Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, review Intuit Enterprise Suite, designed for businesses focused on growth, providing one scalable, integrated solution that decreases manual, repetitive tasks with streamlined processes, boosts productivity through powerful automation, and unlocks actionable insights for faster decision making.
Watch the video, or listen to the audio podcast below (transcript below):
Or use the below podcast player to listen:
Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab, sponsored by CPA practice advisor, with your host, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley,
Randy Johnston 00:11
welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host Brian Tankersley, ish. You may know Brian might have reviewed more accounting software products than any other CPA in the country, and we’ve got another new accounting software product to discuss with you today, the new Intuit enterprise suite. Now I have taken my CPA training on the platform, and there’s a couple of very important capabilities in the platform, including 20 dimensions for reporting and being able to run consolidations. But this is not cheap software. It really is intended to be mid market. So Brian, I know you’ve been around the QuickBooks platforms, both legacy desktop, in all the various versions, and QuickBooks Online and all the various versions, and taught a lot of those courses. But what, what do you think our listeners need to know about the Intuit enterprise suite?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 01:11
I think it, I think it is an upgrade from the perspective of, you know, from the perspective of it does include 20 dimensions. It does include multi company and intercompany capabilities and quite a few, quite a few things like that. I also think that you know when we’re when we’re looking at this, I want you to be very careful with the word enterprise in here. Okay, because when you and I and most accountants talk about enterprise. We’re talking about fortune 500 SAP, Oracle e business suite and and again, the the top end stuff that’s highly customized for the workflows. Okay? What we’re talking about here is a low end, mid market product that is also integrated with platforms to allow sell through of payroll, benefits, insurance, 401, k as well as, as well as some additional, some additional data integration with MailChimp and so, you know, I guess the the thing I would just kind of generally say here Is that I think there is a need for this product. I think the the big, the big open thing to figure out is is going to be how this is going to be received by the partners when they get it to sell, and and how this is going to replace QuickBooks Enterprise. Because I think that’s the 800 pound, you know, I think that’s the, the 800 pound gorilla in the room, that that everybody needs to talk about is that, is that, again, this, this is, appears to be what they’re picking out to replace QuickBooks Enterprise on a going forward basis. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 02:55
So, you know, that is background there. You know, the industries that were presented as being, you know, capable in this product they call industry specific needs. And I think they can do some of this pretty well, construction being a good example. But also the product is pictured to be light manufacturing, and based on my understanding of the platform to date, not so much on that. So, you know, I know Intuit folks might disagree with me on that, but, you know, I don’t think so. Now,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 03:25
all I can, I can’t name a single kind of manufacturing that’s going to go well in in QBO advanced at this point, simply because, you know, you look at the assemblies, you look at all those things that and it’s, you know, I don’t know. I mean, I can’t imagine make to order, Make to Stock, custom order. You know, customized, customization. I mean, you know, process manufacturing a lot, you know, maybe it does lot in serial tracking. But it’s, again, it’s, it’s a matter of trying to figure out what those workflows look like in here. Yeah, and
Randy Johnston 03:59
your caution on into an enterprise in the name is another pretty important one, because, again, you’re used to talking with me and my biases tier 1234, and five, and I’ve always put QuickBooks down at tier five and sap up at tier one, and competitor like sage Intacct at tier three, and maybe, maybe NetSuite up at tier two, but, you know, not much more capable than sage in tech, and I think into it. Is it targeting the sage intaccts And the net suites of the world, and they’ve got a long way to go. This product, in my opinion, is at best tier four right now, 444, and a half, yeah, yeah, yeah, somewhere in that range. So, anyway, but, but let’s,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 04:41
let’s say in fairness here, okay, in fairness, those other products are $200 per user per month, every month, okay? And they have a minimum of five or 10 users. And so I want to, I want to be fair, to into it that they have a less complete product, but they also. Have a they also have a significantly lower price, yeah,
Randy Johnston 05:04
and, you know, knowing that that’s this positioning, and we have done other technology labs on a lot of these other products, and we will be, you know, attending the Acumatica conference and many others in the near term, and we’ll produce new content on all of these mid market products. But just to give a pricing perspective, that’s a little different. Microsoft 365 Business Central is $70 per user per month. Okay, so if you’ve got 10 users, you know $700 times 12 is 8400 and most of the Intuit enterprise right now is being sold in a cooperative sale with Intuit involved. And the numbers that we understand, and again, don’t quote these. You always have to get your pricing from the vendors, but we wanted to give you perspective, is about $7,500 for the base system, $5,000 for each additional company. And Intuit expects the average business to spend 22 five on the platform. Okay? So again, that doesn’t sound over the top in terms of a, you know, a mid market type of sale, and when you consider the current pricing of QuickBooks, desktop, enterprise, per user. For our purposes, I’m going to call it a couple of 1000 user. You know, times 10 is 20,000 Okay, 20,000 versus 22,000 okay, we’re kind of in the same ballpark. But QuickBooks, enterprise, desktop and Intuit enterprise, are less capable than Microsoft. 365 Business Central, or sage Intacct or NetSuite. So, you know, again, we’re just trying to help you understand what’s going on here. Now, the good news is it’s somewhat familiar feeling, because it’s kind of like QuickBooks Online in terms of its look and feel, and, you know, the reporting tools and the payment integrations and a lot of the other technologies that Intuit has developed over time, they’re integrated as well. So it gives you a chance, if you’re currently a QBO shop, to keep people on something that looks like QBO, or possibly convert people from enterprise. So, you know, there’s some modules and so forth that are included in here, or capabilities. Brian, what are maybe three or four, maybe five of the other functions that are out there?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:32
Sure, well, it’s, of course, it’s using the Intuit payments and Bill Pay in there. So they, they again, want to, want to be involved in the transaction and the funding and everything. They’ve got some stuff on project profitability, some financial management, including financial planning and analysis capabilities, payroll and HR, as well as marketing. But again, they’re also, they’re also putting in the middle of this health insurance through Allstate. They’re putting in their workers comp. They’re putting in there some retirement plans. So it’s clear that they are intending to have integrated solutions that also help them monetize the suite with referral fees.
Randy Johnston 08:15
Yeah, yeah, that whole financial services play we’ve talked about for some time, and we also have been concerned not knowing a firm timing for the discontinuance of the desktop versions. One little fact that’s kind of interesting to know is the guarantee to write works that they would allow hosting of enterprise through 2027 so we know we’re in a window here where QuickBooks Desktop enterprise will exist for a while, but of course, we’re already past the new sales of the legacy QuickBooks Desktop products. So it’s clear we’re in a transition period.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 08:51
Yeah, that’s, right, it’s, it’s, you know, and again, it is, it is an interesting time. Here’s another slide from their deck on this, you know. Again, they’re they’re incorporating some bi functions. They also are including their Gen OS, their proprietary AI based tool. They’re saying that this is going to be the the tool that actually will do a good job on on multi company consolidated reports. They’ve got features in here. I actually saw that they have some intercompany capabilities in regular desktop enterprise, but it looks like they’re going to have some intercompany capabilities in here too. One thing that is a big deal that they’ve added is this multi dimensional piece where, you know, again, we’ve had classes and locations in the past that most of you are familiar with, but you can have up to 18 more of these fields that you use to classify things. And again, I would just caution everybody to be careful that you don’t go too crazy setting these things up, because what happens is you end up tagging every transaction with the. Mentioned that’s associated with it. So you want to have enough, but not too many, okay? And 2020, is going to be too many for most people. And and again, because it’s shiny, some people may be, may tend toward putting a whole bunch in. So we just want to be careful with that. They also have, they also have some revenue recognition tools, some, again, intercompany transaction tool, some financial planning analysis, some workflow automation, as well as some industry solutions to address areas around services and contract and general contracting, so job costing, change orders, project profitability features in there as well. Then notice that they also have in here a bunch of marketing capabilities that, again, are driven by MailChimp and some CRM tools. They have financial services associated with this, including the QuickBooks business network and QB money, which I think is, is, again, a big part of, big part of this as well. If we look at getting capital, notice that they list term loans lines of credits, as well as the QuickBooks capital marketplace, where, again, they’re, they’re trying to be involved in, in more and more of the of the financing.
Randy Johnston 11:17
And those are web bank and QuickBooks capital backed on those services. So, you know, there’s plays on that.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:25
And then you’ve got the workforce management, where, again, they’re integrating with hrs. Is, I don’t think they’ve got an HRIS, but they’re again, providing payroll through QuickBooks. And then you have the QuickBooks live features in here, which is the, again, the one of the things again, that is, that is difficult for some. Some accounting professionals really struggle with and consider to be a competitive offering. You know, they have live setup, live bookkeeping and live business tax in here, as well as MailChimp live. So, you know, again, this is it’s a there again, with MailChimp lives, they’re really increasing their the scope of their offerings to to these folks,
Randy Johnston 12:14
yeah, so, you know, we’ve talked about some of the privacy issues and so forth with MailChimp and some of the other platforms on Intuit, but I do appreciate the positioning on the platform and some of the scope. Now, again, this is relatively new as the year unfolds, more will come out. Brian and I will continue to learn more about this and talk about it more as it becomes better known. But you know, at least at this point, we wanted to make sure that you had some background and exposure. Now, the base package for Intuit enterprise has financials in it, so you can buy one company or multiple companies. You get some discounts for additional companies. We’ve already talked about the dimensions, and then there’s the users are broken up in multiple tiers. There’s standard users and free users and super users that are there. The free users are basically view only access for reports and invoices. So it, you know, pushes that out a little bit more. The bill pay is in their family, so they’re trying to pull that inside. And they also have preferred payment rates. One of the things that they thought they’d have to do with this enterprise system is have dedicated support reps, so they not only have customer success managers, but also mid market product experts that are, you know, included with the subscriptions when you do the premium professional services. So just be aware that you know that you’re going to have those things available now there’s other solutions for additional cost, including the ability to run payroll and timekeeping and being able to get MailChimp premium, and to be able to do implementation and integration services and get customized training and reporting, every indication is the implementations are all going to be remote, but that’s yet to be seen, because on more complex businesses, sometimes That doesn’t work very well. And of course, I’ve actually already called out that if you’re throwing additional entities, you’ll have extra dollars related to that. But there’s also an additional dimension pricing as well. Further standard user super users have additional uplift costs too. Now Intuit has not provided price sheets to us at this point in time, nor have they provided their terms of service EULA and Privacy Policy, which I have requested. So again, there’s going to be things that are being learned, but let’s face it, this thing’s only been out a couple of months in the initial rollout. Ups, and, you know, the information is still somewhat limited. Now, the people that I’ve talked to that are in the council have been involved with for a while. They’ve got more insights, but there’s quite a bit of information that’s still not very public, and that’s a little confusing to me, but I think I see where they’re going with it. But, you know, we’ll have to see. So, you know, we talked earlier about the ideal fit clients, Brian and you know, what is the current Intuit positioning on that?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:33
Well, they, they see, realistically, you know, three basic profiles in here. One is going to be entity organizations that operate multiple US based entities generate more than 3 million in revenue and have multi entities, and again, have have multiple entities involved. Another one would be single entity users that require multi dimensional reporting, and then the industries, industry specializations that they’re focused on, again, are going to be construction, nonprofit, profit, service and project based and professional service businesses. So again, they’re trying to leverage those that that Job Costing or the again, the job reporting feature that they have into the industries where that plays well,
Randy Johnston 16:22
yeah. So that said, those are the primaries for the platform. So, you know, we’ve already mentioned a few of what we call the key features, but Brian, I think you’ve got a a few opinions on on those items, and we’ve mentioned them a bit, but we want to summarize them here.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 16:42
Yeah, so, so again, multi entity, dimensions, up to 20. Again, be careful with with these when you’re assigning them, do kind of a gut check. You know, three or four dimensions is a good number. 20 is too many, okay, so, so figuring out how you can make that work is important for industry customization, again, I I haven’t seen enough yet to make me comfortable with this in a manufacturing environment. Maybe you could make it work with wholesale distribution or something like that. You know, the dimensions certainly will help there. Project Management, financials is interesting. FPA, you know, going beyond budgets and cash flow, cash flow reporting, I think is going to be an interesting piece that we’ll have to see how that, how that also flushes out, that’s, that’s, again, another place where they’re adding capability, potentially. And again, I haven’t spent as much time on this product as as others have. Again, it seems like we’re almost in in in a live preview for this product right now.
Randy Johnston 17:48
You know, that’s kind of an interesting way to talk about it, Brian. Because, you know, I push Brian to say, look, I’d really like to at least have something out for our listeners, for Intuit enterprise, because I’m sure they’ll hear about it, and we wanted to let you know what we thought was key things to know at this point.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 18:09
For example, I’m not aware that they have, that they have a partner program for this yet that is active, you know, actively selling it the same way the Intuit solution providers are selling the the QuickBooks Enterprise product, the desktop product, yeah, and
Randy Johnston 18:26
right now, the preferred sales methodology is, you know, partner works with Intuit directly to close the deal. And I think that’s partially to get the scoping and expectation set correctly, and I think it’s also to continue to work on the pricing model, but again, that’s my observation. So we prefer to be very fact based here in the technology lab, and facts are few and far between on the platform.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 18:57
That’s fair. That’s fair, all right. Well, I guess, you know, I’m, I’m waiting with bated breath to see where we go with this and where what happens with it. I think it’s a needed product. I’m, you know, again, I’m, I think it’s going to be interesting to see how this is accepted by the marketplace as time goes on. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 19:19
Well, I appreciate those closing thoughts there, Brian, because again, I wanted at least enough of our listeners to be aware of it. Intuit is routinely promoting CPA courses. It’s the orientation. They’ve got a few other courses, and I have intentionally attended them just to hear what the messaging was from Intuit and the product manager behind them, but we’ll see what happens over time. And you know there’s a lot of a lot of road ahead, so we do appreciate you listening in, and we will talk to you again soon in another technology lab. You have a good day today.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:59 Thank you for sure. Sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
= END =
Thanks for reading CPA Practice Advisor!
Subscribe Already registered? Log In
Need more information? Read the FAQs