A QuickBooks match made in cyberspace

This Valentine’s day — appropriately enough — Intuit’s QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program, which matches accountants to expert QuickBooks advisors, celebrated its 20th anniversary. To mark the occasion, the company has launched a redesigned marketplace. If it works as planned, accountants should be able to find a ProAdvisor that matches their specific needs on the first page of match results.

The new Find-a-ProAdvisor marketplace, which launched exclusively through QuickBooks Online last December, is now available through country-specific websites at the following locations: Australia, Canada, India, United Kingdom and United States. According to Chris Hamilton, leader of the Global ProAdvisor Program, the marketplace receives 1 million visitors a year.

The QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program is a membership program for accounting professionals that provides customer support, QuickBooks training, and access to Intuit products and services at discounted prices for them and their small business clients. ProAdvisors can become certified as QuickBooks experts and then list themselves in the Find-a-ProAdvisor marketplace.

ProAdvisors on the marketplace now have their specific areas of expertise prominently displayed on the front page of their profile. “You wouldn’t believe the impact the phrase ‘certified expert in’ has,” Hamilton said. For a full view of a sample profile page, click here.

Also new is smart technology that allows accountants to send a message to a ProAdvisor straight form their bio page, and the message is auto-filled with the information from the search criteria the user entered when searching for a match.

“This is just the foundation,” Hamilton said. “There is much more we want to do in the future. Everything we do is in service to driving more connections. We want to drive more business for our ProAdvisors, and small businesses are finding the right fit for them ideally on the first result. How do we create the world’s best matching algorithm technology? How do we constantly think about new ways to discover? We have, as as far as we know, the largest mktplace of accountants. Small businesses all over the world are looking for ProAdvisors. How do we make this easily accessible to them?”

The new marketplace was built largely using customer feedback. “We went very deep with accountants and small businesses,” Hamilton said. “If we didn’t have those insights, we would build the wrong product.”