Intuit Inc. announced several updates to its popular accounting software QuickBooks on Wednesday at its QuickBooks Connect conference in San Jose, including a new partnership with cloud storage vendor Box and a suite of tools and services for developers.
The Box partnership brings a new document collaboration feature to the cloud version of Intuit’s well-known software, QuickBooks Online Accountant. Slated for release early next year, the document center will allow accountants to request documents from clients, and track what documents they have requested and received from those clients. It should make collecting all those T4 slips around tax time a bit easier.
Accounting professionals using the service will have 10 GB of free storage to use with Box. Small business clients of accountants will be able to freely respond to requests and upload documents from within their own QuickBooks Online account.
Intuit also unveiled a major update to its developer relations website, offering new tools and APIs to encourage developers to work with its QuickBooks Online platform. It wants more third-party apps available for its users, so it’s investing in making it easier for developers to build on its cloud platform. It is also rebranding the Intuit Partner Platform to Intuit Developer. Developers can download sample apps to see examples of how to execute eCommerce, time-based billing, and customer relationship management (CRM) interactions.
Behind the new tools is Intuit’s recent acquisition of ItDuzzit, a software platform that creates developer tools to tie together mobile apps with the web. There’s a new payments API that developers can use which calls upon Intuit’s processing infrastructure in order to create apps.
Developers that do build an app on the QuickBooks Platform can publish it to Apps.com, the online store for QuickBooks third-party apps, within two weeks, according to Intuit. So far, the website supports 385 apps.