Last week, there was a little excitement in the Bitcoin community, when it was announced that Intuit would be supporting Bitcoin in Quickbooks, its flagship accounting package.
As happens far too often, someone made a small finding and twisted it into a story that was far more grandiose than it actually is. In this case, Intuit is rolling out a service called “PayByCoin” to Quickbooks Online users, which allows a way to include a link on their invoices for their customers to pay with Bitcoin, and that’s it.
The Intuit Labs website does mention some of the advantages of Bitcoin, such as the lack of charge-backs, but really, the amount of work that Intuit devoted to this means of “supporting” Bitcoin is quite minimal.
The list of what the service isn’t is quite long:
It is only available to Quickbooks Online users, not to Quickbooks desktop users.
It doesn’t allow BTC-denominated accounts within Quickbooks; there is no support for currencies with eight decimal places.
In short, Quickbooks does not “support” Bitcoin, it simply provides users with the option to use Bitpay as a payment processor is a simple link on the e-invoice. If you have those coins converted to US Dollars on the spot, you’re golden, but if you want to hold some percentage of the Bitcoins you collect during the course of your sales (a service offered by Bitpay), Quickbooks provides no support for you there.
Meanwhile, other reports from across the web indicate that Intuit’s Merchant Services division is just as opposed to Bitcoin as nearly any other credit card processor.
