QuickBooks announces digital innovations to improve Small Business Survival
Game-changing innovations will help address four biggest financial problems faced by small businesses
Intuit QuickBooks, the UK’s leading financial management software, today launched a host of digital innovations designed to solve major financial problems for the UK’s small businesses: cash flow; late payments; time spent on admin and confidence in compliance.
The innovations are part of the company’s vision to increase the small businesses survival rate by harnessing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning within the QuickBooks product. The innovations address:
Cash flow – Cash Flow Planner is launching1 to provide AI-driven proactive notifications of impending cash flow issues, fuelled by Open Banking to access data
Late payments – QuickBooks and PayPal are expanding their collaboration to allow QuickBooks customers to offer PayPal payments on their invoices at special rates
Time spent on admin – Receipt Capture is live in QuickBooks Online, so business owners need never enter receipt details manually again
Confidence in compliance – SmartScan and Payroll functionality is expanding to give business owners even more certainty their VAT returns and payroll runs are correct
QuickBooks VP and UK Country Manager, Chris Evans said: “We know 58%2 of small businesses fail within the first five years. Our mission is to power prosperity and improve this statistic. We believe this can be achieved by embracing digital tools, which can increase productivity and improve small businesses’ chance of success. That’s why we’ve been speaking to business owners across the UK to understand their biggest challenges – which we consistently hear are cash flow, late payments, admin and confidence. We then worked with our UK product teams to solve them through digital innovations within QuickBooks. We’re really proud of these innovations and believe they are a major step towards helping small businesses thrive.”
Cash flow
Cash Flow Planner is a new way to manage and forecast cash flow within the QuickBooks product. It is built to address the 80% of small business failures that result from cash flow issues.
Cash Flow Planner enables small businesses to view a 30 and 90-day forecast of their cash flow based on a holistic view of all their financial accounts – all within the QuickBooks platform and at no extra cost. It generates proactive notifications of impending cash flow issues.
Fuelled by AI and Open Banking, customers can bring in up to two years of transaction history, with an added layer of security, to power the Cash Flow Planner’s business insights machine.
Late payments
QuickBooks is today announcing an expanded collaboration with PayPal. It will provide customers with additional options to receive payments directly through debit or credit cards for their invoices. Small businesses can now give their customers more ways to pay quickly and easily. The partnership gives QuickBooks customers special rates for accepting credit and debit cards via PayPal.
The partnership follows QuickBooks research which found UK small businesses spend 56.4 million hours a year chasing overdue and late payments.
The new PayPal experience is in closed pilot in QuickBooks and complements other QuickBooks ecosystem partnerships such as GoCardless for Direct Debit payments and iZettle for point of sale.
Other innovations to address the scourge of late payments include new functionality to automatically chase payments and set up recurring reminders on open invoices to stay on top of due dates.
Time spent on admin
To further reduce the burden of admin tasks faced by small businesses, from today customers will be able to access Receipt Capture in QuickBooks Online. Customers can snap or batch upload receipts and QuickBooks will read and extract the data, automatically creating financial records for tax and other purposes.
Research shows small businesses waste a third of the year on admin and the vast majority of them do it outside of work hours.5 By reducing these admin tasks, small business owners can use their time to do what they do best – run and grow their business.
By pairing with automatic mileage tracking already available within QuickBooks, and leveraging the automated reconciliation of Open Banking, customers could save up to 8 hours a month6 on admin.
To help further reduce admin, QuickBooks also today announces it has moved bank connections from screen-scraping to Open Banking. Open Banking will give customers real-time bank data of money in and out, with up to two years of transactions for richer cash flow understanding. It also adds another layer of security to ensure data is safe and secure. QuickBooks customers can now connect multiple bank accounts through a seamless bank connection. They can also set up rules so transactions are automatically categorised and put in the right place.
Confidence in compliance
Also announced are updates to two payroll products, Standard and Advanced Payroll. Through the two payroll products, QuickBooks now addresses all the payroll needs of small businesses.
Coming soon, QuickBooks is introducing Automated Pension Submission and an Employee Portal to Standard Payroll. This is in response to feedback from Advanced Payroll customers. Customers say this feature saves 30 minutes7 per pay run because of direct integration with pension providers.
In addition, QuickBooks is bringing CIS to Standard Payroll to better serve construction customers. Many contractors and sub-contractors in the construction industry still use paper or spreadsheets to track and record CIS deductions. This is a major admin burden and impacts on time. Coming soon across all QuickBooks Online plans is the ability to automatically mark as filed and submit CIS 300 returns to HMRC. Another benefit is contractors will be able to send statements to sub-contractors, which helps comply with HMRC regulations, making it easier for sub-contractors to declare CIS deductions at the end of the year during their self-assessment.
Shaun Shirazian, UK Product Leader at QuickBooks said “Our CIS innovation means we can now deliver a complete experience for construction industry contractors. They can prepare their taxes on the platform and then file directly to HMRC. We’re really pleased to be rolling this out because it solves a big problem for a large sector in the UK.”
