If you’ve been following the Intuit Developer Spotlight series, then you’ve been reading about dynamic developers—and their unique apps—within the Intuit Developer community. Seeing a need and fulfilling it seems to be a common desire, and Joe Lauer, Founder and CEO of Greenback, is no exception.
“I saw a need and wanted to help small-to-medium sized businesses spend less time reconciling bank feeds,” he says.
Here’s a look at Joe’s successful app journey.
Passion for Technology and Customer Service
Joe founded Greenback in 2015. He and his team are passionate about providing automation software that meets—and exceeds—the needs of their clients. They listen to customer feedback, and they utilize all of it within their product.
“Listening to customer feedback and quickly iterating on your product is essential,” Joe says.
Helping him is Joe’s development team, who run the gamut of experience—from recent graduates to decades of engineering. Together, they’ve created what they call the “new itemized transaction feed”, which provides their clients with fully itemized transactions directly from the vendor, such as Amazon and Home Depot. Joe notes in a Firm of the Future post (Greenback: Sync Expenses From Top Stores and Suppliers) that they are the only platform that itemizes every receipt detail, assuring reconciliation to the penny.
“Greenback has been helping thousands of businesses by automatically getting millions of sales and expense transactions on a daily basis with its sophisticated connected accounting platform,” he says.
Key benefits for Greenback users include:
- Automatic fetching of fully itemized sales and expense receipts directly from top stores and channels, eliminating OCR, expensive manual receipt processing, and brittle workflows
- Less work and better insights with actual itemized transaction information, eliminating guesswork on what was purchased or sold
- Seamless, intuitive, and automatic integration with some of the most trusted brands in business
And integrating with QuickBooks Online, Joe says, was not even a question. “Greenback targets primarily small-to-medium businesses and QuickBooks is the clear leader in that space. It was a no brainer! It was just a plus that the developer platform is easy to use and the sandbox simplifies our engineering process.”
The Benefits of Joining the Intuit Developer Community
Joe and his team love being a part of the Intuit developer ecosystem, partly because of how supportive it is but also because of how “low friction it was to get started, build our app, and launch in the QuickBooks App Store.”
The QuickBooks App Store, according to Joe, is one of the best ways to reach QuickBooks users. He says, “It’ll be your best return on investment. Intuit offers numerous ways to solicit feedback and advice on how to best market your app.”
Integrating Greenback’s platform with QuickBooks Online has been a long-term but successful process, and they’ve learned a lot throughout it. “I’d say the most difficult aspect of a great QuickBooks integration is simply adapting to the hundreds of variations of settings users can configure. At Greenback, we ended up with hundreds of unit tests to cover the entire matrix. It was the only way to ensure quality while we keep shipping new features every week.”
He continues, “Greenback’s platform uses a fairly modern stack of microservices, containers, and storage. We run Java across-the-board for our apps. Over the past 3 years, we’ve streamlined our QuickBooks integration to something we think is one of the best and fastest. We intelligently cache data locally and leverage QuickBooks CDC (change-data-control) functionality to deliver a super-fast experience in our app. If you haven’t tapped into CDC yet, then you need to.”
Working with the Intuit Developer Team and the Future
For Joe, a major benefit of choosing to integrate with QuickBooks Online is the support he’s received from the Intuit Developer team. “Intuit Developer has had a huge impact on Greenback’s success. They have helped expand our reach immensely, and we truly appreciate their enthusiasm and support. It’s clear Intuit Developer wants apps to be successful, and obviously so do we. I think the symbiotic relationship has been critical.”
He also says, “They immediately understood the benefits of using the Greenback app and saw the short-and-long term benefits of our product too. They know where we are headed and readily became our product evangelists!”
And speaking of their product, Greenback’s focus in 2019 is going to be around accountants and teams, scaling its UI to work from single-owner businesses up to large accounting firms. The team is also keeping an eye on emerging developer trends, such as Natural Language, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain.
As they move forward, they’ll continue to focus in on what their customers want and need for their businesses. Of their 26, five-star reviews on their QuickBooks App Store page, this one stands out regarding customer service: “Our company started using Greenback a couple of weeks ago. We had a few things that needed tweaking in order for it to work with our system. Customer support was fantastic and got everything working perfectly. Now all of our receipts are attached to the transactions and everything is categorized and assigned to the client correctly. This saves us so much time! We’re no longer sorting through paper receipts or signing in to multiple accounts to try to figure out what was purchased and for who; it’s all in Greenback! Exactly the app I was hoping for!”
To help other developers in the QuickBooks community achieve the same reviews, Joe says “persistence is key”, “make sure that everyone on your team is engaged”, and “being able to pivot quickly will always be a great asset—you never know when you might need to do a course correction.”
Great words of advice, and I, along with the entire Intuit team, look forward to our continued partnership with Joe and Greenback.
We also look forward to partnering with new developers. Contact us today to get started and check out the Intuit Developer Blog for both past and upcoming posts in our Intuit Developer Spotlight series, as well as additional insights into the QuickBooks Online community, such as the importance of being active on forums.
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