And a free migration service.
Three months after the launch of the Australian QuickBooks Online, global accounting giant Intuit has added two of its most requested features, payroll and inventory.
“We have been in Australia for three months and have been doing a lot of listening,” product manager Nora Tucker told a small audience of QuickBooks beta testers and cloud software vendors. “Now we’re delivering on the big items.”
Intuit integrated with Web Payroll, Australian-based online payroll software that also worked with Xero, rather than building it internally. “So you run payroll in Web Payroll and the corresponding entries are automatically placed in your QuickBooks Online account,” Tucker said.
Web Payroll offered QuickBooks Online users a free payroll employee and provided up to 20 employees for $20 a month. Adding payroll pushed the base price for the three versions of QuickBooks Online to $45, $60 and $75 a month respectively, or about $11-$25 a month more than competing solutions from Xero and Saasu.
The second most requested item was inventory which Intuit added directly to QuickBooks Online. “Inventory tracking will help businesses to make sure they’re not promising to customers a product that they don’t have on-hand to deliver and understanding at any given time what the value of their inventory is,” Tucker said.
Intuit also announced a migration service that imported online balances between QuickBooks desktop software to QuickBooks Online. The migration service was operated by Intuit staff who would take a data file and upload the basic details. Transactions weren’t included in the service.
“Some of our competitors charge $200 or more. We are doing it for free,” Tucker said.
Intuit also released an add-on called QuickBooks Online Accountants. The program let accountants and bookkeepers manage multiple clients from a single sign-on and carry out batch processes. The program was in pilot and available for free for ProAdvisors, Intuit’s channel program for accountants and bookkeepers.
TOMORROW: An exclusive interview with Intuit’s global CEO Brad Smith