QuickBooks Online For iPad Isn’t A Boring Accounting App – It’s A Simple CRM : Xero's API partner base ahead of Intuit's and now over 115

Sara Perez for TechCrunch writes: Over a decade after porting its QuickBooks desktop software to the web, Intuit is finally addressing the needs of its small business owner user base with the launch of a version of the QuickBooks application for iPad. The app has been designed from the ground-up to take advantage of the tablet’s screen size and feature set. But more notably, it’s helping to refocus the QuickBooks platform from being solely thought of as a tool for back office accounting. With the iPad launch, QuickBooks is becoming a CRM solution for small businesses.

The iPad release follows QuickBooks’ previous debuts on iPhone in 2008, and Android in 2011. Those apps were also updated in fall 2012 in advance of the iPad debut, in order to better match the new QuickBooks look-and-feel. Like its mobile siblings, QuickBooks Online for iPad still works as a companion to the QuickBooks Online experience, but it doesn’t really require a user to ever log into the desktop-optimized website to make use of what the app has to offer.

To get started, business owners who newly discover the app through the Apple App Store, can just sign up for QuickBooks Online while being walked through a quick sign-up flow where they enter in their business’s name and upload a logo. The app even uses GPS to pull in their contact information automatically, to save extra typing. That may seem like a minor detail, but sometimes good apps are the sum of lots of little minor details just like that. Meanwhile, current subscribers can sign in using their login information. New users can try the app for free for a month, and upgrades are available via in-app purchase. (Prices are the same for Online or iPad, starting at $12.99/month).

Customer Relationship Management, Not Just Financial Management 

After setup, you might be surprised to discover that QuickBooks Online for iPad is not exactly what you may expect – that is, it’s more about customer management, and finances are just one part of that.

“Over the last five years, we’ve been transitioning, along with our customers, to more mobile and web applications. QuickBooks Online was launched in 2000 – it’s almost like a vintage or heritage web app,” explains Dan Wernikoff, SVP of Intuit and GM of Financial Management Solutions. “When you think about mobile, [business owners] can be out the field, getting data from QuickBooks – it made us rethink the role of QuickBooks itself,” he says.

Customers told the company that they were using the software as something of a CRM already – even if that meant phoning the office to get the information they needed. The iPad app, Intuit hopes, will tap into that pent-up demand for a better mobile experience. And for starters, it does so by pulling in customer info from Gmail, Contacts, Yahoo, LinkedIn and customer pictures from Facebook.

Feature Highlights

The new app also makes it easy to create and email estimates and invoices, take notes and snap photos related to customer activity, enter expenses on the go (including receipt photos), and view insights about their business with highly visual charts and graphs. Intuit is making good on its Mint acquisition again, as those graphs are actually powered by Mint’s charting engine, which will soon make its way to QuickBooks on the web, too.

There are a number of tools for filtering through customers – an especially handy one is “Near Me,” which can help you figure out which customers you may want to swing by while you’re out and about. (You know, to pick up that money they owe you…or say hello. Whatever.)

Central to the revamped QuickBooks experience is also this concept of a business’s “feed,” a nod to the impact social networking paradigms have had in terms of product design.

Here, every action and customer interaction is recorded in an almost News Feed-like interface. In three to six months, it will be expanded to include data from the wider web (think Yelpreviews, Twitter updates) and those from other Intuit partners, like ProOnGo or Expensify, for example. There are now over 100 developer partners using the QuickBooks API, Wernikoff tells us.

What’s Next? More Data, GoPayment Integration

In the near term, however, the focus will be on bringing more of the data from QuickBooks Online into the iPad. I imagine that serious (older) QuickBooks users will complain that the app doesn’t have “X” like their software does, or “Y” like the online version. But I’d take a breath before releasing those rants. It’s clear that this is version one of something that’s evolving. Some things will come in time. Others won’t. But at the end of the day, I’d rather have an easy-to-use app that does the most important tasks well, instead of some Microsoft Office-like monster creation where every little function is crammed into too many menus.

Intuit will soon be deeply integrating its mobile payments solution called GoPayment into the iPad app. Wernikoff says they would be “stupid not to” integrate the two. ”This year we’ll do over two billion invoices from QuickBooks customers. The ability to make those enabled for payment immediately – you can kind of eliminate the need to even send the invoice,” he says. “It’s a unique position we’re in in relation to our payments competitors, because a lot of them haven’t really thought about invoicing workflows.”

Right now, GoPayment works with the app, but you have to launch it separately on the iPad. For other transactions – like those, perhaps, processed via competitor Square, cash or check – users can just mark invoices as paid in the app, or enter them online which then sync with the app.

QuickBooks today has over 4 million paying users across its product suite, including over 400,000 companies online, across 150+ countries worldwide. On mobile specifically, the company is growing at 300 percent year-over-year, and has 50,000 monthly active users on iPhone or Android. Those aren’t insignificant numbers, but they also speak to the fact that much of Intuit’s customer base uses what we might call “legacy” products. Small business iPad use has been booming for some time, so it’s critical that Intuit attract those first-time SMB CRM subscribers to its mobile solutions. This iPad app is a serious attempt at doing just that.

davidleeti

21 hours ago

I hate Quickbooks with a passion.

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number1mavsfan

21 hours ago

@davidleeti - then why did you bother reading this article?

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leehammondphotography

20 hours ago

@davidleeti I hate QB and Intuit, with a passion too, but there is little alternative for the small business. There are other accounting packages but they don't do payroll. There are other payroll packages that don't do accounting. Intuit may be going rapidly into mobile but they haven't got the Mac version up to feature parity with the PC version of QB yet. WTF?

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sutherlandjamie

20 hours ago

What the accounting space needed was some real challengers. There are more and more online accounting and accounting related apps being developed all across the globe. Xero's API partner base is now over 115, which appears to be slightly ahead of Intuit's. It's that kind of groundswell of interest that gets larger incumbent players to react and innovate. 

At the end of the day, we're seeing more and more innovation in the accounting space which is good for all small businesses. Small businesses employ over 95% of workers and make up the majority of GDP, so anything we can do to help them is good for US in general.

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Forrest Zeisler

13 hours ago

What I hate about QB is how they were promoting the API for Quickbooks Online. We dumped a bunch of time into integrating with it, and then they suddenly announced it was no longer supported. Instead, if we want something without bugs, we need to pay for the $5/user/month model or join their profit sharing program.

A free API is a requirement these days. In particular, promoting it and then suddenly swapping it for a paid version, is a real bate-and-switch.

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Ronan Quirke

11 hours ago

@Forrest Zeisler we should talk http://nz.linkedin.com/in/ronanquirke/

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JakeGasaway

12 hours ago

Agree with Jamie. At a time when APIs continue to get better and allow for more data flow between applications, small businesses can choose which apps are best to help them run their operation. The days of having a clunky application that does everything, but nothing very well, are behind us. 

Along that same thought, by opening their platform, companies like Xero can continue to be laser focused on creating accounting software and allow for add-ons to assist with functions adjacent to accounting. Focusing on what you do well allows a company to drive a much more effective user experience. We, at Stitch Labs, are about to become a part of the Xero add-on list very soon. 

4 Tips for Investors to Ease Growing Tax Bite

MARK JEWELL AP Personal Finance Writer for the York Daily Times writes: This year's tax-filing deadline is a couple months away, and many investors are beginning to review whether they made any rash moves with their portfolios to trigger potentially unnecessary tax bills. It's a good instinct to follow, because it can become a teachable moment on how to become a tax-savvy investor.

But it's perhaps more important now to be mindful of new tax law changes approved in the deal that lawmakers struck in January to avoid the "fiscal cliff."

Those changes could have a big impact on taxes filed in 2014 and beyond, especially for those in the top income bracket. They'll pay higher rates, and will want to invest with a heightened sense of tax implications starting this year.

The rate increases are intended to help the U.S. get its fiscal house in order, but the medicine isn't entirely bitter. Historically low rates remain intact for investors in middle-income brackets, and the worst-case scenario rate hikes that were on the table during congressional negotiations failed to become law.

Another plus: The high uncertainty over taxes in recent years is largely gone. President Obama and congressional leaders continue to discuss raising revenue by capping or limiting some tax exemptions. But the rate levels in the Jan. 1 agreement to avert the fiscal cliff are expected to remain in place for the foreseeable future. There's no sunset date on the rates, unlike the Bush-era tax cuts approved in 2003.

"The most important thing is to have a plan, and now you can plan," says Duncan W. Richardson, chief equity investment officer with Eaton Vance, an investment manager whose specialties include tax-efficient investing.

Tax-savvy investors keep in mind the type of account in which they hold their investments. Only withdrawals are taxed from IRAs and 401(k)s, so these tax-advantaged accounts are good places to keep investments that are likely to generate a tax bill. Taxable accounts are the place to hold municipal bonds and mutual funds that invest in munis, because the income they generate is exempt from federal taxes.

Here are 4 other considerations for investing in the new tax landscape:

1. TAXES ARE HIGHER, BUT STILL MODEST HISTORICALLY

In the year ahead, investors should focus on their tax rates for capital gains and dividends.

In the middle-income tax brackets—those with adjusted gross income of $72,501 to $223,050 for married couples filing jointly, and $36,251 to $183,250 for single filers—the rate remains 15 percent on long-term capital gains. Those are the profits from selling such investments as stocks or funds held for at least a year.

The 15 percent on long-term gains is the same rate that applies to income from stock dividends. But the rate for capital gains and dividends has climbed to 18.8 percent for joint filers with more than $250,000 in income and $200,000 for single filers. That factors in a new 3.8 percent investment income surtax to help pay for President Obama's health care overhaul.

The biggest hit will be felt by top-bracket investors—those with adjusted gross income of more than $450,000 for couples, and $400,000 for individuals. They now pay 23.8 percent on long-term gains and dividends, including the health care tax. They will pay nearly 9 cents more in taxes than they did last year on each dollar of dividend income flowing into a taxable account.

Despite that increase, these rates are modest historically. In the 1970s, the top rate on dividend income was 70 percent, for example.

2. SHORT-TERM GAINS, BIG TAX BITE

The distinction between a long-term capital gain and a short-term gain remains important for investors in the top brackets, because tax rates continue to be far higher for the latter.

Short-term gains are triggered by profits earned from a taxable investment held less than a year. They're taxed as ordinary income, like wages, and high earners now face higher income tax rates. Those in the top bracket now pay a steep 43.4 percent including the health care tax, up from 35 percent. That's nearly 20 cents on the dollar greater than what they pay on long-term gains.

3. MUNI BOND ADVANTAGE GROWS

The rate also rises to 43.4 percent for income that top earners receive from taxable bonds, such as corporate bonds. As a result, those investors can realize a greater tax advantage than they could previously from investing in municipal bonds and muni funds, rather than in taxable bonds.

Investors don't have to pay federal taxes on income from munis, which invest in local and state government bonds. Munis are also free of state taxes if they limit investments to the state where you live. So consider whether munis' tax advantages will offset the higher pretax returns you'd normally expect from investing in a taxable bond fund. Look at tax-equivalent yield. It tells how big of a return you'd need from a taxable investment to equal the return of a tax-free bond.

4. BACKLOG OF TAXABLE GAINS BUILDING UP

Stocks have more than doubled since the market hit bottom in early 2009. That huge gain means there's a growing likelihood that investors will be hit with tax bills from capital gains. When fund managers sell investments that appreciated in value, they pass on the taxable gains to investors each year. Managers have been able to limit their investors' tax exposure in recent years by using losses incurred during the stock market meltdown of 2008 to offset gains. But that's no longer so easy, now that stocks have made such a sustained climb.

Tax exposure is typically greater at funds that trade holdings frequently. It's an especially important consideration for wealthy investors, now that they're paying higher rates. One option is to choose funds with moderate to low portfolio turnover. A fund with a turnover ratio higher than 50 percent—meaning more than half the holdings changed hands in a year—could be one to avoid.

If you're investing in an actively managed fund, consider those using strategies to limit capital gains—they often call themselves "tax-managed" funds.

It's not easy to sort out all the options on your own, so it might be worthwhile to seek professional help from a financial adviser.

Method CRM adds $3M to Expand QuickBooks CRM App to Intaact, Wave, Xero, Freshbooks, and other Accounting Platforms

Erin Bury @ BetaKit writes: Sometimes the simplest and most effective apps are ones integrated with another company’s technology, and Method has bet its livelihood on being a customer relationship management (CRM) app for QuickBooks’ accounting software. Today the Toronto-based company is announcing it has raised $3 million (We @ ExactCPA assume this is Canadian Dollars)  in Series A funding from Klass Capital, its first outside investment since launching in 2010 (the founders initially put $3 million into the company). While right now it focuses on QuickBooks integration, the funding will allow it to scale its integrations to include Intaact, Wave, Xero, Freshbooks, and other online accounting platforms.

Method’s CEO and founder Paul Jackson was formerly the founder of QXpress, another company that integrated with QuickBooks, in that case providing field service scheduling software. They sold the company to a competitor and started working on Method, with the goal of providing a fully customizable CRM app for small businesses.

“What we saw with our old product is that customers need more credit for how technical they actually are, even these small businesses,” Jackson said about the inspiration for Method. “We figured if they could do that, they could do a lot more, and why limit that to reports.”

Jackson said the company will use the funding to double in size, going from 25 to 50 employees, and to expand internationally to South America, Europe, and Asia. Right now the company has thousands of users in the U.S. They’re also planning to redesign the platform so it doesn’t just work with QuickBooks, but rather encompasses any online accounting tool for SMBs, which will be key to its expansion.

“With the funding, it opens us up to all small businesses. It’s not just a little link into Xero or Freshbooks, it’s really doing everything we’re doing for QuickBooks with Wave, Freshbooks, and Xero as well, which is syncing everything, and making everything available in the CRM that’s available in the accounting [app],” he said. He added that they are actively working with companies like Wave to get their input on the integration, and while they could potentially launch their own CRM apps down the line, he doesn’t view it as competitive today.

The platform tracks sales, marketing, customer service, and contact data, reminding users to follow up on leads and making it easier to reference client data and track issues. It also provides a customer portal for viewing and paying invoices, with all the data synced to QuickBooks, and vice versa. The drag-and-drop interface lets businesses customize their dashboard, and it also features integration with Google Apps. The SaaS platform charges either $25 or $40 per user per month, depending on the number of features.

Expanding to additional accounting platforms will be the key to standing out vs. competitors, from larger players like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, to startups targeting the SMB market, to social CRM startups likeUnifyo and Dynamic Signal that focus on combining customer profiles with their social media presence.

The CRM space isn’t always easy to succeed in, with startups likeNetworkHippo shutting down to focus on other projects. Method plans to test out its new apps over the next few months, with a responsive mobile version slated for April, and an official launch of the new platform slated for the summer. It’s also planning to add integrations with marketing platforms like Mailchimp, as well as shopping cart software. The company’s challenge will be switching from “CRM for QuickBooks” to an all-purpose CRM add-on for any online accounting platform, but with a solid base of users and now this new funding, it should be able to scale out in 2013.

QuickBooks Online for iPad® App Now Available

With today’s introduction of QuickBooks Online for iPad, small businesses that are mobile by nature will no longer have to save the books for last. Rather, they can get more out of their workdays with an app that helps them work more productively, wherever they are.

“As a wedding planner, I spend 70 percent of my time away from my desk meeting with clients and vendors. At the end of the day, I used to sort through my meeting notes, map out next steps, track payments and expenses, and follow up with invoices,” said Sadie Waddington of Locally Grown Weddings in San Francisco, Calif. “Now, I save time by catching up on accounting during the four hours I commute on public transit each week using QuickBooks Online for iPad. The app also helps keep me more organized and look more professional in front of my clients and vendors.”

Now available in the App Store℠, QuickBooks Online for iPad brings the world’s No. 1 small business cloud accounting solution to one of the world’s fastest-growing computing devices. It packages the most useful on-the-go business tasks in an easy-to-use, friendly app with a native iPad experience, including integration with the Camera, Contacts, Push Notifications and Location Services.

“Managing a small business is a different game today than it was a few years ago, due in large part to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets,” said Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Financial Management Solutions division. “We found that more than 20 percent of QuickBooks Mobile for iPhone users access the app through iPads. And, customers like Sadie told us they need more than mobile point solutions – they need an all-in-one app that lets them work in a whole new way, and that’s what we created.”

Get Started Quickly

Starting an account and learning to use QuickBooks Online for iPad takes just minutes.

• Sign-up requires only a username and password.
• Guided setup walks new users through customizing and sending a sample invoice, a common task in QuickBooks, in a couple of minutes.
• Pulling in contact information from other sources is effortless. Users can download customer information from Contacts, Gmail, Yahoo or LinkedIn, and customer pictures from Facebook.

Provide Better Service

QuickBooks Online for iPad empowers small business owners to complete important tasks as they occur, which allows them to provide better customer service and get more time back in their days. It lets them:

• Create and send professional estimates and invoices on the spot to get paid faster.
• Get estimate approval by electronic signature from the customer to expedite jobs.
• Capture photos and notes to remember important project details, and for fast reference when completing forms or answering customer questions.
• Quickly access and browse a complete history of customer interactions, including notes and sales transactions, in the Customer Feed.

Organize Finances in one Place

QuickBooks helps small businesses organize their finances all in one place so they have business insights at their fingertips, and are prepared for tax time. Users can:

• View interactive reports and charts that provide at-a-glance snapshots of income and expenses, or more detailed views.
• Take photos of receipts and enter expenses to be organized for tax time.
• Stay on top of business updates at a glance with the Activity Feed. Users can check recent activity, and focus on what requires action, such as upcoming invoices or overdue accounts, with the “Needs Attention” view.

Financial Management on Many Devices

QuickBooks Online for iPad is the newest addition to the QuickBooks Online suite. Through a singular QuickBooks Online account, a business can access and interact with its data from a computer, iPhone, iPad, or Android devices. Data automatically syncs between devices and users, so small businesses can manage their finances anytime, anywhere.

More than 400,000 companies and 1.3 million individuals subscribe to QuickBooks Online globally, making it the world’s No. 1 cloud accounting solution for small business. Small businesses can easily customize QuickBooks Online by turning on Intuit Payroll, Intuit Payments and a host of third-party apps as their business needs evolve.

Pricing and Availability

QuickBooks Online for iPad is free to download in the App Store. QuickBooks Online subscribers in the United States can start using the app with their account login information right away at no additional cost. New users can instantly create a QuickBooks Online account through the iPad app and sign up for a monthly or annual subscription through In-App Purchase. After a 30-day free trial, QuickBooks Online for iPad starts at $12.99 per month or $124.99 per year, and includes access to QuickBooks Online on the Web and QuickBooks Mobile on a smartphone. Visit http://quickbooks.intuit.com/mobile/ for more information.

The QuickBooks Online for iPad app is available for free from the App Store on iPad or at www.appstore.com/QuickBooksOnlineforiPad.

Free Tax Efficiency Seminar Hosted by Beacon Wealth Management on February 28 at Fairleigh Dickinson University

Beacon Wealth Management will host a complimentary tax efficiency seminar titled Investors Tax Playbook for 2013 on Thursday, February 28 from 6:00 to 9:00 pm at Fairleigh Dickinson University in the Wilson Auditorium in Dickinson Hall, located at 140 University Plaza Drive in Hackensack, NJ (10 minutes from the George Washington Bridge).

Attendees of this program will hear strategic insights, commentary and analysis from the playbooks of three top experts in the fields of tax efficient investing, macroeconomics, domestic and foreign equities, and fixed income. Anyone seeking to enrich their tax and investment knowledge is invited to attend this educational event. Participants will discover strategies to build wealth and keep more of what they earn.

Topics will include:

•     Q1 commentary and analysis of macroeconomic themes
•     Tax changes for 2013 and how they affect you
•     Tax efficient asset management strategies
•     Asset allocation themes
•     Framework for tactical investing
•     Risk and reward – Why “risk-free” is no longer risk free
•     Strategic opportunities in the year ahead

Investors Tax Playbook for 2013 features three speakers with extensive experience in the financial markets. Mark Germain, CFP®, MBA, founder and CEO of Beacon Wealth Management, will share his expertise in the field of tax efficient asset management. Mr. Germain's firm provides investment management and tax efficiency planning to high-net worth individuals and families. He holds the Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) designation and received his MBA in Finance from Northeastern University and B.A. Economics and Accounting from Southern Connecticut State University. Currently, Mr. Germain is an adjunct professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University teaching future CFP® candidates the Estate Planning curriculum.

Gregory R. Kurek, Director, is a member of the Credit, Rates, and Alternatives Product Strategy team within BlackRock's Fixed Income Portfolio Management Group. Prior to joining BlackRock in 2010, Mr. Kurek was a Client Portfolio Manager and Fixed Income Market Strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, where he was responsible for providing market and product insight to clients as well as participating in portfolio strategy and positioning. Mr. Kurek earned a BS degree in finance from Pennsylvania State University.

Simon Arrata is Senior Vice President for Fidelity Financial Advisor Solutions (FFAS), a division of Fidelity Investments. Mr. Arrata joined Fidelity in 2000 as Senior Financial Planning Consultant. There, he managed the investment portfolios for the firm’s high net worth clients, managing over $3 billion in assets, and developed and implemented sophisticated estate and income planning strategies with a focus on intergenerational wealth transfer. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Hunter College in 1988 and a Juris Doctorate (JD) degree from New York Law School in 1993 and is a member in Good Standing of the NYS Bar Association. Mr. Arrata holds FINRA series 7, 63, & 65 as well as his Health, Life & Disability license.

Admission is open to the public and complimentary. Pre-registration is required and can be completed online here at: http://bwmllc.sites.hubspot.com/investors-tax-playbook-2013, by telephone (201) 447 – 9500 or email: tina(at)bwmllc(dot)com. Complimentary kosher refreshments, wine, and soda will be served.

How Quickbooks Online Will Change The World

Okay, we at ExactCPA are suckers for grand declarations so when something called "The Projection Hub" wrote "How QuickBooks Will Change The World", we had to take a look.   Quite amusing.  They  write:  I believe that Quickbooks Online is the final piece of the puzzle for Intuit to control the financial world for you at home, at work, and in the eyes of the government.  You may not realize this but Intuit owns the 3 top finance web applications in the world:

• Mint.com – Personal Finance
• TurboTax – Tax Finance
• Quickbooks – Business Finance

As all three services make the transition from driving to Best Buy, picking up the latest version of TurboTax or Quickbooks, and installing on your computer via CD, to a cloud based solution, Intuit is unlocking an absolute gold mine of data.  Intuit can now take that data from their over 65 million accounts, and make it available to developers like ProjectionHub who will cut and slice the data in order to provide incredibly valuable information to a wide range of customers.  As my day job, I manage a small business loan program, I can think of several ways that we could use Intuit data to make our job of lending money easier.  These are just a few of the ways that I believe Quickbooks Online, and it’s partner programs Mint and TurboTax will change the world for lenders, investors and small businesses everywhere:

1. Predict Business Failures – As a lender and business consultant I would love to be able to take the Quickbooks data of a small business and compare it to aggregate industry data.  For example, an application could easily be developed to compare your restaurant’s sales, margins, cost of goods sold, labor costs, etc to the aggregate of all other restaurants that use Quickbooks Online.  This would tell me what areas the business needs to improve on.  The data can go way beyond that though.  A couple of clever statisticians could find trends that might show that a business with certain sales levels, certain margins, etc fails 40% of the time within 5 years.  You could find commonalities with the businesses that succeeded, and focus on those areas for your business.  No longer do we need a thousand management consultants to tell us their idea for how to improve our business, the data will speak for itself, and the numbers don’t lie.    
2. Benchmark Against Industry in “Real Time” – I already mentioned the idea of benchmarking and comparing your business to other businesses in your industry, but you could take this a step further and compare your business in real time.  Many Quickbooks users are entering in data on a daily basis for their business.  You could watch your daily sales at your coffee shop compared to daily sales of all other coffee shops around the country.  Maybe you run a promotion and business picks up by 10%, and you assume it is because of the promo you are running, but if you noticed that other coffee shops in your region also saw a spike in sales, you might realize that it was not your ad, it was the fact that it was exceptionally cold this week and more people wanted a warm beverage.
3. Simplify Loan and Investment Approval – Finally, I believe that when Quickbooks Online is connected in a coherent way with Mint.com and TurboTax, Intuit could vastly improve the loan and investment approval process.  Lenders typically want to look at both personal and business financial information.  Mint can provide the personal, Quickbooks can provide the business financial info.  Since you can put anything you want into your Mint and Quickbooks account, a tax return is typically used to validate that you are telling the truth.  TurboTax can provide that information quickly and easily for both the personal and business finances.  I could imagine a day when the bank clicks one button that brings all this data together and gives the person a score immediately that will describe their creditworthiness.  This level of information would put the credit score to shame.  Credit score information would still be important, but it would be only a small piece of the overall puzzle, instead of the primary number that most banks look at.

I truly believe I am only scratching the surface with all of the really crazy and cool things that we will be able to do with Intuit data someday.  I would like to develop an app here at ProjectionHub that utilizes this data that is now becoming available, I just need to focus in on one core problem that this data can help solve, and then build it.  Any ideas?

A Comment

Harry Grier

While I agree with your assessment that the data gathered from Intuit’s online customers can potentially be used to make predictions, benchmark businesses, and simplify some aspects of the lending world; I have to throw up a red flag to anybody who is interested in doing so.

I have seen too many businesses who use QB, whether on-line or desktop, who have absolutely no valid data I would want to use for any of the ideas you mentioned. The problem stems from the fact that QB is used by small business owners who have no idea about accounting principles. Their Income Statement and Balance Sheet simply can’t be trusted to make critical decisions. They make critical errors in their entries. IF, and I stress IF, QB brings the error to the owners attention, they often don’t know how to fix it and take whatever suggestion QB proposes. Reconciliation Discrepancies is a very popular GL in QB. In the vast majority of cases, the business owner isn’t purposefully creating bad accounting entries. They just simply don’t know any better.

Here is a perfect example. I know of one sole proprietor who paid themselves from their Retained Earnings account. They wrote the check out of QB, crediting the Cash account and debiting the Retained Earnings account. Their logic was that anything that was retained after all of the expenses was available for paying themselves. Their accountant didn’t question a thing. I don’t know if they prepared tax returns based on this flawed data or if they made a correction and moved on. Either way, the CPA didn’t bring the error to the attention of the sole proprietor. This went on for two years before I discovered it and showed them the correct way to do payroll.

Anybody who buys the customer data from Intuit needs to take it with a grain (a ton would be better) of salt. The data is most likely very flawed.

REPLY

ProjectionHub February 8, 2013 at 6:21 pm

Harry,

I agree there is a lot of room for error; however, any data scientist worth their salt would be able to quickly devise ways to determine what data is likely untrustworthy. For example, you may throw out any business with less than $50,000 in annual sales from your data set, or maybe you get rid of all businesses less than a year old. In your example, we would quickly throw out that data point because it would be an obvious red flag to have a business with significant sales and no payroll. We could probably also throw out businesses that do not reconcile on a monthly basis. We might not have any data left haha, but I think you could find a million businesses out of their 11 million clients that have solid data, and a million businesses is certainly enough to show some clear trends.

Adam Hoeksema

The Cost Of Health Care Insurance, Taxes and Your W-2

Kelly Phillips Erb, the Taxgirl writes for Forbes: Notice any different about your form W-2?

Take a look at Box 12. Seen anything that wasn’t there last year?

The value of health care coverage provided by your employer is now reported in Box 12 with Code DD to identify the amount. The amount reported in the box should include both the portion paid by your employer and any amount paid in by you.

So why is this information showing up on your form W-2 now? Under the Affordable Care Act – you may also refer to it as Obamacare or the health care act – most employers must now report the cost of your health care plan (a few small businesses are still exempt from reporting under the transitional relief offered by IRS).

Chances are that number is more than you thought. A lot more.

The average cost of healthcare for a typical American family of four in an employer-sponsored health plan in 2012 was $20,728. On average, employers paid $12,144 of that total cost while employees paid the rest. Employer contributions for health care plans for the typical American family are now nearly equivalent to the salary of a full time employment for a worker who is paid minimum wage.

And it’s not taxable.

That’s why most Americans don’t even know how much their health care coverage costs. It’s one of those benefits that many of us take for granted because we don’t see it on a tax or wage form.

But now that’s changing. The reporting requirement under the new law will make many more taxpayers aware of the actual cost of their health care benefits.

What’s not changing is the tax treatment of those benefits. It remains federal income tax free to you as an employee. So if you see wages of, say, $50,000 in Box 1 and benefits marked “DD” for health care insurance paid in $15,000 in Box 12, your income for purposes of calculating your federal income tax liability remains $50,000.

The requirement that the benefits are reported on your form W-2 is “for informational purposes only.” The purpose of the rule, according to the IRS, is to “provide employees useful and comparable consumer information on the cost of their health care coverage.” And believe it or not, that specific requirement wasn’t a partisan move: it was actually proposed by a bipartisan quartet made up of Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT); Michael B. Enzi (R-WY); Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-IA); and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).

But let’s be honest: is it really just for informational purposes? The IRS and Congress both say yes – for now. But a number of taxpayers fear that it’s not. That fear isn’t totally unfounded. The tax free treatment of health care insurance benefits is a whopping $180 billion tax break to employees. And while for now raising the notion of taxing health care coverage – especially now that it’s mandated – would be political suicide, that doesn’t mean that won’t change. You know that somewhere, some Senator has circled that number – $180 billion – in red ink.