Intuit Buys Payroll Specialist PaySuite

Given key geographic differences in payroll rules, Intuit has purchased U.K.-based payroll specialist PaySuite, to complete it’s integration into QuickBooks Online. The two firms had been partnering with months. This move is similar to Intuit’s purchase back in May of Invitco, a cloud-based bookkeeping operation in Sydney, Australia, ZDnet reported.

This adds to Intuit’s recent expansion via takeover, where it has acquired about a dozen niche players in FY14, including KDK Softwares, Check, Lettuce, CustomerLink, Docstoc, Good April, Full Slate, Level Up Analytics and Prestwick Services, ZDnet said.

As important as geography and adding highly-focused specialties are for its accounting package’s comprehensiveness, Intuit is also looking to add and strengthen its cloud position. For years, Intuit has strategically aimed at comprehensiveness and ease-of-use, while not needing to obsess over security. As long as much of the data stayed on a customer’s desktop, Intuit absorbed little risk. But as cloud has practically taken over all aspects of IT operations, Intuit now needs robust protections for the data that it has been organizing.

Intuit is claiming that five million small businesses subscribe to Intuit products and that QuickBooks Online has an installed base of 1.7 million user globally. Terms of the deal were not announced.