Intuit has quietly made another acquisition today to expand its accounting and back office management business, this time focusing on payroll. Acrede, a Jersey, UK-based provider of global, cross-border and cloud-based payroll services, is joining Inuit; and its CEO and founder, Karen Paterson, is being named Intuit’s director of payroll platform.
Financial terms and other details of the deal have not been disclosed in Acrede’s announcement of the deal — which was delivered in the form of a magazine feature written by the CEO.
Intuit tells us that it is not disclosing the price but has confirmed the acquisition and that all of Acrede’s 80 employees are joining the company. “Acrede’s cloud-based global platform processes payroll for employees in 30 countries with scalable technology and a talented team with deep global tax and compliance expertise,” Karen Peacock, GM of employee management solutions in Intuit’s Small Business Group, said in a written statement. “We’re excited to welcome them to the Intuit team.”
The transaction should close in a few weeks.
Before buying Acrede, Intuit already had an established payroll operation, with its own online component. What the new company gives Intuit is a payroll operation that’s established across Europe and Asia with infrastructure to handle more international payroll business, helping Intuit raise its game outside of its core market of U.S. and serving mainly domestic customers.
As companies like ZenPayroll, Zenefits and Zoho (they don’t all begin with Z) continue to grow their businesses and try to disrupt Intuit, scaling up its payroll operations, and adding more international and cloud components, are essential for Intuit to remain competitive.
Acrede was founded in 2010 and appears to have been self-funded, a point that Paterson makes with not a little indignation in that magazine feature.
“Being an entrepreneur is tough,” she writes. “When I say tough, this is what I mean: it can feel like no one believes in you, no one wants to fund you and everyone wants a track record that you do not have.” She had founded one company previously, the eponymous Patersons, before starting and running Acrede.
Acrede is Intuit’s 21st acquisition.
Updated with comment from Intuit
