>> Announcer: Live from San Jose California,
in the heart of Silicon Valley,
it's The Cube, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016.
Now here are your hosts,
Jeff Frick and John Walls.
>> It is the Cube, and along with Jeff Frick,
I'm John Walls, as we start to wrap up here
from QuickBooks Connect 2016.
In fact, the afternoon keynote session
has just started behind us where
Shaquille O'Neal is one of the featured speakers today.
So looking forward to hearing that.
Jeff, let's just kind of take a look back
at where we've been over the last couple of days here,
and we've talked a lot about
common themes, common feelings, those kinds of things.
But you really do get this, this really I think
a great sense about QuickBooks
and it's mission in encouraging and nurturing
the small business community and all
the great online resources it's providing,
and getting people to go online,
and making that move happen has been a
probably a driving force behind
that company's success, and really
why small business is taking off as it is in America.
>> Jeff: I think I hear Shaquille in the background.
>> Yeah, I do. >> I'm like oh,
that sounds like a big TV sports caster.
Anyways, I think the key word you said there John
is mission, and it's clearly a mission.
And it comes down from Scott
and the founding 33 years ago,
and everyone has really embraced that mission
from the Intuit employees that we've talked to
the partners we've talked to and even
the customers that we've talked to,
like the death with coffee.
It is really about empowering small business,
and what I find interesting is
we've taken these big tech trends
that we see at other shows like IBM and HP,
if you will with Cloud and Mobile,
and now using those tools to take
huge engineering teams, huge amount of R&D effort
that's going into the applications
that they're then deployed on Cloud,
delivered via your mobile device,
and putting that power in the hands
of small entrepreneurs and medium-sized entrepreneurs.
I think the folks we've talked to today
have businesses from seven people
up to 150 people, still relatively small.
And they now get the power,
the combined R&D power of not only
the Intuit Quickbooks platform itself,
but their partner Ecosystem,
people like TSheets,
and they can now use that to run their business
to free them up to do the things
that they want to do in the first place
which is follow a passion,
build a business around it.
Most of the people we've talked to
didn't even plan on necessarily building a business.
They kind of thought, hmm, this is an interesting idea,
and they started it.
So it's a real, refreshing place to be.
It's a really great energy.
They've already announced next years show.
They're passing out the cards.
And it's just, it's fun to see that using these tools
you can put that power in the hands of small business.
>> And what kind of struck me is that,
you heard a lot of news this week
about different offerings, different services, improvements,
that Quickbooks has done.
But the TSheets example's a very good one.
They've embedded that technology onto their platform,
so that it is a completely transparent process operation.
It's simple, it's clear, it's easy.
But you never leave the QuickBooks platform.
And so if you're a small business,
a lot of the things you worry about are time, money,
complexity, simplicity, all those things.
Well, they make it simple for you.
>> Right.
>> Because they have embedded these kinds of technologies.
So, it is one interface, it is one click.
It's just one simple process.
And they are simplifying that.
So, like we hear the crowd behind us.
Got to be Shaq coming out.
Shaquille now, by the way, not Shaq.
Well, so let's talk about -
we talked about this, this morning a little bit.
Kind of the nature of the key notes
and the messaging that was really, I think,
consistent throughout all of that,
is that there are failures that come with success.
That simplicity is big.
That mission is critical.
And that the passion is vital.
And I heard that an awful lot.
And I think Intuit certainly conveys that
with all of its products and all of its services.
>> Right, and then the really lazer focus on
the very specific things that matter to
the small entrepreneur and that's money.
It's cashflow.
It's getting paid faster.
It's getting paid easier.
It's making the management of both the paying of bills
and the receiving of bills more efficient.
It's the financing.
Which is a tremendous thing, if you've ever been involved
in small business, or yourself, or friends or neighbors,
all you ever hear about is people having to put
their mortgage on the line,
take out a personal guarantee to get that financing.
Whether, it's to smooth out bumps
in the road on the cashflow
or if it's expansion financing.
That's always a huge challenge.
And then the last thing is just time, time, time.
It takes so much time to do all these tasks
that are required to run a business,
that you can now free up.
Whether that be through the application itself
or the partner applications.
But I think this other kind of concept is,
we hear over and over in the IT side,
use technology to do the low value tasks.
The cumbersome grunt work to free people up
to provide better service.
And we saw that there the Intuit, that's worth coffee.
Where your accountant should be your business partner,
not your tax filer.
Your tax filing is something that happens once a year.
But your business partner is someone that engages with you
on a weekly basis to make sure
when you get to the tax filing
you're in the best position ever.
So, that seems to really be embraced by some of the
accountants that we've talked to.
They've talked about having all the data in this cloud
system now.
It's not locked in the coffin underneath your desk,
which enables all kinds of things up to and including,
quick lending, the day that you submit your common app,
that maybe even will come out ahead of time
to tell you maybe you should grab some working capital
because Christmas is coming and you're a little shy
on inventory.
So it's really fun to see this application of technologies
we talk about all the time applied to small business.
>> Well before we head out, you probably, I think,
when Matt Rissell, the CEO of Tsheets,
just about lost it, when you said, you know,
you caused the big problem yesterday.
And if you're just now joining us,
it's about the socks.
It's all about the socks.
They handed out one sock on 5,000 seats in the keynote area.
I got back to the hotel, I said,
why do I have just one sock?
We had to go get the other sock.
But you were nice enough to leave us with a pair,
so we will not go home barefoot.
Our sock demands, I'll leave that there.
>> When I showed that to my wife last night,
she was like oh my gosh, more socks.
We just threw away the last batch of socks.
>> Well we've certainly enjoyed having you
here for the past couple of days,
here at QuickBooks Connect 2016.
And look forward to being back here for 2017.
We've talked to a lot of folks here about the progress
they made over the past year.
And I'm sure this next year coming up for them
will be even bigger and better.
So for all of us here at the Cube
and my colleague Jeff Frick,
I'm John Walls and we thank you again for joining us
from San Jose.