If you attended QuickBooks® Connect last month, you probably saw Sasan Goodarzi, executive vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Small Business Group, share Intuit’s vision to fuel small business success worldwide. If you weren’t one of the 5,000 small businesses, accountants or developers in the audience, we’re so sorry about that, but here is a quick summary of how we plan to deliver on our vision for you. Sasan shared ten world-class, near-term innovations, and a very cool video of how QuickBooks may become even more indispensable to you using voice recognition and artificial intelligence to help you run your business. You can view his full keynote here (the cool future video starts at 25:55).
“When small businesses succeed, we all do,” Goodarzi said when asked about how the QuickBooks team determines what to create for customers and why it matters so much. “They are the backbone of the economy, and every day, Intuit’s 8,000 employees go to work all over the world with the goal of enabling customers and providing them with all the tools they need to thrive. To do this, we fall in love with customer problems, not the solutions; we think about the struggles customers face and how we can help them overcome those problems. And, because of that, QuickBooks – in collaboration with strategic partners and third-party developers – has focused our innovations on the areas that are most important to small businesses, self-employed individuals and accountants: saving them time, putting money back in their pockets and helping them grow.”
Save Time
When you own a small business or are self-employed, time is one of the most valuable resources. Every minute you’re fighting with Excel, or struggling to balance books, is time away from family and friends, or not spent working on your passion – and that passion is the reason you went into business in the first place.
Imagine what you could do if you have two extra days a year. Well, by automating tasks to eliminate tedious manual processes and leveraging the power of data integrations, QuickBooks saves you time, and when added up, essentially gives you two days a year back. A small business owner with two extra days to spend more time with family or reinvest in their business is a fantastic gift that we’re proud to deliver to you!
To help do this, we announced money insights that allow you to see if you’re making money in one tap by connecting all the businesses’ accounts in one place and automating the flow of data. An integration with Google Calendar gives you the opportunity to import data seamlessly from Google into QuickBooks Online. This simplifies time-tracking and billing, a deep integration with TSheets provides you with an end-to-end solution for scheduling, time approval and employee management, as well as a deep integration with Bill.com, which gives you a central home within QuickBooks for managing bill payments and their overall accounting needs.
More Money
Cash is king, and anything that saves money, or gets money back in small businesses’ pockets faster, is crucial to guaranteeing success.
With that in mind, we announced four innovations that will help ensure that you get and save as much of the money you’ve earned as quickly as possible: SmartInvoice, which notifies small business owners about what’s happening with their invoices every step of the way, an integration with Apple Pay that enables merchants to get paid quickly and easily on outstanding invoices via the newly launched Apple Pay on the Web, an integration with American Express Working Capital Terms, which provides short-term loans directly within QuickBooks Online, and Mileage Tracker, which finds users $7,000 in tax deductions by auto-categorizing trips as personal or business.
Connect with Your Accountant
An astonishing 65 percent of accountants’ time is spent on data collection and data entry – sorting through shoeboxes full of receipts and manually culling through Excel spreadsheets.
To address this and give accountants the tools needed to connect better with small business clients, QuickBooks announced Intuit Link . Available today as part of Intuit ProConnect’s Client Connection Suite, it allows small business owners to share their personal and financial data easily and securely with their accounting partners via a secure portal, while accountants can easily send clients requests for important documents needed to prepare tax returns.
And, lastly, the audience at QuickBooks Connect saw a preview of Smart Look, which enables accountants to serve their small business clients at their point of need, when they need guidance the most, by connecting small businesses to their accountant via QuickBooks Online Accountant it gives you the ability to share screens, video chat and learn how to use key QuickBooks Online features.
Look for more innovations and new ways that QuickBooks will innovate to save you time and money, and help you grow your business in the coming weeks and months.
