Helping small businesses get paid more quickly, boost their cash flow and save time organizing their finances is the goal of Intuit’s QuickBooks Online, according to Sasan Goodarzi, executive vice president of Intuit’s Small Business Group. Intuit today unveiled a broad range of enhancements to QuickBooks Online at its annual conference for 5,000 accountants and small business owners, QuickBooks Connect, in San Jose. This year, more than 500 developers are also attending the conference to review the enhancements being unveiled today and to receive information on how they can integrate their products into the QuickBooks Online platform.
QuickBooks Online Enhancements
Below are some highlights of the new Quickbooks Online partnerships and new features announced today. We will be going in-depth on some of these in a later article. The features will be released at different times between now and the first quarter of 2017.
Payments
Some of the new enhancements planned (or currently available) for Quicken Online designed to speed up payments include:
Apple Pay Integration
QuickBooks Online will be the first small business accounting solution to integrate Apple Pay, giving small business owners a fast, secure way of accepting payment from their customers. Customers will be able to view and pay an invoice with a single touch without having to spend time searching for their wallet and finding the right card. Every transaction on a customer’s iPhone or iPad will require Touch ID – Apple’s fingerprint identity sensor – authentication or passcode, helping small businesses avoid fraud and decrease chargebacks.
PayPal
Intuit and PayPal are expanding their existing partnership. A new feature will allow small businesses to send an invoice from QuickBooks Online and seamlessly accept payment from their customers through PayPal.
Smart Invoice
This new feature of QuickBooks tracks and notifies a small businesses about what’s happening with their invoices every step of the way.
Cash Flow
The current QuickBooks Financing platform allows small businesses to integrate QuickBooks data to demonstrate their credit worthiness, streamline the application process. It shortens the loan processing time significantly, from weeks to as little as one business day. To date, small businesses have secured more than $500 million in credit through QuickBooks Financing. More cash flow and financing features and partnerships include
A new QuickBooks financing platform
QuickBooks Financing gives small businesses the ability to use their QuickBooks data to apply for the full spectrum of credit offerings including, short and long term loans, lines of credit, invoice financing and Small Business Administration loans. In addition to AMEX Working Capital, Intuit is adding BlueVine’s Flex Credit to the platform. Flex Credit is particularly well suited to new small businesses. To be eligible for financing, businesses only need to have been in business for six months and have minimum annual revenue of $60,000.
AMEX working capital
Small businesses that need a short-term loan to pay a vendor will benefit from a deep integration with AMEX Working Capital. It will provide short-term loans directly within QuickBooks Online. Small businesses will be able to access loans between $1,000 and $750,000 to pay vendors and get more time to even out cash flow. One single fee will be associated with each loan term, including 30-day, 0.5 percent; 60-day, 1.0 percent; 90-day, 1.5 percent. Each loan is tied to a specific receivable.
Organization and Time Management
Eighty-one percent of small business owners say they are too busy with other tasks to take the steps to improve their money management. To make it easier for small businesses to seamlessly sync their data and understand their business performance, QuickBooks Online enhancements include:
Google and G Suite integration
Fifty percent of QuickBooks Online users also use Google Calendar. A new integration imports data seamlessly from Google into QuickBooks Online. The time that recorded in Google Calendar flows into QuickBooks. Small businesses can also now access QuickBooks Online through G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Work) and sign-in once using their Google credentials.
Auto expense feature
QuickBooks automatically balances the books by matching income and expenses with the correct category. QuickBooks categorizes over 70 percent of a small business’ transactions, saving users time and making it easier to prepare for tax season.
Money insights at the click of a button
QuickBooks Online connects all of a small businesses’ accounts in one place, automating the flow of data so that business owners have a simple, integrated view of how money flows in and out of their business.