Webware

Intuit shared details of bookkeeping app QuickBooks 2009 on Monday. With this release, the company aims to broaden the focus beyond the ledger book, providing a management center for small businesses that includes expanded online banking, support for transactions in more than 100 currencies, and 12 months of free Web hosting.

The applications are set to arrive in stores October 8.

(Credit: Intuit)

The 2009 release targets businesses that do work globally, whether that means say, shipping vintage Disney toys to eBay buyers in Japan or employing basket weavers in Uganda. At least 30 percent of QuickBooks users handle international transactions, according to Intuit.

Multi-currency support enables invoices, bill payments, and wire transfers in most of the world's currencies, with online updates and historical tracking of exchange rates. Wire transfers can be made in 100 currencies through QuickBooks Merchant Service, while the other features support 158 currencies. Users can add custom currencies, such as Ithaca Hours in upstate New York or Linden dollars for Second Life.

Intuit is also offering users a free Web site for 12 months at an Intuit domain name. Drag-and-drop page designs come from Homestead, a 2007 acquisition. Once the free period expires, monthly hosting costs are $4.99.

QuickBooks offers banking center capabilities, so users won't need to hop to banks' separate Web sites to check on the status of accounts.

Intuit says its Live Community peer-to-peer tech support, with 2.6 million users since its introduction in 2007, increasingly is being used for general business advice. The context-sensitive question-and-answer interface is docked along the right edge of the QuickBooks interface.

The built-in QuickBooks Messenger enables users of multi-user editions of the applications to chat with each other while logged in.

A new Company Insights view provides quick access to balances, money owed, reminders, and reports.

Expanded tools for accountants include Client Data Review to scan for client errors.

For $99, QuickBooks Simple Start Edition targets users with the most basic bookkeeping needs. The full-featured Pro Edition costs $100 more for one user, or a total of $379 for two people and $549 for three people. QuickBooks Premier, which offers industry-specific flavors, costs $399, or $749 for a pair of users and $1,099 for three-person access.

Intuit is announcing today its entry into the growing app platform market. Like Salesforce has done, Intuit's new QuickBase Developer Program will let developers create and sell add-on Web apps that tap into the company's core product: QuickBooks. And like Salesforce, Intuit will market these third-party apps directly to its customers via a promotional channel in the core app. Intuit will go after the small-business market with the program, leaving the enterprise space for Salesforce--even though both companies have customers in the other's main market.

Intuit claims an addressable market of 3.6 million companies that use QuickBooks.

Other players in this space include Google and Amazon. However, their platforms don't come with large audiences of customers already familiar with their back-office business apps.

The QuickBase Developer Program has important elements. First, it gives the Intuit Web database access to data from customers' QuickBooks installations. Most of Intuit's business customers use the QuickBooks installed software, not the online version. The QDP is for Web apps, though: It links apps to data resident on customers' PCs.

A Flash app accessing QuickBooks data, thanks to QDP

QDP apps will be presented in Flex, which has the big advantage of running everywhere (and making it easy to create very pretty applications). However, since QDP apps are targeted primarily at QuickBooks users, and nearly all of them are on Windows, the cross-platform angle isn't that important. The fact that there are a lot of Flex developers is, though.

One of the QDP's slickest pieces is financial. Intuit will handle the billing for QDP apps on the part of developers. That saves them from having to hassle with collecting from their customers. Also, resources for QDP apps, all of which will be hosted by Intuit, will be charged for in a pay-as-you-go system, like Amazon Web Services. That makes QDP apps economically scalable.

The program goes into limited beta on Thursday. Version 1 should open up to all developers this summer.

After I wrote up Zoho Invoice (review), I got a call from Intuit, makers of QuickBooks (which Zoho may integrate with some day). They had news for me: Intuit has a free Web-based invoicing app too: Intuit Billing Manager. And it's been out since September.

Well, slap me silly. For some reason Intuit hasn't publicized this neat little app. But my Zoho writeup got under their skin, and they called to give me a demo.

I found Intuit Billing Manager a strong invoicer for the very small business. Getting started takes very little time, and it shows you the info you need when you need it. For example, the moment you begin creating an invoice, it pops up the outstanding balance from your client, so you have a good picture of what you're dealing with.

Intuit Billing Manager is simple, like the other good online invoice managers.

The app sends your clients basic text e-mails (unlike Zoho, which sends nice PDFs), but it also includes a link to an invoice page where clients can see a nicely formatted invoice, pay their bill, or set a reminder if they don't want to at the moment.

The best feature of Billing Manager is that it accepts credit-card payments. You'll have to sign up for QuickBooks Merchant Service and pay $9.95 a month plus 2.9 percent of each invoice payment charged, but the integration with the Billing Manager invoices is very strong. You can also accept credit-card payments over the phone based on your invoices, and the app will send your clients nice e-mail receipts.

Customers get a simple invoice in their e-mail, plus a link to a personal Web page where they can pay their bill or set a reminder.

Downsides include somewhat poky response when you click "send" after creating an invoice, and no support for PayPal payments.

Intuit makes money from this free product in two ways: Primarily, it pushes users to sign up for the fee-based credit-card payment system. Second, Billing Manager is a gateway drug for Intuit's more fully featured QuickBooks Online Edition. Not the Quickbooks software itself, though. As Intuit group product manager Heather Kirkby says, "The person choosing Billing Manager is choosing the Web."

For many small businesses, the tightly focused Billing Manager app will be all they need. Intuit's presence in the small business market, not to mention the company's implied promise of a smooth upgrade path to other QuickBooks services, will make this app the first choice for small businesses looking for an upgrade from tracking invoices on a spreadsheet or on paper.

See also: Blinksale, Simplybill, Freshbooks, Netbooks.

Intuit is making the 2008 version of its entry-level small-business accounting product, QuickBooks Simple Start Edition, free. Previous full versions of the program sold for $99.95, and "more than 300,000 businesses" use the product. So why give it away?

Intuit's pitch is that it wants to encourage entrepreneurs to take the plunge and launch their dream businesses, and removing the $100 barrier to basic accounting software is its way of proving it. Alongside the launch of the 2008 version, there's a new "Just Start" marketing campaign and contest, in which one person can win $50,000 in cash and services to start a business.

Whether or not Simple Start is good software (I haven't used it and have no opinion), Intuit's move to make it free is defensive. Microsoft offers a competing stripped-down small-business accounting product, and there are new small business-focused Web 2.0 services coming online all the time. Most of the free and low-cost business apps are fairly basic, and that's all mom-and-pop startups need. What the accounting vendors really want is the more grown-up small business customers that are willing to pay for robust accounting solutions.

Hence Intuit's entry-level software that is free today, but that works as an easy gateway to paid services like Payroll ($99 a year and up) and to its more powerful QuickBooks software and online products. It's a straightforward get-them-while-they're-young strategy. Or rather, get them while the Web 2.0 is still young.