Accounting
Intuit Announces QuickBooks Online Integration with G Suite
New invoicing capabilities with Gmail and Google Calendar offer small businesses faster payments and seamless customer communication
May. 22, 2017
Getting paid on time is a huge pain point for many small business owners who spend hours reconciling their calendars to determine billable hours or chasing down unpaid invoices. To help eliminate this pain point and help small businesses get paid faster, Intuit has announced a QuickBooks Online integration with G Suite by Google Cloud.
More than 1.5 million small businesses in the U.S. use QuickBooks Online to manage their business and balance their books. Many small businesses use G Suite to manage their schedules and customer communications. In fact, Intuit found that 56 percent of QuickBooks Online customers use Google Calendar to book and manage appointments, while almost 50 percent communicate with their customers via Gmail. This means that small business owners can find themselves spending hours performing double entry as they switch back and forth between QuickBooks and Gmail or Google Calendar to invoice their customers.
“Intuit constantly looks at how we can unlock the power of many for the prosperity of one. By coming together with Google, we can save our customers money and time. This extends to accounting professionals as well. Streamlining workflows through data integration eliminates time spent chasing down or reconciling data so accountants can focus on being trusted advisors,” said Gretchen Salyer, director strategic partnerships, Small Business Group, Intuit.
Intuit and Google are working together to integrate key data and workflows for small business owners and accounting professionals, helping them be more successful and efficient in running their business. Intuit hopes to help alleviate the risk of errors associated with manual data entry and save customers time by automatically importing G Suite data directly into QuickBooks Online. With Bill My Time and the Gmail Invoice Add-on, small businesses can create invoices directly from their events in Google Calendar or from Gmail without having to switch back and forth between QuickBooks Online and Google. If they use the Gmail Invoice Add-on, they can also track the status of other invoices from within Gmail. A future integration with Google Hangouts Chat will also revolutionize the way QuickBooks users communicate with their customers.
Intuit has been working hard on Bill My Time since it was announced last year at QuickBooks Connect. Since then, the product has been rebranded to reflect the target demographic – small businesses and accounting professionals who manage their time in Google Calendar – and the company has been testing it live with customers.
“We have been working with our customers and developers to enhance Bill My Time so that it can really be a one-click process to get billable time from Google Calendar into an invoice. Customers that are currently using Bill My Time in beta have shared with us that they save at least 30 minutes every time they use the integration compared to their old way of invoicing,” said Salyer.
Through the Bill My Time integration, QuickBooks Online customers can turn their client meetings and tasks in Google Calendar into billable appointments in QuickBooks Online for easier and faster invoicing. Hours from client work scheduled in Google Calendar are then auto-populated into the invoicing flow in QuickBooks.
Additionally, many small business owners also communicate with their customers solely through Gmail and Intuit recognized that almost 50 percent of QuickBooks Online customers have Google email domains. Most of the workflow where money is being requested and communication is taking place already exists in Gmail, but is later manually reconciled in QuickBooks Online.
When a small business owner sends an invoice through email, customers may miss it or disregard the notice because they are waiting for an “official” invoice. With the QuickBooks Invoice Add-on, Gmail will prompt users to create a professional-looking invoice with a click of a button based on keywords within the email, eliminating customers’ confusion on whether that email was actually an invoice. The QuickBooks-branded Add-on will allow users to not only create an invoice right from Gmail, but also track the invoice’s status. Small businesses will always know if an invoice has been opened or paid and can follow up with customers accordingly. Any payments received are then automatically entered into QuickBooks, eliminating the need to manually enter that data.
“Our e-invoicing integration meets small businesses where they are already communicating with customers [in Gmail] and gives them the confidence that they can create a professional invoice to send to their customers and know their data is automatically reconciled into QuickBooks,” said Salyer.
One of the unique features of the Gmail Invoice Add-on is that it is a standalone widget that does not require an active QuickBooks subscription. Data from the Gmail Invoice Add-on will integrate into QuickBooks Online when users sign up. Payments processed through the add-on will be subjected to the usual credit card payment fee.
Bill My Time and the Gmail Invoice Add-on integrations are the brainchild of a meeting between Intuit and Google that took place two years ago. The two companies met to discuss ways they could partner to change the game for small businesses and accounting professionals by drastically changing their lives and helping them become more successful.
“There are endless opportunities for our partnership with Google. We are both customer-centric companies who are committed to understanding our customers’ biggest needs, solving for them and creating one, unified experience,” said Salyer. “In addition, every time we launch a new integration with Google, we learn more about our customers – what they want and how they want us to work together.”
Intuit’s latest QuickBooks Online integrations are just one more way the company aims to improve the invoicing and client communication processes for its customers. Intuit continues to build upon its QuickBooks ecosystem to enable long-term success for small businesses and accounting professionals. The Gmail Invoice Add-on will be available later this summer and Bill My Time is currently available in beta for free on Apps.com, where QuickBooks customers can opt-in to test the beta version and give feedback.