Intuit And Revel Simplify Payments Food Chain

The Intuit and Revel Systems relationship serving small to mid-sized enterprises continues to expand, with a new duo of verticals served by the latter’s iPad POS systems and the former’s QuickBooks POS.

As announced on Monday (Aug. 15), the two companies will now offer, via QuickBooks powered by Revel Systems, data syncing from purchase orders to payroll — this time around for grocers and salons.

For grocers, the new offerings are about a continuum from scales (the measuring kind) to taxes. For salons, it extends from booking appointments to taxes. For both industries, the iPad-based checkout of Revel is housed within QuickBooks and helps information flow lead to better business decisions, John Shapiro, director of product management and payments for small businesses at Intuit, told PYMNTS.

The newest launch follows the success of serving retail and restaurants, which had been the first salvo of the partnership.

“Salons and grocers are businesses that have unique needs,” said Shapiro, referring to high turnover of services and goods. The far-flung activities of a brick-and-mortar operation — notably, in a grocery, with different points of contact, ordering and sale — can be stymied by redundant data entry, which can lead to errors and lost time upon reconciliation at the back end.

Shapiro said Intuit has utilized machine learning to look at different industries to see how they use QuickBooks and how that usage has been customized, leading the firm to find new opportunities to help simplify business processes.

Among the features offered through the partnership for salons: appointment scheduling, with the ability for customers to book online. Those same customers can also request ancillary services for their appointments, such as coloring or manicures, which are tracked, paid and accounted for as a bundle. Added services, of course, mean added revenues for the small business.

Shapiro told PYMNTS that salon owners now have the benefit of employee management that can sync with the aforementioned requests from customers. That means that employees can be assigned to those added services, and at the same time, commissions can be allocated to those employees, along with back-office reconciliation that helps track tax implications, for, as Shapiro noted, “some employees are weekly and some are monthly.”

For the grocery segment, said Shapiro, the Revel/Intuit partnership promotes integrated scales, where, at the initial order, employees can use them to check out customers for foodstuffs that sell by weight (meat, fruits and vegetables) and sync with the POS. Barcode labels feature prices embedded within those labels, and as Shapiro stated, with all of this taking place at the front end and via the cloud (and with mobile functionality that means that sales can be done on the fly and in aisles), there is the benefit of eliminated bottlenecks, with “no more receipts printed out to be reconciled at the end of the day.”

One important boon from an integrated POS partnership as offered by Intuit and Revel, said Shapiro, comes as small business owners are able to gain a 360° view of their business, with the ability to track inventory from purchase order to ultimate sale — especially important for a grocer. “What many of these smaller firms may not realize,” said Shapiro, “is that inventory is often their biggest asset,” and yet, it is an asset with quite a limited shelf life — literally. The goal of any grocer (or retailer) is to maximize sales per square foot. And, said Shapiro, with inventory tracking, that becomes easier, as decision-makers can see what is turning over most effectively and what may be lagging and deserves closer scrutiny.