Meet Ted Callahan - Leader, Accountant Segment at Intuit (Part 2)

Joining us today is Ted Callahan, the Accountant Segment Leader at Intuit. He’ll be talking about how Intuit and QuickBooks empower accountants, bookkeepers and other small business advisors and what changes are developing in the process.

The following is a conversation between Joe Woodard and Ted Callahan. This conversation will be featured in audio in an upcoming Scaling New Heights Podcast episode.

Joe Woodard: I know you just stepped into the role, so it may be a little bit early to be asking these questions, but if you had a magic wand, you could wave it and you could make anything happen in the Pro Advisor program, or for accountants and bookkeepers beyond the Pro Advisor program, what would it be?

Ted Callahan: It's a great question. Joe. When I look at the Pro Advisor program, it's predicated on being number one, a community of accountants and being a place where you can share best practices. There's an established bar of quality because of the certification in the training, which is the next big tranche of work.

And there's a series of benefits that come along with being a member of this community and getting certifications. It’s driving more and more people to be not just using or buying the software, but actually using it in good ways.

I see opportunities for advancing that program. If you look at the pace of innovation that's coming out of the QuickBooks teams across the ecosystem from our payments team, our payroll team as well as our QuickBooks Online accounting team, It has never been hacked faster or higher.

We need to keep up with the pace of innovation. We've got a look at our training and ask how we can train better, faster, and more effectively. That’s number one. Number two, when we go back and we talk about that community. Well, we're in a virtual world, how are we, enabling more community.

We've been talking about some of the adjustments that you're making on the Scaling New Heights program. How do we keep leaning into that? and it's an opportunity. We can have more people now than ever actually able to connect through a virtual event because you don't have the expense and the time of travel. I think there's some big opportunities there.

And then finally, when I think about the benefits that we're providing I think there's an opportunity to ask if we are providing the right benefits, given what we're trying to do today, which is powering workflows across a variety of different applications.

So that's going to be the other area that we're digging deep into, Joe.

Joe Woodard: And then there's a whole rich partnership realm that exists within Intuit that's not accounting or bookkeeper. It’s developer. How do you see Intuit’s relationships with developers as helping you to protect the Pro Advisor’s journey?

Ted Callahan: That's another extremely active conversation. I've been meeting with a number of the leaders on the developer team about that. Again, the one of the key things that accountants have taught me is that they think about workflows. So they're trying to get accounts receivable or accounts payable done. They're not thinking of a specific tool to do that. They're thinking end-to-end: what does their client need to do, how do they insert themselves in that process, and where can automation play a role?

So what I see the need for is for Intuit to be more specific about a set of apps we have identified that are built to work well within the QuickBooks Online system. We want to be investing in the apps that help our customers the most and enable accountants on those so they can do their jobs faster. We need to ask: Are we curating apps clearly, and are we training on the apps correctly? Where are they working well? When things don’t go well, are we providing the tools to make the right adjustments?

I've heard loud and clear that there are some big wish-fors, such as being able to roll back transactions or have a sandbox to try out new apps. So we're exploring many areas.

Joe Woodard: I've noticed that sometimes the best answer to that is that Intuit acquires the partner, which happened in the backup realm. And then you can begin to put some proprietary code in there that's not available to third parties. Everybody's waiting expectantly to see if that backup does become a true comprehensive snapshot. You just picked an excellent example because you’re addressing an acute need in that acquisition.

But the other thing that I believe that the developer community can do is bridge the gap between what bookkeepers know they need to do, which is embrace advisory, and actually deliver those advisory services. Products like Fathom are a bridge to advisory and so are products like LivePlan for strategic planning services. I would encourage taking an ecosystem approach to your deployment of QuickBooks and let that ecosystem empower you to get past the barrier you thought, and maybe still think, is impenetrable.

Ted Callahan: Now those are those are wonderful points. And you also reminded me of a big facet of how I see my role of deepening the partnership with accountants. First I listen, then I come back with: “Here's our agenda. Here's what we're going to be doing the same. Here's what we're going to do more of. Here's what we're going to change.”

I think also that role that I play on our team is being a steward of that voice of the accountant across all the different product teams at Intuit to make them aware of the power of the accountant voice. They’re power users of the software features and functionality. And then developing that in ways that really enable that community to do their jobs better and faster, so they can then move to advisory.

My team, the accounting team, can step in saying, “Now that we've created more capacity through automation, better tooling and better integration of third-party apps, here are the real opportunities for our accounting and bookkeeping professionals to take their practices to the next level through things like advisory.” For example, we’re getting into cash flow forecasting. That's a big part of the agenda as well, but one that we're going to be making sure we're learning our way into versus moving too far, too fast.

Joe Woodard: Well, and that's ultimately where the two visions intersect the most because if the vision is powering prosperity, I can think of no greater way than through everything you just described. And that was a perfect and comprehensive description: delivering effectively through the account channel so that small businesses prosper, so that their ownership of those business processes for their employees prosper. It can literally change the world. And I know that can become trite because it's just said too much, but you've got an army of almost half a million small business advisors. That's game-changing stuff. We just have to get them the right tools, and it sounds like you've got the vision to back that up.

Ted, thanks so much for being with us today. I wish you well in your journey and we collectively are here to support you in any way we can.

Ted Callahan: Thank you so much for having me. Joe, great conversation and I look forward to more.

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