Tradeshift’s Analyst Day: Intuit and QuickBooks / Where this partnership is heading...

 Before reading, be mindful of what Tradeshift is:  Tradeshift rethinks invoicing & payments (with a web based platform). In establishing a platform for all your business interactions, it helps smaller companies run more efficiently, harnessing the power of their network to create new value from old processes. Apps like e-invoicing become a route to getting paid faster or even open doors like dynamic discounting.   In January  tradeshift announced a partnership with Intuit Inc.

Jason Busch for Spendmatters.com writes Thirty minutes into the morning, Intuit’s Eric Dunn (who has been with Intuit since the provider’s early days) took the stage. Eric is responsible for Intuit’s commerce network solutions. Part of his charter (and the broader Intuit strategy) is focused in part on moving accounting from the desktop to other areas, including the space that exists between buyers and suppliers. This is where the Tradeshift investment and partnership comes into play.

It’s important for Intuit to defend its turf, where it has a dominant market position. Eric shared, among other metrics, that Intuit has 90% market share in small business finance (through QuickBooks products). As not entirely happy QuickBooks Online users ourselves (the online site has odd outages which brought our back office down and has changed its Mac browser support policies over the years) the parent company of Spend Matters is a good test case to provide a gut check on usefulness of where Intuit is headed with its Tradeshift partnership.
Yet Intuit still has to prove the basics of consistent uptime to long-time users like us (it’s been our accounting system since 2004). As we observed at the end of 2011:

It’s a pity that Intuit has had so many issues keeping the service up and running for subscribers like us. Just this week, we’ve even had to resort to manually writing checks because we can’t access the system. And don’t get us started on not being able to invoice customers … Coming from the software as a service (SaaS) and cloud world, we know that growing sites and services will always have outages. .. [Yet Intuit is not] communicating with customers and keeping them proactively informed over a multi-day and week period [of outages].

QuickBooks uptime has improved since then, at least for our business. But the question customers should ask is what’s next for Intuit and small business accounting? Will the tool transcend the basic general activities it enables today?

Eric noted that “connectivity” is a part of the strategy, including touch points with Mint (on the consumer finance side), payroll, and related areas (provided by Intuit). But enterprise connectivity (“ERP endpoints” as Intuit calls it) with SAP, Oracle, NetSuite and others is a broader opportunity that Intuit intends to tackle with Tradeshift to connect small business accounting users with larger customers (and each other).

Earlier this morning, Intuit’s Eric Dunn shared his thoughts on Tradeshift and the rationale behind the partnership and “strategic” investment his firm made in the e-invoicing network/platform upstart. In short, Dunn summarized that Tradeshift addresses the space that exists between QuickBooks users to build connectivity with enterprise counterparts. He also suggested that Tradeshift has:

• A compatible vision to “eliminate paper-based transactions, simplifying business and bringing the world closer together.”
• Modern technical design – “Service oriented architecture, extensible platform approach, mobile centric UI, etc.”
• Customers/clear market traction – not just a strong vision or underlying product/platform
• An “impressive” team

Dunn reiterated that Intuit is “not a financial investor,” but is seeking to partner “with a company with a fast growing network” where it can dedicate resources to integrate the products/services. Currently, Intuit has assigned four resources to the joint development projects and “hopes to have product” in customer hands by year-end.

The vision for bringing the Tradeshift platform together with QuickBooks extends to supplier enablement/on-boarding. This includes when a QuickBooks user “sets up a supplier for the first time, the system knows they’re on the network” and does not require new information to be entered. The goal is to drive increased supplier participation and connectivity.

Another goal is to avoid “supplier fatigue,” such as when QuickBooks users do “double data entry” by using eProcurement supplier portals to enter invoices, but also do manual data entry into QuickBooks. “They do it because they have to, but they’re not happy,” Dunn observers, regarding this all-too-common phenomena.

The partnership, in part, aims to overcome this type of AR double-duty that small businesses face when working with large customers using eProcurement and e-invoicing tools by linking transactions through the Tradeshift platform. This will start first with invoices but will move into POs and other document types, Intuit suggests.