Intuit and Mailchimp: What Does it Mean for ProAdvisors?

When I listened to Intuit's Alex Chriss talk about the Mailchimp deal earlier this week, my first thought was to wonder about the effects on ProAdvisors, accountants and bookkeepers like you. I reached out to Intuit to ask a couple of questions. Here are their answers. 

Question 1: Alex Chriss said that 2/3rds of small businesses say their biggest challenge is getting customers. He added that to date, Intuit has been highly successful in helping small business owners run their businesses, and now Intuit is ready to help them grow their businesses. I see a healthy tension between what Intuit offers small businesses directly, QB Live Bookkeeping, and the accountants and bookkeepers who provide professional services. But the audience of The Woodard Report is accounting and bookkeeping professionals, and I can't ignore the fact that they are also running their own small businesses. How will Intuit continue to help those accounting and bookkeeping professionals, in particular, grow even as Intuit expands front office services generally to small businesses as a whole? 

Intuit's answer: Accounting professionals are our top priority and true partners as we share the same mission: to help small businesses succeed. At the same time, we recognize that accountants and bookkeepers are also small business owners. That’s why we spend each day focused on how we can help accounting professionals grow their practice and scale their impact to not only ensure their own success but also the success of their clients. We do this today through the ProAdvisor Program and QuickBooks Online Accountant.  

The ProAdvisor Program provides free training, certification, and educational content to help accountants grow their skills and learn how to get the most out of the QuickBooks platform to better serve their clients. The program also includes Find-a-ProAdvisor, a free web-based platform visited by millions of small businesses worldwide looking to connect to a QuickBooks certified ProAdvisor. 

QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA), also free, is designed to give accountants the unique tools they need to manage their clients’ books and present data and insights to help them better advise clients on growth opportunities. Our commitment to the ProAdvisor Program and QBOA remains steadfast. We will continue to improve upon both, providing additional tools, training, discounted product pricing and more, to help accountants grow and prosper as small business owners and advisors. 

Question 2: Alex Chriss said, "We certainly see Mailchimp as a great front door for us into the rest of the ecosystem”. As accountants and bookkeepers listen to this conversation or read about it, one of the questions that they may have is - where will the existing Mailchimp customers be directed for expert accounting/bookkeeping advice when they are newly introduced to QuickBooks - to the ProAdvisor pool or to QuickBooks Live?

Intuit's answer: We are very excited about our plans to acquire Mailchimp and look forward to further helping small and mid-sized businesses succeed and grow. Both the QuickBooks and Mailchimp teams are working diligently to identify all the possible integration touch points across both platforms. We will have more details after the deal closes, which is expected by the end of January 2022. In the meantime, nothing changes for accountants, their clients, or customers of QuickBooks and Mailchimp.