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Company

Intuit Launches Self-Service Data Conversion to Expand Market and Reduce Costs

"Our vision was to have a fully automated self-service tool to empower our customers with rapid, painless data conversion. Given the choice of building a solution or finding one with a small enough footprint to effectively OEM into QuickBooks and that fit our pricing model, we went with Pervasive."

– Dan Beck
Product Manager
QuickBooks Group, Intuit

Executive Summary

Intuit is known worldwide as a leading provider of business and financial management solutions. Intuit wanted to provide a better experience for their new users – they found that they had many requests from people who had previously used a competing software product and now wanted to switch to QuickBooks, and simplifying that process could help Intuit expand its market opportunities. In addition, to meet the needs of their non-technical customers, Intuit had to provide a lightweight, wizard-based tool that was embedded in their product.

After determining they didn’t have the integration expertise available to build a solution in-house, Intuit analyzed numerous integration tools. After consulting a leading industry analyst, they chose Pervasive Software.

Pervasive was given just two days to provide a proof of concept. After meeting and exceeding the requirements of this intense process, Pervasive Software got the green light from Intuit.

Situation

The QuickBooks group faced a significant hurdle in meeting the deadline for its product launch of QuickBooks 2006. The group had an extremely tight schedule, and the existing “high touch” conversion process required a team of hourly employees taking help calls and performing manual exports, data manipulation via Excel macros, manual imports and data entry. Each conversion required, on average, from three to five days to complete.

Dan Beck said, “Our prior data conversion process was not designed for end-users, so it couldn’t scale to meet our goals. We were looking for a solution that was reliable, scalable and radically productive. We had limited integration experience, few people and an aggressive six-month schedule.”

Key Challenges

• An embedded integration solution that would be invisible – and provide a seamless experience – to customers.
• A solution that could be employed within a short time. The pressures were high, according to Beck, and there was no room for failure. For the fast-track project to be successful, Intuit wanted to bring a minimum of 5,000 customers from a competitor’s product to QuickBooks, during the first year.
• Reduce the need for internal integration resources. The company did not have the internal resources to tackle the project and turned to Pervasive to deliver Intuit’s wish for a fully automated self-service conversion solution.

Solution

• Intuit leveraged Pervasive Data Integrator™ to meet the QuickBooks rollout deadline within less than three months.
• The Pervasive integration engine was embedded within the QuickBooks Data Conversion Tool, which supports all 2005 and 2006 registered versions of QuickBooks including Pro, Premier, Enterprise and all vertical solutions.
• “This is really a story of teamwork and trust,” said Daniel Beck. “We chose Pervasive because they offered us OEM capabilities and are an expert partner.”

Results

• Objectives Met: New market share opportunities from fully automated, self-service, data conversion tool.
• Fast Deployment: Less than three months, from initial contact to fully deployed solution – and proof of concept from start to finish in two days.
• Faster Solution: Conversions in only 15 minutes – 100 times faster; three times as many customers migrated in the first two weeks as were migrated in the previous year.
• Simplified for Customers: 500 business rules embedded to make wizards easy for Intuit customers.
• Competitive Advantage: Supports integration from five years and all SKUs of a competitive product.
• Low Total Cost of Ownership: Complete solution using only one engineer and four analysts, with little or no ongoing support needed.

Conclusion

Intuit’s goal was to expand market opportunities with a fully automated, self-service conversion tool quickly and efficiently. The company had high expectations for the project, but the actual results far exceeded their original goal. In just the first two weeks of product availability, the solution from Pervasive handled three times as many integrations as had occurred in the entire previous year.

Average conversion time was reduced to less than 15 minutes – nearly 100 times faster than the previous process. The complete solution Pervasive has provided also allows Beck and his QuickBooks group to move from time-consuming “high touch” support and to gain better efficiencies of scale with its one engineer and four analysts.

Best Practices

• Pervasive has proven that it has the embedded integration solution to open new opportunities for Intuit. Pervasive delivered the low total cost of ownership Intuit wanted, with the scalability and flexibility needed to take on future projects.
• Pervasive met Intuit’s need under extreme time-to-market pressures, becoming a highly trusted partner who has opened new possibilities and market share growth for Intuit.
• Pervasive helped design business rules and an Intuit common architecture that will enable Intuit to easily add automated conversion from other accounting packages in the future.

About Intuit

Intuit Inc. is a leading provider of business and financial management solutions for 25 million small and mid-sized business, consumers and accounting professionals. Its flagship products and services, including QuickBooks®, Quicken® and TurboTax® software, simplify small business management and payroll processing, personal finance, and tax preparation and filing. ProSeries® and Lacerte® are Intuit’s leading tax preparation software suites for professional accountants. Founded in 1983, Intuit had annual revenue of more than $2 billion in its fiscal year 2005. The company has nearly 7,000 employees with major offices in 13 states across the United States, and offices in Canada and the United Kingdom. More information can be found at www.intuit.com.