Intuit Competes with Customers
Emailed on February 15, 2019 in The Friday Forward
As we continue to build our community of bookkeepers, accountants, and consultants at Malartu we often look to successful counterparts in the industry who have built communities of their own.
One particularly large one that we often look to is Intuit. Their product, Quickbooks, is our most popular integration and the software running most small business books around the world.
All good, right? Well... If you head over to Quickbook's pricing page (www.quickbooks.intuit.com/pricing) you'll see two packages:
Do it yourself: offers different software-only packages
With a bookkeeper: pairs Intuit's software with a live bookkeeper, available to you year-round, starting at $200/mo
It doesn't matter which angle you take here: Intuit is now competing with their customers.
And this isn't the first time they have done so, in 2017 Intuit launched TurboTax Live, a service that connects TurboTax customers with EAs and CPAs to help with taxes on demand.
As with the TurboTax Live offering, QuickBooks Live customers will be able to access bookkeepers via video chat embedded directly in the QuickBooks application in their web browsers.
There's a great breakdown of this entire situation on Blake Oliver's blog here, but here's a good snippet:
“The big difference is, of course, that until this point, Intuit has not competed directly with its own ProAdvisor network. ProAdvisors are Intuit’s accounting and bookkeeping channel partners for the QuickBooks line of products.”
Straight up: We don't think this is right. The good news? It presents an opportunity for the next generation of accounting/bookkeeping software providers to create a stronger, more symbiotic community.
Foreshadowing of things to come at Malartu? Yes. More on this in the coming weeks 💪