QuickBooks cloud management software simplifies finance biz

A growing number of India’s businesses and accountants are using Intuit QuickBooks to simplify running their business finances, making it one of the country’s leading cloud-based financial management solutions. Launched in India in 2012, QuickBooks has recorded over 200 percent growth in subscriber adoption in the last fiscal year.

QuickBooks is Intuit Inc.’s flagship business and financial management software, providing users with easy, cloud-based access to their finances through an Internet-connected computer or data plan-enabled smartphone.

QuickBooks is largely being adopted by the new age technology savvy small businesses from the retail sector and in service industries, including travel and tourism, information technology and telecommunications, accounting services, and advertising and design agencies. Intuit also serves one in five of India’s 120,000 practicing chartered accountants.

Adoption of QuickBooks by accountants has grown at 75 percent over the last fiscal. Accountants play a key role in recommending their own clients to migrate to QuickBooks. With the acquisition of KDK Softwares, Intuit has acquired 22,000 accountant customers and has a nationwide partner network in India that includes more than 60 channel partners.

Nikhil Arora, Vice President and Managing Director of Intuit India, says “The rapid year-on-year traction that Intuit QuickBooks has experienced in India is indeed very encouraging. Intuit is the world leader in cloud financial management solutions, available in over 124 countries . Last quarter we added 100,000 new QuickBooks subscribers and now we have 841,000 paying subscribers worldwide. Our vision is to become the operating system behind Indian small business success by delivering powerful solutions on the cloud. We will continue to work on empowering small businesses in their journey to success. Today we serve one out of five practicing chartered accountants in India and by 2020 we are looking at one in four small businesses to be using Intuit products and services.”

Varun Chawla, Co-founder, 91 Springboard, one of I ndia's largest co- working hub for startups, shares how the solution has affected the way he does business “Getting the reports in the way we wanted was quite cumbersome when we used a desktop accounting solution. Intuit QuickBooks puts all the reports in one place where we can view and review data better and make several business decisions faster. Our offices are distributed in different cities, so the cloud feature reduces the time gap by providing access to multiple users instantly. I believe that ‘time is money,’ and I now have more time to focus on marketing and product development. One more significant tangible cost benefit is the savings on the resource allocation as we don’t necessarily need to put accounting specialists on the job for managing our accounts.”

To meet this growing and varied demand, QuickBooks has partnered with Paybooks to offer integrated payroll, with the user interface and workflow running within QuickBooks to provide a seamless experience across accounting and payroll. The QuickBooks India edition now includes an enhanced sales tax (VAT/CST) workflow that simplifies tax and compliance for small businesses & accountants.

With a growing number of subscribers are actively using the QuickBooks Online mobile application, QuickBooks online is also available on Android and iOS operating systems. We are seeing QuickBooks mobile is increasingly being used for checking outstanding receivables, raise instant invoices and check the health of their business while they are on the go.

QuickBooks’ contribution to the accountant and small and medium business ecosystem has been awarded the “Asia Pacific Deal of the Year 2014” by Acquisitions International Global Media, and the “Online Accounting Software of the Year 2014” by Silicon India.

Harsh Vardhan, director of Wealth Cafe Financial Advisors Pvt. Ltd., a leading accounting firm, explains the tangible and intangible benefits he experiences and how the features helps him acquire new business “Our company and clients are not always co-located, so we needed a solution that didn’t require us to physically visit the client’s office. Intuit QuickBooks went beyond our expectations. Never before have we experienced the power of viewing data across locations at the same time. The cloud-based solution saves even a phone call or an email as the data can be viewed real time by our clients given the multiple user login feature and mobile access. Sitting in my office at Kandivali in Mumbai, I can now service my client in Navi Mumbai, some 60 kilometers away. For that matter, I can serve our clients thousands of miles away, in the USA and Singapore. A key business benefit is surely the confidence in our ability to service any client irrespective of the location.

“The budgeting feature that tracks actual versus budgeted for business and personal balance sheets is also quite popular amongst our clients as it helps our customers keep a track of their finances. New customers are approaching us with a pre-requisite of having worked on QuickBooks and that talks volumes about the customer adoption for cloud.”