Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq:INTU) is launching a range of AI and machine
learning powered innovations at the fourth annual QuickBooks
Connect conference. Attendees were able to experience firsthand the
ways QuickBooks’ ever-expanding ecosystem continues to evolve,
delivering personalized experiences through a trusted open platform,
while creating indispensable connections between customers, partners and
products.
“QuickBooks is the world’s largest self-employed and small business
ecosystem, connecting more than 7 million people who work for themselves
to half a million accountants and 5,000 app developers,” said Sasan
Goodarzi, Executive Vice President, Small Business Group at Intuit.
“We’re leveraging the collective power of all these customers, partners
and developers to give small businesses a smarter way to do business –
smarter money, smarter decisions, and smarter connections.”
Smart Money
Money is like oxygen to people who work for themselves. They can’t
survive without it. But every day, self-employed and small businesses
struggle to manage their cash flow. They struggle to get paid on time,
face friction obtaining loans they need to grow, and often juggle
managing payroll. Here are three innovations that make QuickBooks the
smarter way for small businesses and the self-employed to manage their
money:
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Access to capital: 70 percent of new business -- those in the
first 5 years of operation -- say they need funding to grow, but only
23 percent of them are able to access it. QuickBooks
Capital was built to remove the friction from the lending process.
It delivers a breakthrough credit model built on 26 billion QuickBooks
data records to that will help new small businesses overcome the
barriers they have faced in accessing small dollar loans.
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Getting paid: It takes a small business an average of 45 days
to get paid after sending an invoice, and 64 percent of small
businesses have an invoice that's been outstanding for more than 60
days. Intuit’s new QuickBooks Payments helps small businesses get paid
more than two times faster. Small businesses can create a
“payments-enabled” invoice in less than a minute, with their hours,
expenses and mileage populated automatically. Their customers then
have the flexibility to pay online by credit card or free bank
transfers. QuickBooks users will also soon have the option of
accepting payments by PayPal and Apple Pay. They can also use a new
integration with Google to send QuickBooks invoices from within Gmail,
view the status and get paid online.
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Paying employees: One of the biggest cash-flow challenges for
small businesses is managing payroll. That’s why QuickBooks Full
Service Payroll now offers 24-hour Direct Deposit. Small business can
run now payroll up to 5 p.m. PT the day before payday. This gives
small business the ability to hold onto their cash longer, with peace
of mind knowing their employees will still get paid before the weekend.
Smart Decisions
Everyday, people who work for themselves make decisions for their
business, and often times they are guessing or deciding without all the
relevant insights or information. QuickBooks has seen others make these
decisions before, and can arm users with insights based on billions of
transactions and decades of experience.
Leveraging machine learning and data driven insights, QuickBooks is
becoming predictive and proactive, intelligently anticipating critical
turning points, making customers smarter and more confident in the
decisions they need to make for their business. Current examples of
these features in action at QuickBooks Connect include:
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Proactive and predictive help: Announced on stage at QuickBooks
Connect today, QuickBooks Assistant is a new, virtual assistant that
delivers financial insights so businesses never need to run a report.
It only takes a few seconds for[QuickBooks Self-Employed customers to
use QuickBooks Assistant to share how much money they made last month,
how much tax they’ll owe at the end of the year, how long their
current cash flow will last, or even how profitable the most recent
customer was compared to the previous five. All they need to do is ask
a question, and QuickBooks Assistants uncovers the answer.
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Doing the work for you: People who work for themselves waste
precious hours every month trying to organize their business, from
getting data (income, expenses, receipts, mileage, time cards, etc.)
into QuickBooks to putting it into the right categories or applying it
to the right customer, employee or project. Using machine learning
that adapts in real time to the constant flow of ecosystem data, we
will automate all of this work, saving time and money. For example,
tax deductions are complex and time consuming, costing the
self-employed more than 10 percent of their potential income.
QuickBooks now automatically identifies tax write-offs based on a
self-employed users individual patterns and puts them in the correct
Schedule-C category, saving users over $4,300 per year.
Smart Connections
Intuit understands that people are at the center of small business –
from repeat customers to accountants, employees and vendors – these
people can make or break a business. As a network, QuickBooks is
connecting self-employed and small businesses to the customers,
employees, partners and tools they need to succeed and thrive –
improving awareness, access and control and making it easier for teams
to scale and grow. The network is already fueling success by:
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Accountant collaboration: The secret sauce behind the success
of many people who work for themselves is their accountant: 89 percent
say they are more successful when they work with an accountant. Intuit
recently reimagined the 'Find-A-ProAdvisor' platform, and today, the
algorithm connects almost 1,000 small businesses to accountants every
single day worldwide. In addition to helping accounting professionals
grow their practices, Intuit is also focused on helping them manage
all their clients and their entire firm from one place: QuickBooks
Online Accountant. More than 700,000 accountants globally use
QuickBooks Online Accountant to manage their clients and run their
practice, and the Practice Management workflow solution gives them one
place to grow and manage all their clients and run their entire
practice, from books, to tax, payroll, payments and third-party apps.
It's making them more efficient than ever before by helping them
deliver insights to make their clients more successful.
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Connecting to apps you use: On average, people use more than 15
different apps to run their business. Intuit’s App Store now has more
than 500 apps, and they all integrate seamlessly with QuickBooks.
They're available through either QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks
Online Accountant so accountants can discover, recommend, setup and
manage the right apps for their clients. Announced during the
Accountant keynote address at QuickBooks Connect, Intuit is making it
even easier for accounting professionals to integrate apps into their
clients’ QuickBooks Online books. Available now in beta as an
early-access program, accounting professionals can provision, manage
and offer their small business clients special pricing on apps when
purchased through QuickBooks Online Accountant. Expensify, Method:CRM
and Tsheets are the three apps initially participating in this
early-access program.
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Lighter Capital Intuit Developer Fund: Independent app
developers play a vital role in small business success on the Intuit
QuickBooks Online platform. For software developers, getting the
resources they need to scale and grow quickly can be a challenge.
Together, Intuit and Lighter Capital have partnered to create a $15
million-dollar fund for developers designing apps for Intuit
QuickBooks, giving them access to $50,000 to up to $2 million to help
them get to the next level, without giving up equity or control of
their company. Lighter Capital can deliver funding to qualified
companies in about 4-6 weeks, using a secure online application
process. Developers can learn more about the new Lighter Capital
Intuit Developer Fund here.