Intuit released their new QuickBooks Online Self-Employed solution for freelancers and home-based entrepreneurs.
The product was designed for the rapidly growing self-employed population that is expected to become 43 percent of the U.S. workforce by 2020, according to research in the Intuit 2020 Report, conducted in partnership with Emergent Research.
In building QBO Self-Employed for that market, “the goal was to make the product as simple as possible,” said senior product manager Joe Callinan.
Bank and credit card transactions are imported into the system and captured as individual expense cards user can then categorize as business, personal, or both. The product’s companion mobile app makes that process even more intuitive with a swipe left or right to instantly categorize the IRS Schedule C deductions.
By tracking deductions year round, QBO Self-Employed also calculates users’ estimated quarterly and year-end taxes. When those deadlines arrive, users click pay, choose their state and the corresponding voucher is populated with the dollar amount, ready to be completed, printed and sent.
The product also offers support for tracking miles, often a freelance or self-employed worker’s biggest deduction.
Intuit expects the product, in beta for the past six months, to alleviate accountants’ difficulty with their self-employed clients, which often comprise about half of their business. An alternative to the annual box of receipts, said Callinan, freelancers present their QBO Self-Employed data to accountants to be checked finalized with the necessary supporting documentation.
Since its beta launch in the fall of 2014, QBO Self-Employed has tracked more than $50 million in business expenses for self-employed users.
“As the on-demand economy continues to expand, there will be unprecedented income opportunities for freelancers,” stated Alex Chriss, vice president and general manager of Self-Employed Solutions at Intuit. “But this work comes with a host of new challenges: co-mingled and confusing business expenses, quarterly and year-end tax headaches, and a general lack of visibility into their real income.’ That’s why we are expanding the QuickBooks Online (QBO) ecosystem with a new product that is tailor made to meet the needs of a new type of entrepreneur operating in a new economy.”
More information on the product, priced at $9.99 per month, is available
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