Making Small Business Connections with CPAs
Project Information
Team
Running a business is a team sport
Working at Intuit was pivotal in shaping who I am as a designer and leader. On the Intuit Labs team, I worked on 0→1 concepts. Working on these projects taught me that building products is more like starting a company than pushing a roadmap.
The QuickBooks project exemplified these values perfectly.
Starting with a data point: Roughly 49.4 % of U.S. small businesses close within their first five years. We set out to improve the survival rate of businesses. A key point that pointed our way was that businesses with a CPA were more successful than those without.
Research backs this up: nearly 7 in 10 small businesses that work with an accountant report steady or high growth, compared with just 4 in 10 who go it alone.
Talking Shop
We talked to every business owner we could find. Walking shop to shop across the business corridors of Dallas asking owners questions about their business, what kept them up at night, and their relationship with CPAs. We chatted with more than 100 business owners in a week.
A big insight we found was that the owners who worked with tax professionals delegated all the things they hated about running a business: expense reporting, bookkeeping, etc., so they could focus on building the business, marketing, improving inventory, and connecting with customers.
Creating the Experiment
We built a very slim feature in QuickBooks that did 3 things: It let businesses match with a CPA, engage in a back-and-forth dialogue, and invoice and pay.
The Ad
We needed a way to get QuickBooks users to use this product. We set up targeting filters, the primary one was for businesses without a CPA connected to their QuickBooks account. We presented the 'ad' on the dashboard page of QuickBooks. We ran dozens of quick tests of this ad to try and improve click-through rates.
Playing matchmaker
We wanted the business owner to feel like we could find the perfect CPA for their business, but we only had 15 CPAs in our beta group. The owner would fill out a short questionnaire about their preferences, and we would filter the 15 CPAs down to 9 and randomize the order.
Contrary to what they told us, businesses didn't care as much about a perfect match as they let on.
Talking Tax
We needed a clear way for CPAs and business owners to communicate. QuickBooks had a messaging system integrated into the tool, but it wasn't built for this matchmaking concept. So we developed a way to have an introduction conversation, a way for the CPA to request access to their books, a task manager in the tool, and a way to cancel an engagement if it didn't work out.
What We Learned
Running a business is already hard, but doing so while being the bookkeeper makes it nearly impossible to be successful. After the experiment launched, the response was surprising.
Customer feedback highlighted immediate benefits: they were saving money on their taxes, finding more time and energy to devote to their businesses, and realizing how valuable tax professionals were in making daily financial decisions.
Over the course of a year, we connected 2000 businesses to CPAs
The pilot's success convinced Intuit to graduate the flow into the left-nav My Accountant tab—now live in every QuickBooks region. Today that tab sits in front of 6.5 million+ QuickBooks Online subscribers worldwide, multiplying our original impact by three orders of magnitude.
2000+
Connections between CPAs and entrepreneurs in the first year
15%
Higher 5-year survival rate for businesses connected on our platform