TWR Podcast Episode 96: Intuit Enterprise Suite Ft. Bill Murphy

Intuit, the software giant known for accounting and bookkeeping tools like TurboTax and QuickBooks, has just rolled out a new product, Intuit Enterprise Suite, which seeks to provide mid-market businesses with a comprehensive management solution for financial management, marketing, payroll, customer engagement, and more.

In episode 96 of the Woodard Report Podcast (sponsored by RightWorks), Heather Satterley welcomed special guest William “Murph” Murphy to discuss the big news from Intuit.

A focus on the mid-market with small business appeal

According to its press release, Intuit's new product aims to serve mid-market businesses or those generating $3 to $250 million in sales annually. The stated goal of the Intuit Enterprise Suite is to provide these companies with an all-in-one solution, reducing the need for multiple software subscriptions by consolidating all of the functions that firms typically use multiple tools for into a single platform.

Murphy explained why this new product might also be attractive to independent contractors and smaller practitioners. He said many QuickBooks users rely on up to 10 apps, not counting QuickBooks, to cover everything from payroll to bill pay, leading to rapidly escalating costs.

“One of the things small contractors look at is, ‘how much money am I spending on trying to do the things I'm trying to do at the detail level,’” Murphy said. “When they start seeing that they're spending quite literally hundreds and hundreds of dollars to package a bundle of apps to track everything they're doing, they'll be more prone to looking a single solution.”

Pricing and availability

Pricing for the Intuit Enterprise Suite has not been officially published, but Satterley mentioned that Intuit’s CEO Sasan Goodarzi said in an interview that it would be competitive compared to other enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

The pricing model will likely vary based on factors like the number of users, companies, and features needed. Satterley noted that Intuit is expected to offer some flexibility in pricing, similar to how other ERP systems operate.

QuickBooks Online Advanced cross-functionality

Based on the screenshots released by Intuit, Satterley pointed out that the interface of the new platform looks similar to that of QuickBooks Online (QBO) Advanced. She also mentioned that, based on the language mentioned by the press release, Intuit’s Enterprise Suite would include features previously QuickBooks Labs, a feature update to the QuickBooks platform released in 2014.

Murphy said the new product was likely built on Intuit’s QBO Advanced platform, suggesting that this was probably how current QBO users would be able to use their existing profiles.

Industry focus: construction

The Intuit Enterprise Suite offers tools to give its users industry-specific insight, with features built to provide financial data, project management, and business performance solutions tailored to specific professions.

Satterley noted that construction, an industry known for its complex financial management needs, is the first industry Intuit plans to tackle with this new suite.

“I'll be interested to see the tools they've put into this enterprise suite that are going to cater to construction,” she said. “As you and I both know, you've got job costing, you've got multi-year accounting for assets…so it will be very interesting to see how well that gets rolled out.”

AI and human support

Of course, artificial intelligence (AI) is currently a hot topic of discussion, with most major tech companies—including Intuit—recently rolling out new product offerings that seek to expand the capabilities of this nascent technology.

Satterley and Murphy discussed how AI-powered features will be prevalent in the Intuit Enterprise Suite. Satterley said Goodarzi emphasized that, rather than the enterprise suite being an “AI-driven” product, it should be viewed as a platform in which “AI-powered humans” provide support and training to users, who also benefit from AI-driven tools.

Intuit has said that the suite will come with support from a dedicated team that will offer technical and financial guidance, leveraging both AI and human expertise to assist users with any challenges they encounter.

“I think it'll mirror a lot of some of what the other ERPs are doing,” Murphy explained, “where you have a digital assistant that is built into essentially every screen, so that if you have a question—not so much about the screen, but the results that are appearing—you can get that help on, ‘Why is my cash flow this?’ Or, ‘why is my particular account showing that?’ Or, ‘where did this number come from?’ And that's pretty well where all of the ERPs are going. At least the entry-level ERPs are certainly going that direction.”