This year’s QuickBooks Connect event saw nearly 5,000 attendees descend on San Jose. A mix of accounting and bookkeeping firms and small business owners were in attendance, along with add-ons like Receipt Bank. We were all looking to find out what Intuit had in store for the future of small business accounting.
Bringing software and accountants together
The event continued Intuit’s mission of seeking closer engagement with the accounting community. Newly appointed Global Accountant Segment Leader, Rich Preece, reminded us on Day 1 that one of Intuit’s top priorities is “matchmaking accounting professionals with small businesses to form even more connections in the coming months.”
The connected app ecosystem and the importance of choosing the right one for your firm and clients remains a crucial issue. And it doesn’t just stop at add-ons. For example, 98 percent of businesses use Excel or Google Sheets to track spending and profit, there will be moves to integrate QuickBooks Online and speed up the flow of information.
Our recent Additional Integration update allows partners to combine Receipt Bank with QuickBooks Online and an additional piece of software such as Bill.com, Gusto or WorkflowMax.
The result is clear. No firm – or app – can go it alone anymore.
As usual, the event was as much about conversations on social media as it was making friends on the conference floor. The firms who got noticed were the ones who engaged on social, retweeting the keynotes and tying the points raised back into their own firms.
We also heard a lot about social media in the breakout sessions and the importance of branding yourself and your firm for both current and prospective clients. For some firms this could mean building their own app, or the Receipt Bank option of co-branding, putting your brand in front of your clients each time they snap a receipt.
Which brings us back to the notion of partnership. The most important part of these events for us is meeting with the forward thinking partners who find new and exciting ways to use technology like Receipt Bank and QuickBooks Online.
It was a pleasure to have partners like Elliot Davis from Decosimo, Michael Ly at Reconciled It, Chad Davis from LiveCA, Greg Cole of Cole & Co., Veronica Wasek from CPA On Demand and Ingrid Edstrom from PolyMath stopping by our stand.
We did our best to bring a bit of extra fun to the event, with a giant game of Paper Toss on the jumbo phone at our stand.
We also saw a great turnout at our evening event, Connect After Dark, in association with Avalara, TSheets, and SalesPad. There was a lot of dancing from all in attendance, though the floor was at one point stolen by a belly dancer. We left her to it – fire was involved.
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