Summary:
This article is mainly about Intuit Inc. who decided to purchase an online personal finance website, Mint.com, for $170 million. Intuit Inc. sees this transaction as a beneficial and defensive move for the business. This website (Mint software) organizes the users’ bank accounts all in one place and provide ways to analyze the users’ spending and investments. Simultaneously, Mint recommends other financial service companies to its 1.4 million users in return for a charged fee. Both Intuit Inc. and Mint will benefit from this transaction. Intuit Inc. will further strengthen its position as a leading provider of consumer SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings with profits in the process and on the other hand, Mint can acquire a large portion of Intuit Inc.’s original users.
Connection:
The connection between the article and accounting is the new and improved accounting software. These software not only helps inexperienced individuals to do simple accounting, but they also make accounting easier for accountants. In the past, accountants have to spend countless hours calculating financial information like mortgages for the customers. Now with the aid of these software, accountants can simply punch in a few values and a few clicks and the results will magically show up in a blink of an eye. Software like Mint can increase the efficiency of running a business by reducing the time consumption required to organize and speed up the accounting processes.
Reflection:
In my perspective, this transaction is certainly a defensive move for Intuit Inc. By accumulating the original users of Mint and sharing its users with Mint can immensely increase the profit. I think that this is a defensive move because this transaction allows Intuit Inc to climb out of recession quicker and prevent any deficit from getting deeper. Also, considering that Intuit Inc’s loss has increased to $70million in quarter 4, Mint can play a huge role in filling up the $70million loss.
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2009/09/14/daily2.html
