Smith said the company "succeeded on all fronts" and "we won this tax season." The number of subscribers for QuickBooks Online rose to 624,000, up 36 percent from 459,000 in last year's third quarter. What is important about such growth is that QB Online subscribers buy additional Intuit applications, many more than are purchased by desktop users. This year is going to bring a lot more functions to QBO, whether through the purchase of other applications or whether through Intuit's decision to open the APIs to outside developers. The recently purchased Lettuce, an inventory management package, will be fully integrated into QuickBooks in the next four to five months. "It will be a core piece of QuickBooks Online," Smith said. A historical note: someone told me a few years ago that Intuit would never purchase Fishbowl Inventory, the most popular inventory application for QuickBooks. He wasn't asked during the earnings webcast about the more recent purchase of Invitco, whose product strips out data from emailed invoices in order to automate accounts payable processing
INTUIT TURNS IN STRONG QUARTER Featured
Let's just say that the goals of Intuit CEO Brad Smith are not modest. When it comes to low-cost cloud applications, "Our goal is to win ever new small business customer and to win every cloud decision." Whatever the chances of that are, the results for the second quarter ended April 30 were very good. Net income was $1.37 billion, a 6-percent increase from $1.29 billion in last year's corresponding period. Revenue was $3.79 billion in the recently ended period, up 7 percent from $3.54 billion a year earlier.
