Intuit Announces QuickBooks 2007

New Features and Integrated Services Solve Small Businesses' Most Important Problems

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq: INTU) today announced the availability of QuickBooks® 2007. The new line of products and services focuses on what matters most to small businesses: making day-to-day tasks even easier to complete while adding deeper functionality for specialized and growing companies.

QuickBooks 2007 includes powerful new tools and services that help small businesses succeed in activities beyond accounting. For the first time, Intuit is offering customers integrated tools to market their business and attract new customers, as well as new services that extend QuickBooks' functionality - from accepting credit cards to managing timesheets and running payroll. Combined, these create a robust ecosystem of distinctive solutions to help existing and new-to-the-world businesses be successful.

"No one serves small business and accountants better than Intuit," said Brad Smith, senior vice president of Intuit's Small Business Division. "For nearly 15 years, we have remained laser-focused on ease, continuously improving the market-leading small business management platform. At the same time, we have developed a powerful mix of integrated services that our customers asked us for to help better connect them with their customers, vendors, partners, and employees."

Solutions Beyond Accounting

QuickBooks offers more than 25 products and services beyond core accounting functionality. From QuickBooks Merchant Service for Web Stores to Intuit Small Business Payroll services, customers can leverage their existing QuickBooks data to manage better and market their companies. QuickBooks also offers easy solutions to process payments, such as the QuickBooks Credit Card Processing Kit and the new QuickBooks Time Tracker to easily collect and manage employee timesheets on the Web.

The latest addition to Intuit's comprehensive small business ecosystem is a series of popular marketing tools from Google. The new integrated online tools include Google maps, Google AdWordsT, and the QuickBooks Product Listing Service, designed to solve another critical small business concern - attracting new customers online.

Customers can easily find more than 400 add-on applications that solve specific needs, from sales force automation to eBay integration, through the QuickBooks Solutions Marketplace at: http://www.marketplace.intuit.com.

"Small businesses are increasingly interested in moving from piecemeal solutions to more integrated approaches to company operations," said Merle Sandler, senior research analyst at IDC. "But this can be tricky because small firms also want resources supporting company growth but not being too expensive or difficult to use. With that in mind, Intuit's strategy of extending beyond basic accounting to build a valuable network of available capabilities will resonate with both small businesses and the accountants that serve them."

Focusing on What Matters Most - Ease

QuickBooks 2007 features numerous enhancements that simplify users' most frequent activities, helping the approximate 3.7 million small businesses using the software be more efficient:

• Easier Setup: To help new users set up their income and expense accounts more accurately, QuickBooks 2007 features a simplified recommended Chart of Accounts. Optional accounts to suit specific business needs can easily be added. The latest version offers users the 30 most commonly-used reports for their business type - reducing the likelihood of incorrectly categorizing expenses down the road.
• Easier Payroll: The nearly 1 million businesses that use Intuit Small Business Payroll Services can now efficiently run payroll for all their employees at once rather than one at a time. A new dashboard displays the impact of payroll across the business, showing clearly what the company needs to pay employees and the government and what forms they need to file. And a new "review, confirm and submit" process gives users the confidence their payroll is correct and ready to go.
• Easy Data Sharing with Accountants: It is now easier than ever for accountants to change their clients' company files. At the same time, the business owner continues to work on their day-to-day business transactions without interruption. Previously, if a company needed to send files to an accountant, the business would have to stop entering data into QuickBooks to ensure version control. While the files were with the accountant, the business could not process financial information, including invoices, bills, or payroll. With the new Dividing Date functionality, QuickBooks allows accountants to edit and review all information before a specified date while allowing the company to continue business as usual. When the accountant is done with the adjustment, the business owner can quickly review and import those changes directly into QuickBooks.
• Easier Customization: Small businesses rely on forms to communicate with customers, suppliers, and partners. On average, a small business uses 168 forms per month, including invoices, letters, and purchase orders. With QuickBooks 2007, small businesses no longer have to print their customized document, walk to the printer and look at the hard copy to see if the form meets their needs. New for this year, QuickBooks includes an auto-preview feature that makes it easy to customize layouts with color schemes, logos, and more, while showing users their changes as they are made. The software also consolidates the most commonly-used customization options all on one screen.

New "Right for Me" Solutions to Solve Specific Needs

As part of Intuit's Right for Me strategy to offer QuickBooks versions for companies of different sizes and industries with specific needs, the QuickBooks 2007 line adds new capabilities for specialized businesses and growing companies:

• Enhanced Features for Product-based Businesses: Inventory management is critical to the success of product-based businesses, but to keep an accurate record of total inventory, they must often convert products from one unit of measure to another. For example, a company that purchases a product by the case of a supplier may sell the same effect by the individual bottle to its customers. Available in select QuickBooks 2007 offerings, the new Unit of Measure feature removes the hassle of manual conversion and the risk of costly errors by automatically calculating the transformation from one unit to another in the appropriate forms, including invoices, purchase orders, and inventory reports.

"To meet the needs of large retailers, we were spending two to three hours a day manually calculating and converting quantities. We have different shipping requirements for each retailer. Any error in shipping too many or too few of any one item results in shipping error fees" said Tom Mitchell, CFO of HBH Pet Products in Springville, Utah. "QuickBooks gives us that peace of mind to know that we have shipped out what our customers want when they want it."

In addition, an improved Shipping Manager enables multi-parcel high-value shipping with FedEx, and UPS handles third-party billing. It can print labels right from QuickBooks on popular thermal printers.

• Online Time Tracking for Professional Services Firms: Businesses can now collect and manage employee and contractor timesheets on the Web with the new QuickBooks Time Tracker service, available by subscription. Freeing managers and employees from manually entering data into QuickBooks from hand-written timesheets, Time Tracker quickly downloads data into QuickBooks saving hours of tedious work and reducing errors that can cause incorrect billing.

"Time Tracker saves us so much time when entering employee timesheets," said Leticia Zaragoza of K Page Kistler, PC in Virginia Beach, Va. "Plus, I have total control when managing these entries for billing."

• After-the-Fact Payroll: Approximately 28 percent of the 250,000 accountants who work with QuickBooks perform after-the-fact payroll services, entering payroll data from paychecks that clients have prepared themselves. To save accountants considerable time and effort, QuickBooks Enhanced Payroll for Accountants features a new After-the-Fact Payroll spreadsheet-style data entry tool that transforms this traditionally time-intensive task into a simple process.
• Increased List Limits for Growing Businesses: Mid-market businesses using QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 7.0 can add a hundred thousand or more inventory items, customers, and vendors as they grow - an increase of more than 400 percent.

Pricing and Availability

QuickBooks Premier - including industry-specific editions for accountants, contractors, manufacturers and wholesalers, nonprofits, professional service firms, and retailers - is priced at USD$399.95.

QuickBooks Pro retails for USD$199.95, and QuickBooks' entry-level product, QuickBooks: Simple Start Edition, is USD$99.95. A new three-user value pack for QuickBooks Pro is USD$ 499.95, and a five-user value pack for QuickBooks Premier is USD$1,499.95.

QuickBooks 2007 products are currently available direct from Intuit at: http://www.quickbooks.com. They will be available starting on October 11, 2006, at fine retailers everywhere, including Amazon.com, Best Buy, CDW, Circuit City, CompUSA, Costco.com, Fry's Electronics, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Sam's Club, and Staples.

For mid-market companies, QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 7.0 starts at USD$3,000 for a five-seat license and is available for up to 20 simultaneous users. The QuickBooks Enterprise price includes a 12-month full-service plan that entitles businesses to 24/7 technical support from a dedicated support engineer, product upgrades, data recovery, reporting services, interactive training tools, and automatic renewals. QuickBooks Enterprise can be purchased directly from Intuit by calling 866-379-6635 (+1 866-379-6635).

About Intuit Inc.

Intuit Inc. is a leading business and financial management solution provider for small and mid-sized businesses, consumers, and accounting professionals. Its flagship products and services, including QuickBooks®, Quicken®, and TurboTax® software, simplify small business management, payroll processing, personal finance, and tax preparation and filing. ProSeries® and Lacerte® are Intuit's leading tax preparation software suites for professional accountants.

Founded in 1983, Intuit had annual revenue of $2.3 billion in its fiscal year 2006. The company has nearly 7,500 employees with principal offices in 13 states across the United States and in Canada and the United Kingdom. More information can be found at: http://www.intuit.com.

Intuit, the Intuit logo, and QuickBooks, among others, are registered trademarks and registered service marks of Intuit Inc. in the United States and other countries.