Australia gets Intuit's Quickbooks Self-Employed exclusively as mobile app

Inuit has launched its Quickbooks Self-Employed platform in Australia, opting to enter the market exclusively with its mobile app.

According to the US-based enterprise software firm, 1 million Australians are self-employed, and with reports pointing to 77 percent of the population being smartphone users, Intuit conducted its own research on existing customers and determined the best way to have Quickbooks Self-Employed enter the market was to make it available exclusively as a mobile app.

Intuit's study of over 600 self-employed operators found that the majority use mobile to access business information, and more than half of those surveyed -- 60 percent -- want to be able to do more business tasks on their smartphones.

Quickbooks Self-Employed, which is now available on the Apple App and Google Play stores, allows users to snap and store receipts, as well as create and send invoices.

In addition, the app tracks all expenses and gives users the ability to categorise expenses as business or personal by swiping left or right.

Mileage is also tracked using the smartphone's GPS and trips can be categorised using the same swipe motions. When this feature was added to the app already in use in the US and the UK in March, reports suggested that Intuit was targeting the growing number of self-employed workers in the delivery and driving space, such as Uber drivers.

Vice President and Country Manager of Intuit Australia Nicolette Maury said this feature is especially important because every 1,000 business kilometres equals AU$660 in tax deductions.

"Self-employed people are often driving from one place to another and they're using their car for both business and personal reasons. They usually use a paper logbook, but often forget to write down their business or personal trips so they miss out on some of those tax deductions," Maury told ZDNet.

"The ability to have expenses, mileage, and invoices all in one place means that the self-employed have instant access to profit and loss and cashflow insights. It's a fantastic offering for them to be have their entire business in their pocket."

Intuit first launched the self-employed version of QuickBooks in January 2015. Around 85,000 customers use the web and mobile versions of QuickBooks Self-Employed across the US and the UK.

Maury believes the app will be a "game-changer" for self-employed people in Australia.

"The most exciting thing is it helps them become paperless, move to the cloud, and get much faster insights into their business," she said.

When it comes to ideating solutions for its customers, Maury said Intuit is heavily focused on "customer-driven innovation".

"We spend a lot of time watching our customers conduct their business and use our product. That enables us to uncover unmet customer needs and identify how we could make business for our customers more frictionless and delightful," she added.

"That insight then gets fed into our product development cycle. It's a combination of features that customers say they need and features we discover they need by spending time with them."

The company is planning a major expansion of its Quickbooks business group into a machine learning advice and services platform for creating, managing, and operating all kinds of small businesses.