- published: 17 Nov 2011
- views: 12909
Intuit Inc. is an American software company that develops financial and tax preparation software and related services for small businesses, accountants and individuals. It is incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Mountain View, California.
The company was founded in 1983 by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx in Palo Alto, California.
Intuit makes the personal finance programs Quicken and TurboTax (and its Canadian counterpart, QuickTax), as well as the small business accounting program QuickBooks. In addition, they produce QuickBooks Point of Sale solution for small retailers, professional tax solutions ProSeries and Lacerte, and the Web-based corporate workgroup productivity solution QuickBase.
The company maintains a number of foreign sales offices. It has R&D activity in Intuit Canada headquartered in Mississauga, Ontario and Intuit India headquartered in Bangalore, India. International product versions are now predominantly produced by third-party localizers or licensees.
Intuit was conceived by Scott Cook, whose prior work at Procter & Gamble helped him realize that personal computers would lend themselves as replacements for paper-and-pencil based personal accounting. On his quest to find a programmer he ended up running into Tom Proulx at Stanford. The two started Intuit, which initially operated out of a modest room on University Avenue in Palo Alto. The first version of Quicken was coded in Microsoft's BASIC programming language for the IBM PC and UCSD Pascal for the Apple II by Tom Proulx and had to contend with a dozen serious competitors. Intuit struggled financially until they found their formula for success, which revolved around direct marketing campaigns, favorable reviews in industry and consumer magazines and word of mouth from satisfied customers[citation needed].