Humble House Foods case study: How they improved visibility & simplicity using Intuit Enterprise Suite

Humble House Foods comes by its name honestly. Picture a couple of high school kids in 2008, mixing up homemade sauces with a kitchen blender, then selling those sauces at the local farmers market. Humble beginnings, indeed. 

But Marsha Morales and her husband, Chef Luis Morales, aren’t high school kids anymore. And their 10,000-foot facility, which produces hot sauces sold through two major retailers across the United States, is hardly as humble as the rented 10-by-10 room where their dreams first took shape. 

“We would have to bottle our sauces with a spoon, and it was just him and me,” recalls Marsha, thinking back to those early days. “I know that's not very fancy sounding, but that's where we came from.”

At the time, the Moraleses had the most basic of accounting systems: A spiral notebook with tallies to track which hot sauces had sold. “I realized that needed to change the first day we were too busy to keep track of the tallies,” Marsha says. “At the end of the day, I didn't know how much we sold. I had no idea.”

Fast-forward to 2025, and it’s easy to see the many ways that Humble House has grown—technology included. The couple’s leap from pen and paper tallies to QuickBooks Online, and most recently to Intuit Enterprise Suite, has made it possible for the intrepid team to measure the needs and successes of three different business entities, expand their sales goals while mitigating stress, and make plans for a noteworthy future.

Humble House’s early growth sparked complex challenges and solutions

When asked to reflect on Humble House’s early growth from a financial perspective, Marsha says, “As everything grows, it gets more complicated.” The couple moved from notebook to spreadsheets, but eventually, even those weren’t keeping up. Marsha and Luis knew they needed an accounting platform that was less homemade than their hot sauces. 

“A growing company needs to evolve. It needs to adapt, and there's only so much you can do on a spreadsheet,” Marsha explains. “Luckily, QuickBooks was able to grow with us.”

Initially, the couple ran Humble House as a single entity. But as sales and the business’s complexity increased, they realized that structure wasn’t sustainable. “We quickly figured out that we needed to split it into three because we were manufacturing, doing wholesale, and marketing toward the retail side of things,” she explains. The problem with that switch? Marsha knew her job was about to get much harder. 

“At the time, I was totally against it because it was going to be a lot of extra work,” Marsha says. “But we needed to be able to see where all the dollars were going, what aspect of our company was being profitable, what was losing money, and where we needed to tighten the budget. And you can't do that when they're all just meshed up into this one big soupy mess. In order to see the health of the company as a whole or in three individual parts, we had to separate it out.”

Marsha took on the arduous task of managing all three entities in QuickBooks: manufacturing, wholesale, and direct-to-customer sales. She spent hours manually pulling and matching reports across entities. “Reporting was the bane of my existence,” she says. “In order to really see the health of your company, you need reports. But it was very difficult to do that for all three companies, and I didn't get around to it except for probably once a year around tax time, which wasn’t good.”

Then Marsha found Intuit Enterprise Suite, and that’s when her job got a whole lot easier.

Intuit Enterprise Suite gives Humble House owners a bird’s-eye view

Speed, Marsha explains, is huge. And the ease of being able to read the most necessary business insights in moments, is even bigger. 

“With Intuit Enterprise Suite, you can get a consolidated report within seconds. And the coolest part is that my husband, who's an owner but isn’t really QuickBooks savvy, doesn’t have to log in to see the numbers. I have our account linked with spreadsheet sync, and that has all the reports he needs for the quarter and the year. He has the consolidated P&L or the balance sheet—whatever he's looking for—and it's available all the time.” As a result, it’s not just Marsha who’s well-informed of Humble House’s metrics: Luis can feel confident that he’s up-to-date as well. 

Before Intuit Enterprise Suite, Marsha says one of her biggest concerns was that her account data wasn’t matching up correctly. “I would second guess myself and think, ‘Is that really where this belongs? Is this supposed to be here? Is that something that I should have taken care of in this other company?’” 

The task of analyzing and creating those consolidated reports by hand would take Marsha a solid day. “Four to six hours on a good day,” she admits. “And that's if I didn't have any distractions. Now I can pull it up in 30 seconds.”

Marsha is thrilled to not only have consolidated reporting to simplify her mental load, but intercompany eliminations as well. “You can be confident that the information you’re seeing—and also giving to other people—is accurate,” she says. Intuit Enterprise Suite has empowered the couple to make speedy, well-informed decisions as they steer Humble House forward.

“When running a business, you’re dependent on the information you have to make the right decisions for whatever problem you come up against. Without that information, you can't make those decisions that will move the company forward,” Marsha explains.

“A company, especially a multi-entity company, has a lot of moving parts. And as an owner, you really want to see how everything is functioning profitability-wise. You also want to catch things before they become an issue. Intuit Enterprise Suite’s reports help us catch potential problems quickly.”

With all their data in one platform, Humble House sees less stress and more growth

Long before their migration to Intuit Enterprise Suite, Humble House was reliant on multiple Intuit products.

“We had been using QuickBooks Bill Pay, QuickBooks Payments, and QuickBooks Payroll for years,” Marsha explains. “So when we were looking to solve the traceability aspect for food safety compliance, and contemplating all those different ERPs, it was really a non-starter. They didn't have those functions; they didn't have payroll or bill pay—at least, not that we wouldn’t be excessively charged for.”

Marsha knew the best path forward was to stick with Intuit. “With Intuit Enterprise Suite, we’re able to keep the functionality of all those programs that we love so much and that have been very, very helpful for the running of our company. We can keep them all together in one place,” she says.

What’s more, Intuit Enterprise Suite has made those different pieces of Humble House’s accounting function even better than before. “Now that we have Intuit Enterprise Suite, bill pay is even more effective, and payroll is more accessible. I don't have to log out and go to a different website to see all my details. They’re all in the same accounting framework.”

Having all her accounting tools in one place means Marsha can now see the company’s transactions from end to end. For example, say Marsha needs to enter a bill. She goes into Intuit Enterprise Suite and puts that bill into QuickBooks Bill Pay, scheduling payment for two days before the bill is due. The bill is paid automatically, eliminating late fees and Marsha’s mental stress. 

From there, Marsha goes into QuickBooks Payments, where she sends an invoice to a customer. The invoice, sent via email, has a link that allows the customer to pay quickly and easily. “I don't know exactly how the software works, but when it shows up on the bank feed, it's already linked to the invoice,” says Marsha. “When the payment comes through, it's matched to the invoice that is due, so we just click ‘accept,’ and we're done.”

While reviewing her workflows, Marsha takes a moment to set scheduled reminders for her open invoices. Currently, Marsha has the software set up to send a reminder three days before an invoice is due. “If it still hasn't been paid the day it’s due, it'll send them another email,” Marsha explains. “I don't have to hassle our customers anymore. That was my least favorite part of the job, asking people to pay their invoices. But now it's all done automatically through workflows and Intuit Enterprise Suite.”

Third-party integrations help Humble House retain industry-specific tools

Tracking an increasing number of invoices is only one of the growing pains Marsha and her husband have encountered in Humble House’s transition from small to mid-size business. Another is navigating the intricacies of food safety compliance and integrating the necessary tools to help. 

“In food manufacturing, traceability is king,” says Marsha. “There are a lot of compliance regulations. We’re required to have a good handle on where everything comes from, tracking every lot from the raw material stage, through work-in-progress, through the finished product.”

To do that, Humble House uses a manufacturing software called Mar-Kov, which helps with traceability, compliance, and food safety.

Before the couple started using Intuit Enterprise Suite, Marsha had set up her QuickBooks account to integrate seamlessly with Mar-Kov. The integration worked so well, she was hesitant to upgrade to Intuit Enterprise Suite. What if the software wasn’t as open to integrations? 

She and Luis began looking into other options, including an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. But such a solution would be incredibly expensive and still lack some of the necessary functionality Humble House uses in its accounting. In the end, they decided to upgrade to Intuit Enterprise Suite, and they were immediately glad they’d stayed with Intuit. 

Just like QuickBooks Online, Intuit Enterprise Suite’s open platform integrates directly with third-party applications. Every night, the platform syncs with Mar-Kov, matching dollar values from Humble House’s raw ingredients to work-in-progress goods and, eventually, to finished products. As a result, the company’s balance sheet continues to reflect the value of their inventory in each stage of production.

“Having an accurate picture of our inventory is imperative to running a functional and profitable manufacturing business,” says Marsha. “In food manufacturing, you live or die by your profitability, and having that information available in real-time thanks to the link between Mar-Kov and our Intuit Enterprise Suite account is the reason we are able to stay successful.”

Marsha Morales’s tips for growing businesses

“Intuit Enterprise Suite has the best of what a business owner needs to run their company successfully,” Marsha says. “It’ll give them peace of mind, knowing that the information is accurate and that their bills are paid on time; that people are paying them on time; and it’ll get them out of the daily grind of running the company by automating certain things. Intuit Enterprise Suite allows business owners to work on the company—on furthering the plan for their success, and on doing whatever it is that they need to do to build their business.”

For Marsha, who recently had the opportunity to take a vacation (the first in over a decade), being able to step away is a marker of success. 

Reflecting on her own business, Marsha says, “Intuit Enterprise Suite has allowed us to automate a lot of the tasks that used to take up our time—especially the tedious ones. It’s given us the chance to maybe plan a new direction for Humble House and to see what opportunities are several months or years down the road that we might have not have seen had we not had the time to take our heads out of the business and look to the future.”

Disclaimers

Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments Inc., licensed as a Money Transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. For more information about Intuit Payments' money transmission licenses, please visit https://www.intuit.com/legal/licenses/payment-licenses/.

Intuit customer compensated for time.