Published on the 20/05/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
A startling lack of financial savvy among Australia’s start-up community has led software house Intuit to invest in financial education initiatives…
When Galaxy Research asked 400 local start-ups to complete a ten question financial quiz, only three percent got all the questions right. Just 42 percent got a pass, with five or more questions answered correctly, and eight percent failed to get a single question right.
To support start-ups, Intuit Australia managing director Nicolette Maury, said that the company would invest in a series of financial fitness bootcamps being run around Australia by StartUp Weekend Australia.
Maury declined to say how much was being invested in the initiative. For Intuit the main advantage comes from the introduction to potential new users that this will afford.
Maury acknowledged that a significant proportion of new Intuit users had never before used financial software to manage their business affairs, preferring spreadsheets and shoeboxes although what she described as a “healthy” proportion were defecting from other desktop or cloud-based accounting systems.
Intuit’s Quicken and QuickBooks software systems were initially sold by Reckon Software in Australia, a deal which came to an end in February 2014.
Intuit set up shop in Sydney and has been seeking to boost its user base and local profile ever since. Maury today declined to update the mid 2014 user count for the company, which was at that stage just 7000.
While last year Intuit claimed that it supported 5 million of the 29 million small businesses in the US, its global penetration of the small business market stood at just one percent or 6 million users. Internationally it faces a raft of competitors.
In Australia MYOB already claims that it has 500,000-plus paying clients including 116,000 cloud users; Xero Australia lays claim to around 200,000 paying customers.
While Maury remains coy about user numbers she did however say that the company, which has just moved into flash new offices in Sydney’s CBD, had grown to 70 staff, and could add another 10-20 by the end of the year. She said one of the company’s major challenges was finding skilled personnel.
Building Intuit’s Australian profile remains a further challenge, given that both Xero and MYOB are expert brand spruikers, and, being listed in New Zealand and Australia, enjoy additional media scrutiny. That profile has been heightened by MYOB’s recent $831 million listing and the war of words between the management of the two companies.
Even when hosting their own event, Intuit can’t always take a trick.
Maury can’t have been too pleased at the launch of the Financial Fitness programme today when NSW minister for small business, John Barilaro, took pains to explain how his family-run business had been boosted by the introduction of software – MYOB’s.
Take the financial fitness assessment.
