work with all third-party apps. We want it to work with all our apps."
He also said over the next months Intuit will announce significant progress in getting third-party products into its app store. There are about 300 that have developed active integration with QBO and indicated many will likely go into the store.
