QuickBooks Deepens PayPal Integration For SMB Payments

QuickBooks Connect, an event planned this week in London, was canceled due to the coronavirus, so parent company Intuit has released information it had been holding back for the event.

Intuit said it is introducing a number of new digital tools aimed at curbing the issue of new small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) going out of business within a few years.

The company said its goal is to “increase productivity and improve small businesses’ chance of success.”

To do so, Intuit has been consulting with SMB owners to find out the biggest issues. Some of the most common answers Intuit said it heard were cash flow, late payments, admin and confidence. Working with U.K. product teams, Intuit said it has been able to address those problems going forward.

The improvements will be in the fields of cash flow forecasting, payments, late payments, administration and payroll compliance.

QuickBooks’ new cash flow forecasting feature, the company said, will lend business owners 30- and 90-day forecasts for cash flow, using data held within their accounts. The system will use two-year transaction history for the forecasts.

In terms of payments, QuickBooks has added new efficiencies to make it easier for users to integrate the services with PayPal to receive debit or credit card payments for invoices. There are already other options available for users to receive payments with GoCardless for direct debits and iZettle for point of sale.

As SMBs can struggle with late payments, particularly from large customers, QuickBooks’ new features allow users to set up recurring reminders for open invoices, which helps to chase overdue payments. Because of that, those in charge of credit control don’t have to put time aside to check manually. The company has also introduced the possibility of automatically chasing late payments, although it did not offer specifics on what that feature does.

For administration, QuickBooks has introduced receipt-capturing features for users to extract data from receipts quickly and efficiently, and increased open banking support.

QuickBooks has also increased its support with Centsoft’s AP automation cloud software.