Yesterday, the online version of Intuit's Quickbooks, the small business accounting service, went offline for several hours. A related outage apparently also took down Intuit's credit-card processing service, Innovative Merchant Solutions, which the standalone version of Quickbooks uses as well.
Affected customers of Quickbooks Online were left without access to their financial records. While users of the software version of Quickbooks could access their records, those relying on Intuit for credit-card processing had to do authorizations manually over the phone--a slower, more expensive process.
All online services have outages from time to time, but this one appears to have been lengthy for a line-of-business service, and for many users, unsatisfactorily managed. We received complaints from users that communications from Intuit gave neither a reason for the outages nor an estimate on when the service would return.
Intuit spokespeople are still not commenting on what caused the outage, but I did hear this from the company on Tuesday morning:
QuickBooks services, including IMS and QuickBooks Online, are fully running and have been since late yesterday afternoon. Yesterday, some customers may have experienced intermittent delays in accessing these services because of network issues over a course of about six hours.
With service restored, we have extended our QuickBooks Online service hours so that we can respond individually to any issues they may have related to this outage. We notified customers to contact us so we can be of further assistance. Customers choose Intuit to provide the high-quality service they've come to expect from us. We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate their patience. We know that they need and expect our services to be available when they want them and working to prevent this from happening again.
Intuit, makers of the accounting product QuickBooks for small business, and the consumer accounting apps Quicken and TurboTax, today announced a cleverly-named "stimulus package" for its small business products.
The program, Small Business United, consists of reduced-price services or extended trial periods on online apps. For example, the Inuit Online Payroll services is now free for six months ($9.95 a month thereafter). Intuit-hosted small business Web sites are now free for a full year ($4.99 a month afterward).
"Grant" = "Prize." But money's money.
More interesting than the effective price drops on Inuit small business products is the competition the company is running to share small business tips. Considering the economy today, sharing advice on making through is a great idea. All tips are visible on the site. The community helps to vote on the best ideas (the mechanics are exactly clear). Fifty-five winners receive prizes ("grants") ranging from $5000 to the $25,000 grand prize, in addition to Intuit products and services. It's not exactly like the constraint-free bailouts banks are getting, and small businesses do have to sing for their supper, but money is money, and we appreciate the spirit of these awards.
Less appreciated by many (like me) is Intuit's continued lack of a bailout for consumers using its paid software app, Quicken. The company still "sunsets" its annual versions of Quicken, forcing users to upgrade to newer versions. Often, these annual releases are not mature on launch and cause users new problems. I'd like to see the stimulus package extend down to this product. Our society is entering a buy-and-hold era with consumer goods like appliances and cars. It would be nice if software vendors respected this as well.
Intuit is announcing on Monday a Flash-based Web service that companies can use to geographically visualize their customer data and business activity.
Customer Explorer is being unveiled at this week's Adobe Max conference in San Francisco. Customer Explorer, available at the Intuit Workplace, imports QuickBooks data and overlays it on a live map.
Users can view where their customers are clustering or which regions generate the most revenue. They can also generate time slices of the data, much like a moving weather map, to see how their business has been evolving. And they can overlay regional demographic information, such as median household income.
This free version of SpatialKey was created by Universal Mind.
This map is animated and shows customer density growth over time.
(Credit: Universal Mind)The app is more than eye candy. Any business owner trying to get a handle on where he or she is successful--and where the business' holes are--can learn something from the service.
The app is also an interesting hybrid service. While it uses QuickBooks users' data, which is stored on their computers, the visualizer melds that data with geographic and demographic information from Web servers to create maps that are displayed via Flash in a browser. It's an interesting and fairly seamless mashup of various public data sets with the user's own data.
On this map, the circled numbers represent clusters of customers, and the shading is demographic data: median household income.
(Credit: Universal Mind)Previous coverage: Intuit getting into the hosted app business.
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.
At first glance, the web app provides a simplistic view of things. Features included are looking at who owes you, who you owe, vendors, employees, and bank accounts. Despite the initially simplistic look, as you drill down, you uncover a whole new level of detail.
Even though this seems to be a killer app for referring to your financial information, I have to point out some points where they have missed the mark. First off, a standalone app, available through the App Store would have been nice for the iPhone, but it's not completely necessary. The largest oversight here is not being able to edit or add data. In my opinion, this would be one of the primary usage scenarios for this app. That said, this is version one of this app and we may see this sort of functionality being added at some point down the line.
If you are already a Quickbooks Online user, these new web interfaces for Blackberry and iPhone are nice perks. I'm not sure that the introduction of these apps would be the deciding factor in jumping to Quickbooks Online, but it might help the decision.
You can try it out for yourself, before signing up by going to https://accounting.quickbooks.com/m and tapping "Demo."
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.
Intuit is planning to release a Web-based edition of its leading personal finance application this winter, possibly early in 2008. Quicken Online marks a key transition for a company that has made its bones selling new versions of its boxed software each year.
A sneak peek at what will be Quicken Online.
(Credit: Intuit)I've wondered for a while when a big software brand would offer online financial software with some measure of security and a respectable amount of features beyond basic bank account check-ins. The few that I tested late last year were woefully inadequate. Few people seem willing to trust their personal finances with an unknown brand, for what would happen if that startup went belly up?
A few years ago, folks at Intuit told me they saw virtually no demand for online tools. Last week, the company said it's taken so long to cook up Quicken Online due to the lack of consumer trust. While it may be common for those within the technobubbles of Silicon Valley and San Francisco to opt for paperless billing, many millions more see managing their money via the Internet as about as safe as dropping a wallet in a mall.
Plus, it must be hard for a company to perfect a private service that cooperates with third-party institutions. It's a no-brainer that there will be SSL encryption, the same security measures used by online banks. But how many bank accounts, and what types, will Quicken Online access, for instance? What about tie-ins to TurboTax, eBay or Google's services?
Beyond basic account balancing, charts, reports and potential bill payment services, Intuit won't specify other potential features. For now, the JAVA/JSF interface appears to mimic the desktop counterpart, highlighting current Money In, Money Out, and savings or debt by drawing from savings, checking, credit card, and investment accounts. It will automatically categorize expenses and income by source. The main page asks, "Am I living within my means?" Ahem.
With personal debt levels at an all-time high and the mortgage meltdown shaking up markets worldwide, Intuit is repackaging Quicken Basic as the $29 Starter Edition, for newbies to digital finance. I'll welcome any tool that shaves off those little, yet sure-to-snowball bank fees, but only testing will tell how well this application performs. Many CNET readers post passionately to our forums about Quicken's frequent crashes and other woes.
The other four boxed iterations of Quicken 2008, available August 27, are labeled better than in the past to target their markets: the $59 Quicken Deluxe to help with savings, $89 Premier with investment assistance, and the $99 Home & Business. Some new features include a desktop gadget for Windows Vista, PayPal integration, and new ways to display money in and out.
Meanwhile, Quicken Online has been undergoing closed testing, with beta testing set to open on September 10 to some limited thousands of early birds who join the wait list.
Intuit Quicken already offers online backup for between $9.99 per year for 100MB, $49.99 for 1GB, or $149.99 for 10GB. Microsoft Money also offers data backup and has traditionally offered more free access to your data on the Web than Intuit, although requiring a Passport (now Windows Live) account to do so.
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