Intuit Goes SaaS With QuickBooks
Still, we wanted to ask the question this month: Does QuickBase provide enough value for both solution providers and their customers to force itself into the conversation? The answer, in many (but not all) cases will be yes.
Intuit and Microsoft were almost merger partners back in the 1990s, when Microsoft was anxious to add Intuit's accounting software to its personal lineup. After antitrust regulators threw hurdles in the way of that deal, both companies went their own way.
Since then, Intuit has continued to grow on the strength of its stalwart products like QuickBooks and TurboTax—finding strength in SMB and SOHO markets. With its QuickBase product for the CRM space, Intuit is setting its sights a little bit deeper or higher into the enterprise.
It's also setting its sights higher and deeper into the Software-as-a-Service model, since QuickBase is a hosted, Web-based application.
Deployment Unlike the deployment for Microsoft's Dynamics, which can include hours of time installing updates, DLLs, patches and dealing with the integration of applications like SQL Server, deployment of QuickBase is easy ... because there really isn't much of a deployment at all.
Because it's a hosted application, essentially all that's needed is an account setup with Intuit—that's it.
The Test Center deployed a trial account in about two minutes. There were no big issues in accessing the site. The QuickBase dashboard, "My QuickBase," appears on sign-in with several pre-loaded applications, including customer support, project management and time and billing. It also provides an icon that leads to blank templates to create custom applications.
An administrator console, "Manage Billing Account," provides the opportunity to create new applications, provision users, add users to groups, and grant and deny permissions.
Administration Adding users is as simple as three clicks: From the administration account hitting "add user," hitting the "create user" button in a pop-up box, and then adding the user's e-mail address. It's also a three-click process to deny users, and two clicks to manage a user's permissions.
Administrators can also click to access application statistics, delete or transfer QuickBase applications and look at which users have access to which applications. Functionality QuickBase has solid, but simple, applications built in to the offering. There are more than 200 pre-built applications, in categories ranging from Project Management to Professional Services to IT and Back Office.
For example, an application called Professional Services All-in-One can collect data for unassigned customer issues, current customer projects and overdue tasks; from that data, reports can be gleaned that cut across data according to customer representative, leads, unassigned leads, project changes, revenue per client to date, task timelines and pie charts of task status.
If the pre-built library of applications leaves gaps in what a customer needs, QuickBase provides a rudimentary "from-scratch" way to create custom applications, either through importing data or by creating new spreadsheet-style or database-style programs.
On this score, QuickBase appears less robust than either Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce.com. For a small business or a workgroup, though, count on QuickBase to be able to do the trick for any number of business-tracking functions. For a large enterprise, more robust functionality might be needed.
Price Depending on the number of users, amount of files stored and number of applications, pricing will vary for QuickBase. It scales from $15 a month for five users and 2,500 records, to 2,000 users with pre-built applications, 1.25 million records and 5 GB attachments for $5,000 per month.
Bottom Line Not every customer will need a million-dollar CRM application. For some customers, the difference between taking on a CRM application and not could be the difference in the 60 billable hours it might take to deploy something like Microsoft Dynamics. For those customers, QuickBase could very well make sense. We recommend it.