Intuit Unveils Salesforce for QuickBooks

Salesforce for QuickBooks is compatible with QuickBooks Pro and Premier 2011 and 2012.

Business and financial management solutions specialist Intuit unveiled Salesforce for QuickBooks, which is designed to help enable small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) manage their customer relationships. Salesforce for QuickBooks is the result of an alliance that Intuit and Salesforce.com announced earlier in the year. The news comes as part of Intuit's QuickBooks 2012 product announcement, which offers customers new features that give better insights, provide more organization and save time.

These features allow midmarket companies to give their sales representatives a 360-degree view of customers with a look at current deals alongside up-to-date financial information and close the gap between sales and marketing with the ability to track and cultivate leads from various online, offline and social media campaigns using dashboard reports to measure performance across channels.

In addition, the platform helps businesses speed order processing and reduce double data entry by automatically creating a transaction in QuickBooks when a deal is closed in Salesforce and pinpoint a customer's needs with insight into all interactions a customer has had with the company including a history of what the customer owns, what products they are interested in and a history of warranty claims or open issues.

Salesforce for QuickBooks is available in a Group Edition and Professional Edition, which are compatible with QuickBooks Pro and Premier 2011 and 2012. The products also work with QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Enterprise versions 11.0 and 12.0. Salesforce for QuickBooks is currently being offered at a limited-time promotional price of $18 per user, per month for Group Edition and $60 per user, per month for Professional Edition.

"By integrating these best in class products, millions of small businesses can now seamlessly connect their front office and back office, sharing relevant information across the business," said Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager of Intuit's financial management solutions division. "The combination of QuickBooks and Salesforce data provides a powerful, expanded view of business information that will help users turn leads into customers."

For small businesses that already have both products, all that is needed is the Salesforce Integration for QuickBooks application. It is compatible with the above versions of QuickBooks as well as Group and Professional Editions of Salesforce. The application costs $20 per company, per month for Group Edition and $40 per company, per month for Professional Edition, the company noted.

"Saving time is crucial to running my business and Salesforce for QuickBooks allows me to do just that," said Richard Holtz of InfiniSys Electronic Architects. "It helps my team make decisions faster by providing insights into sales and accounting data all in one place. Additionally, we can automatically keep information up to date in both QuickBooks and Salesforce, which reduces the risk of manual errors and lets us focus on closing more deals."

Intuit's annual survey of small business owners found that 54 percent of respondents reported a decline in customer base was their biggest challenge and 27 percent claimed that growing their businesses keeps them up at night. "Managing customer relationships is a key challenge for small businesses," noted Ron Huddleston, vice president of ISV alliances at Salesforce.com.