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Sensing that consumers’ growing preference for contactless-payments options will be permanent, Intuit Inc. on Thursday introduced its QuickBooks Card Reader for small businesses.
The terminal, which integrates with QuickBooks Payments, supports what Intuit calls smart-tipping functionality. Businesses can customize three tipping options that are displayed on the card reader as a percentage of the total amount or as a flat-dollar amount. The new terminal also features an LED display, as well as connectivity and battery-level indicators. Intuit says it designed the terminal using customer research to identify features small businesses want in a payment terminal.
Later this summer, Intuit plans to introduce a companion desktop device called the QuickBooks Power Stand that will wirelessly charge the QuickBooks Card Reader. This device has an integrated USB port for charging USB-compatible devices such as a mobile phone or tablet computer.
“We created QuickBooks Card Reader to address specific challenges we heard our customers were facing with their payment devices,” Rania Succar, senior vice president of Intuit QuickBooks Money Offerings, says by email. “QuickBooks Card Reader fills a unique gap in the current reader market, between the full- scale payment terminal and readers that lack the functionality we’ve designed. And, as we see more consumers make a permanent shift to contactless payments, preferring to ‘tap’ their digital wallets and cards, solutions like the QuickBooks Card Reader are even more essential in helping small businesses get paid.”
The new terminal, which works with the QuickBooks mobile app or QuickBooks GoPayment app, allows businesses to leverage such features as instant deposit on eligible transactions and the built-in QuickBooks accounting capability. Intuit processes more than $65 billion annually through QuickBooks Payments.
“There’s incredible power and potential in the integrated nature of our offerings to optimize money management, and we see great opportunities for our customers to leverage the suite of tools we offer to gain that more cohesive, comprehensive view of their business,” Succar says.
The introduction of the QuickBooks Card Reader is not the first time Intuit has ventured into the POS terminal market. In 2012, the company introduced its GoPayment mobile-payment processing application with its QuickBooks Point of Sale 2013 software. That product was expected to make GoPayment more appealing to small businesses than rival products from the likes of Square Inc. and PayPal Inc.
The QuickBooks Card Reader is available for $49 and the QuickBooks Power Stand will sell for $39. Both devices can be purchased together as a bundle for $79.
