Intuit – Company Overview, History, Products

Intuit Inc. is one of the most popular American multinational companies that is known for its business software and financial specialization. Intuit currently employs over 15000 employees. It is headquartered in Mountain View, California. Intuit owns multiple products and services that help its customers and businesses with tax registration and preparation, personal finance management, business accounting programs, credit monitoring service, email, and promotion marketing as well.

The CEO of Intuit is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit generated a revenue of over 10 billion dollars in the financial year 2021. The most prominent product platforms by Intuit include 

• TurboTax, 
• Mint, 
• QuickBooks, 
• Credit Karma, 
• MailChimp, etc.

There are multiple controversies related to Intuit including search engine delisting and military targeting on their Tax preparation website TurboTax free edition. Intuit also gained the attention of the media when it was caught lobbying against the revenue service for providing income taxpayers with prefilled forms and documents.

History of Intuit:

Intuit Inc was founded by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx in 1983 in Palo Alto City, California. Both the founders of Intuit previously used to work at Procter & Gamble on desktop computers which allowed them for better accounting and management rather than pen and paper-based accounting. Intuit was initially founded in the garage of university avenue in Palo Alto by the two founders of Stanford University. Intuit’s first product was a software called Quicken that allowed the developers to use the BASIC programming language for IBM’s personal computers and the UCSD Pascal language for the Apple II computer.

By 1988, Intuit's first product Quicken was leading the market through its software. But in 1991, Microsoft decided to enter this competition with their software application called Microsoft money. To beat the competition, Intuit allowed its customers to have an extra $15 promotional code for a discount as well as redeemable prices for the software purchased by consumers and businesses by Intuit.

In 1993, Intuit filed for its IPO and then went public by acquiring a big tax preparation software company called Chipsoft located in San Diego. Intuit allowed its customers to file their taxes easily due to which it gained rapid growth and within one year its valuation crossed the 2 billion dollar mark.

But recently, Intuit has been facing charges through various federal agencies for their tax filing controversies. But by 1999, Intuit had diversified its product and services towards personal finance, accounting software, and tax return software. Intuit bought large chunks of shares in companies like Excite, Lacerte software for tax filing preparation, and an online bill payment service called CheckFree.

In 2013, Thomas Bravo firm bought the financial services unit from Intuit Inc. By May 2018, Intuit had crossed the mark of 5 billion dollars in revenue with a market capitalization of more than 60 billion dollars. In August 2018, Sasan Goodarzi became the CEO of Intuit along with Scott Cook as the chairman of Intuit. In 2022, Intuit had to pay a settlement fine of more than 140 million dollars to the US Federal Trade Commission for showing misleading advertisements to their customers and businesses.

Intuit Inc. – Products and Services:

The various products and services provided by Intuit Inc are as follows:

TurboTax – TurboTax is a popular tax filing and preparation software by Intuit that allows users to file both State and Federal income tax returns. It provides a step-by-step guide to its users to ease the process of filing their taxes and also gives them financial tips.

QuickBooks – It is software that allows accounting and management of payment bills, slips, and payrolls in a business or a firm. It allows remote patrol assistance of employees and electronic payment functions for accounting and management.

Mint.com – Mint is one of the popular personal finance management applications by Intuit that allows users to track their credit score, bank accounts, investments, equity, loans, and transactions to help them achieve their financial goals and track their profits.

Credit Karma – Credit Karma is one of the most popular personal finance websites by Intuit since 2007, which is known for providing free credit and finance-related accounting to its users. It also provides extra features like monitoring unclaimed property databases and resolving the credit reports of users.

MailChimp – MailChimp is a popular email automation service by Intuit since 2001. Nowadays, multiple businesses use MailChimp to send billions of emails per month to their users and potential customers to share their products and services through email marketing automation.

Wrapping Up:

Hence, Intuit Inc is one of the popular technology companies that are specialized in personal finance, accounting software, tax return software, and email marketing that help businesses to connect better with their consumers.