Intuit improves SME offering

In a bid to further integrate cloud-based platforms with its more conventional offerings, Intuit plans to combine QuickBooks Point of Sale (POS), its offering for retailers, with its three-year-old mobile-only GoPayment platform, ZDNet reports.

GoPayment is a service that allows small and medium-sized (SME) vendors to process debit or credit cards using an Apple iPhone - no proprietary point-of-sale hardware necessary. The app and hardware is free, and Intuit makes its money from transactions (2.7% per swipe) or a monthly membership fee ($12.95 per month).

Intuit has been in the POS business for 10 years and its QuickBooks POS solution is aimed at the small SME customer, Tech Crunch writes.

Currently, the company has 200 000 SME retail customers, who together reach 23 million customers across the US. Combined with GoPayment, the businesses process $6 billion in transactions annually.

Intuit GoPayment launched in 2009 and now competes with Square, VeriFone's PayWare, PayPal Here and many other 'POS Light' solutions, as Chris Hylen, VP of Intuit Payments, calls them.

GigaOM writes that business customers who take advantage of this combo can have workers taking payments in the aisles of stores or out at trade shows or events, with all the transaction data, inventory and analytics handled by one system on the back end.

The mobile app can be populated with inventory items pulled automatically from QuickBooks POS. By offering both options, Intuit gives companies more flexibility to grow from simple mobile-only retailers to bigger storefront merchants.