The phrase sounds a bit Californian--QuickBooks flavors--but the concept has the ring of something that the market is ready for verticalization in the most widely used accounting software package.
While there has been a lot of comment about Intuit’s efforts in the mid-market, whether it is going anywhere or not, it looks like the move to verticalize QuickBooks flavors is going somewhere very rapidly. According to the company’s data sheet for its year ended July 31, the company sold 54,000 copies of its higher-end products, defined as QuickBooks Premier and the mid-market entry, QuickBooks Enterprise Solution That category isn’t split so we don’t know how well Intuit is doing in selling QES to the 240,000 mid-market customers that are using regular QuickBooks.
The flavors racked up even higher sales with 71,000 units sold during fiscal 2003, the first period for which such results have been reported. What are flavors? These are QuickBooks’ Accountant, Contractor, Healthcare, and Nonprofit editions and point of sale.
There have to be a lot of these that are potentially low-end, mid-market sales that people like Best and Microsoft Business Solutions would love to have, never mind all those 240,000 mid-market customers that should probably be using a more robust package. Heck, MBS would probably thrilled to sell 5,000 units of its Small Business Manager, the slimmed-down version of Dynamics that was aimed at the same underpowered user in the mid-market. It would probably be thrilled to sell 2,000.
Those Intuit numbers still pale besides the 1.1 million copies of QuickBooks Basic and Pro that were sold through the same period. Still, these numbers are one of the few indicators available through public financial reports that show that the verticalization drive that is being made by most accounting software companies is receiving a warm welcome. Peachtree, for example, has similar flavors, but parent Sage Group does not provide such product financial details.
Still, judging by Intuit, verticalization is providing a very flavorful turn of events.
