Major Google/Intuit Partnership

Google and Intuit are announcing a partnership today at 1:15 pm California time. The meat of it seems to be that they are building Google services directly into Intuit’s QuickBooks, so small business users will be able to list themselves on Google Maps, create and manage advertising campaign with Adwords and post listings on Google Base.

There is a conference call at 1:15 with Intuit President and CEO, Steve Bennett and Google CEO, Eric Schmidt that we’ll be on, which will have more details and at least some hints on the economics of the deal.

The Google services will be built into QuickBooks 2007, available this Fall, for U.S. customers only.

I sure hope there’s an easy way to turn this stuff off.

Update: Notes from Analyst call:

Eric Schmidt is talking about embracing the long tail of small businesses on the conference call. Less than half of Quickbooks businesses have an online presence. This will help them get online, he says. Businesses will be able to create an adwords account using pre-filled information from Quickbooks. If the business doesn’t have a website Google will create a notecard page for them. All businesses will be given a $50 credit to start. Google will also create a business listing for businesses for search on Google.com and Google Maps.

Financial terms: In response to a question on the financial terms, someone said “We have some shared revenue and cost things”. Basically a non answer, although it’s clear Google is making payments to Intuit pursuant to this deal. They also say they are working on things with Google to expand partnership beyond QuickBooks base.

Google will create a web page for businesses that don’t have one, since CPC advertising requires something to click to…So google will be charging these businesses to send them to a page served by Google. I wonder if those pages will have Google ads on them.

Google and Intuit are looking at integrating this into Quicken as well.

Additional Update: Press Release is here. Added a screenshot below.