The Costco Connection - December 2015

By Hana Medina

AS THE NEW year approaches, it’s a great time for reflections and resolutions, not only for your personal life, but also for your small business. Ensuring that your company is on track to reach its top potential for 2016 could be as simple as enlisting the help of QuickBooks Online (QBO) and Intuit Payroll services. These tools help track sales, expenses, inventory, payroll and taxes so that you don’t have to.

“We’re making the accounting happen without small-business owners really having to think about it,” says Dan Wernikoff, executive vice president and general manager of the Small Business Financial Solutions Group at Intuit.

Wernikoff says, “[QBO is] about saving time. As much as we like to think of accounting as a really exciting thing, most small businesses didn’t get into small business to do accounting. They did it to offer a product or service to their clients.”

The Connection chatted with Wernikoff to discover how QBO simplifies the complex tasks that come with owning a business.

The Costco Connection: How does QBO go beyond being just an accounting tool?

Dan Wernikoff: We’re able to give small
businesses lots of insights into how to run
their businesses better. Things like helping
them increase sales and work with customers
to be more profitable, helping them to man-
age things like their receivables, helping them
to keep their bills in order to pay
those on time so they don’t have
fees assessed to them—all of
those types of things work around
the core accounting system.

Ultimately, what we really want to do is help them manage their cash flow more effectively. Most small businesses fail because they just run out of cash.

CC: What sets QBO apart from other accounting methods?

DW: The main alternative to QuickBooks is really manual methods. When we look at how [our customers are] managing their company on paper, they make a lot of mistakes. There’s a lot of wasted time in there that really could be better used to run their business overall.

When they start to use QuickBooks, they see a couple really key benefits. One of them is that almost all accountants and bookkeepers use QuickBooks themselves, so you get this extra bit of collaborating with financial advisers [through online community support].

You also have this nice benefit of integrated services. So payroll is just one example we talked about; payments is another. You can process a payment and it’s automatically recorded; you can run payroll and it’s automatically recorded.

[QBO] can also grow with you. This is whether [you’re] a self-employed freelancer, all the way up to larger enterprises.

CC: Is the service available on mobile devices? DW: QuickBooks is now everywhere you go. It has mobile interfaces on iOS and Android so you can access all of the data about your business wherever you are.

CC: Is the user interface friendly for those who are not so tech savvy?

DW: That’s really who we target. We try to
make it as easy as possible, and that means, as
a small business, you [log in] and answer a
few questions, like: What size is your busi-
ness? Do you have employees or not? What
industry are you in? And QuickBooks really
configures for you specifically.

CC: Tell me about your security measures. DW: We have the same level of security as the largest [financial institutions] out there. We have a Tier 4 data center, which is the highest level of data center security. And the other thing that’s nice is that we have a very consistent and stated privacy policy across all of our products.

CC: What is your customer support like? DW: We offer it multiple ways. We have [Monday through Saturday] phone support. … There’s in-product support, where, directly in the flow of using the product, you can find answers to questions. We have an active [online] community with our own customers and accountants, where you can ask them a question and they’ll answer it for you. And then we also have an online help center as well. We really leave it up to a user.

CC: Have you changed your product at all to reflect customer feedback?

DW: We’re listening to [customers] all the time. One thing that they’ve been asking for is inventory capabilities. We just did a launch of an inventory management feature, and we’re starting to build out other inventory capabilities, such as integrating with e-commerce so they can sell online.

CC: What kind of benefits can Costco’s Executive members receive?

DW: The Costco users are growing faster than the general population of QuickBooks users. We’re offering a good discount to members [ 20 percent average savings], and Costco has a great group of members in the small-business space. C

Connecting

Executive members receive a free 30-day trial for both QuickBooks services. For more information or to sign up, visit Costco.com, select “Services” and choose “Payroll Services” or “QuickBooks Online.”