Intuit Makes an MSP Play

Intuit is officially making a push into the MSP space. The vendor has signed up a small number of partners as part of a pilot program. The financial software provider says MSPs can help move customers to the cloud. Furthermore, they can lead customer migrations that are part of a larger shift in how Intuit sells and services its software solutions.

This is a pretty serious play in terms of vendor movement into the MSP channel.

Forrester’s Jay McBain

“Like other SaaS companies, Intuit is seeing the opportunity for a broader range of partners to assist in the go-to-market of SMB customers,” Jay McBain, principal analyst for channels, partnerships and ecosystems, Forrester Research, told Channel Futures. “Understanding that their products need to be implemented, integrated, secured, compliant, automated, and have strong levels of continuity means that a single accountant/CPA firm may not be able to fulfil end-to-end services. Intuit will need to quantify this opportunity for MSPs and explain how reaching this new buyer can be profitable and sticky for them in the long run.”

Since this effort is focused on MSPs, we wanted to find out what the MSPs in the pilot think about the program.

Xperteks and Intuit

At the beginning of the month, Xperteks announced a partnership with Intuit to become a member of the QuickBooks Solutions Provider (QSP program). The idea is to add more capability for Xperteks to deliver cloud services for small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) that will need to decide when to migrate from QuickBooks Pro and Premier desktop software to QuickBooks Online services.

Xperteks’ Marcial Velez

“So far, I’m enjoying the program and the support Intuit has provided us to help migrate customers to the cloud version of QuickBooks,” Marcial Velez, CEO of Xperteks, told Channel Futures. “They’ve provided weekly meetings to review how we can help customers migrate to QBO Advanced, combined with pricing incentives for our existing customers and our incoming new customers.”

According to Velez, Intuit has also provided all of the content resources that helped his company build an Xperteks QuickBooks Online landing page “to help our teams and our clients understand the benefits of using QuickBooks Online.

“Intuit is very serious about engaging the MSP community as we manage most, if not all software licensing and Cloud Subscriptions for our clients,” Velez continued. “Plus, due to the fact that as of Dec. 11, QuickBooks 2021 single purchase licenses of QuickBooks Pro and Premier desktop software, which include purchase of additional users, will no longer be available. End of support for single-purchase licenses will end in May 2022 for 2019 versions, May 2023 for 2020 versions, and May 2024 for 2021 versions. It makes sense to work with Intuit to identify more clients who are either beginning or are in the midst of their digital transformation into the cloud.”

This will certainly be a development to follow, and shines an interesting light on vendors nudging their way into the MSP space to assist with go-to-market strategies.