QuickBooks has finally found a partner to provide point-of-sale equipment for their small business accounting package.
Intuit, the company that provides QuickBooks, announced on Thursday that it’s teaming up with “premier partner” Revel Systems to launch a new iPad POS solution integrated with the QuickBooks system.
Intuit has been aggressive about building partnerships to expand POS offerings over the past year, and also recently partnered with two other POS vendors, POSE and Vend.
The partnerships are all part of an effort to help QuickBooks deliver sales, payment and inventory services to its accounting platform.
“Partnering with Revel allows us to provide a best-in-class point-of-sale solution that works seamlessly with QuickBooks Online,” Intuit’s senior vice president for payments and commerce solutions, Eric Dunn, told Forbes. “We are particularly excited by the fact that we’ll be able to build on our existing strength in retail point-of-sale and now meet the needs of customers in additional categories such as restaurant and grocery.”
According to the description of “QuickBooks Point of Sale powered by Revel Systems” on the Intuit website, the partnership will improve the product’s offerings in several ways. Users will be able to take advantage of a more intuitive interface on an iPad device, which Intuit says will reduce employee training time and make checkouts easier.
The POS solution is also integrated directly into QuickBooks Online, meaning that sales and payment data will be uploaded in real time whenever a purchase is made, eliminating the need for manual bookkeeping.
Of course, since much of QuickBook’s appeal is its cloud functionality, business owners will have the ability to track inventory, sales, payroll and staffing remotely. The site also claims that this information won’t stop syncing even if an internet connection slows or goes down.
The depth of these services led a commentator at Forbes to suspect that Intuit might be preparing to acquire Revel to adapt it to the needs of QuickBooks, especially as other cloud accounting solutions like Xero begin to nip at Intuit’s heels. Only about 47 businesses in the United States develop POS software, so acquiring a company like Revel to create new solutions could be a smart move on Intuit’s part.
The combined product is currently slated for a 2015 release.