Intuit announced a partnership with online file sharing and personal cloud content management service Box to power a new document collaboration center inside the company’s
The announcement was made at the inaugural QuickBooks Connect event and in concert with 100 new product enhancements the financial management company said it would be unveiling during the week, including the new QuickBooks Online Accountant introduced Tuesday.
Box’s integration into QBOA also aligns with Intuit’s emphasis on building an ecosystem, which currently includes 400 apps built on its platform, up from the 75 Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager of the Intuit small business group, counted as of January 2014.
This collaboration extends to Intuit’s research and development priorities, according to CEO Brad Smith, who said 16 to 17 percent of the company’s revenue goes to R&D. “We want to be a 30-year-old start-up,” Smith said.
Intuit’s support of accountants was framed a little differently from that of their small business users, with Wernikoff saying their mission was “to make accounting seem invisible to small businesses” by leveraging the cloud to automate the bookkeeping process.
This past quarter marked the first one that Intuit acquired more customers to QuickBooks Online than the desktop version, “a seminal moment for us,” said Wernikoff. Additionally, 80 percent of QuickBooks Online customers are new to the Intuit franchise, said Smith.
QuickBooks Online was built as an open system and, as Smith told the QuickBooks Connect crowd in his opening keynote, “the operating system behind small business success.”
Intuit also launched a “reimagined developer experience,” a new version of its partner platform, with developer tools and access to a global market of cloud-based small businesses.
“We do the thing developers care about most—reach a large audience,” Smith said.
As of September 2014, there are more than 705,000 QuickBooks Online paying subscribers and 32 million new customers worldwide.
The company’s reimagining also extends to its ProAdvisor program, which Intuit announced is now built directly into QuickBooks Online Accountant and includes new benefits and pricing.
And in response to questions about multicurrency functionality and ApplePay integration into QuickBooks Online, Smith and Wernikoff said they should be coming in the future.
