The News: Intuit announced a new solution fully integrated within Intuit QuickBooks that is designed to provide small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) with automation, digitized recordkeeping, seamless payments, advanced controls with roles and permissions for their team, and simplified vendor and contractor management. QuickBooks Bill Pay integrates bill tracking and payment within the QuickBooks platform and provides several automation and management functions designed to improve payment simplicity, speed, and accuracy that can help businesses manage their money more effectively.
You can read a press release highlighting the news on the Intuit website.
Intuit QuickBooks Bill Pay Driving Automation and Efficiency
Analyst Take: In mid-October, Intuit announced the release of QuickBooks Bill Pay, a new solution within QuickBooks that is designed to provide enhanced and friction-free digital recordkeeping, payments, and vendor and contractor management. Leveraging automation and management controls, the solution is targeted at SMBs that are seeking to streamline the payment and recordkeeping process, thereby improving accuracy and efficiency.
The solution incorporates several features that mirror the functionality of payments systems used in mid-market and enterprise businesses but with a design that is simple enough for small businesses with limited technology expertise and resources.
Intuit highlighted key features that are included in QuickBooks Bill Pay:
- Automatic Bill Creation: QuickBooks automatically imports and invoices and creates a bill, only requiring a human to review and save the bill.
- Role Management: QuickBooks Bill Pay Elite customers can share roles and permissions to decide who can create, approve, and pay bills, providing access to workers who need this functionality while restricting access to other QuickBooks features.
- Automatic Recording of Payments: When paying vendors and contractors through QuickBooks, the transaction is automatically recorded and matched for the business in their books using QuickBooks’ integrated accounts payable (AP) automation capabilities.
- Single Location Storage of Digital Records: Digital records of bills and payments are consolidated rather than saved across multiple platforms, spreadsheets, or folders.
- Support for Digital and Physical Payments: Send electronic payments or paper checks, with QuickBooks automatically issuing and mailing digital or physical payments.
- Consolidation of Vendor Information: Vendor information is consolidated and stored within QuickBooks, streamlining tax and compliance tasks. With QuickBooks Bill Pay Premium or Elite, businesses can also file unlimited 1099s for no additional fee.
- Access to the Intuit QuickBooks Business Network: Intuit also announced that QuickBooks Bill Pay enhances the Intuit QuickBooks Business Network, one of the largest business-to-business (B2B) networks aimed at accelerating and automating B2B payments and improving overall cash flow. When a business sends a payment through QuickBooks Bill Pay, vendors that are not part of the QuickBooks Business Network will receive an invite to join. If they choose to sign up, the vendor can save their payment details securely to their network profile for future payments, saving time and reducing errors often associated with manual entry and eliminating the need to share this information with multiple parties. Vendors on the network can also track the status of their incoming QuickBooks Bill Pay payments.
New Features and Capabilities Are Elevating QuickBooks to Appeal To Mid-Market and Larger Firms
At Intuit’s annual Investor Day, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi laid out his vision for the company’s growth over the next several years, highlighting the massive amount of accounting and financial data the company has acquired, driven by its 100 million customers.
“We have defined the mid-market as 10 to 100 employees,” Goodarzi said. “I want to be clear that our stopping point is not 100. In fact, most companies don’t even define 10 to 100 employees as mid-market. It’s far greater. Our stopping point in the very near term has been 100 [employees]. But our goal is to be able to serve mid-market customers that are in the 1,000s because this is a massive opportunity for the company. Now, what makes us unique, what gives us the right to be able to do what I just shared? It’s what we’ve been talking about for the last five years — we now solve every job for a customer, whether you’re a consumer or a small business, and we have incredible scale of 100 million customers.”
However, two additional factors appear to be setting up Intuit to succeed as it targets companies that are larger than 100 employees. First, the company has integrated AI across its entire platform via its GenOS operating system, enabling routine tasks and intelligent assistant features to be deployed.
According to data included in The Futurum Group’s Artificial Intelligence & Data Analytics IQ Dashboard, AI software and cloud compute revenue growth will be strong over the next 5 years, reaching $182 billion in 2027 global annual revenue, up from $65.7 billion in 2022. Some of the key use categories that are being deployed within Intuit’s product portfolio are the true growth engines in the market, including conversational AI; pattern identification, analysis, and decisioning; predictive analytics; process optimization; and text analysis, generation, and summarization.
Second, the company’s automation and data consolidation tools are more closely replicating the types of tools and features used by larger organizations, in terms of function, ease of use, and integration with other systems and organizations. The increasing technical functionality, combined with the use of AI, bodes well for a company that has been very successful among SMBs and consumers and is well positioned to target larger companies in the future.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Intuit Assist Brings Generative AI to Consumers and SMB Customers
Exploring the Ins and Outs of the Generative AI Boom
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
