As the COVID-19 pandemic plays out around the world, the challenges facing consumers, small businesses, self-employed workers and accountants continues to grow. Many people are struggling to make ends meet and provide for their families. They are facing a loss of income, a lack of adequate savings to weather the storm, and poor access to health care. With shelter-in-place mandates proliferating around the world, small businesses have had to close their doors and are running out of cash to pay their employees and their bills.
Our customers are sharing with us all they are dealing with. One consumer in California shared the emotional toll the current environment is taking: “It feels like everything I worked so hard for, all the responsible money decisions I made, now feel all wrong.” A small business owner described the tough reality he’s facing this way: “We’ve lost 97% of our sales and are struggling to pay our people.”
At Intuit, we are deeply moved by these struggles. We know our customers’ pain is real and the challenges they are facing can be difficult. So today, we’re sharing a number of actions we’re taking to provide relief to those who need it most – a set of initiatives that have the potential to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in value for our customers and for people in the communities in which we operate.
We are putting an investment of more than $8 million to work through four initiatives:
To help consumers in need, we are donating funds to support the people served by organizations that are providing relief during this uncertain time – the United Nations COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We’re also providing extra support to a select group of non-profits who are delivering funds and healthcare services to people around the world. Through our We Care and Give Back Program, Intuit is matching employee donations 2:1 for 15 non-profits in 6 countries around the world.
These funds will work to prevent and stop the spread of the virus, offer healthcare services, and provide critical home supplies like food and medical supplies to quarantined and isolated individuals, especially those who don’t have access to adequate healthcare or resources.
Intuit QuickBooks is teaming up with GoFundMe to create a Small Business Relief Initiative to help small businesses raise money to overcome the challenges caused by COVID-19. Through this initiative, small businesses can create a fundraiser on the GoFundMe platform where they’re able to share their story with the public and request financial support to help cover employee-related and business expenses. All of us – friends, family, neighbors, customers – can find small businesses in need on the GoFundMe website and donate directly to them. Intuit will provide funds to go directly to small businesses as part of the relief initiative.
GoFundMe fundraising programs work and they make a real difference. A local deli in California recently generated more than $20,000 from donors to help stay afloat and continue paying employees while their business slowed. If we work together through this Small Business Relief initiative we can inspire more stories like this one by providing millions of dollars in funding to help small businesses stay in business and save jobs.
We’re helping QuickBooks Capital customers with upcoming payments and access to funds. Customers who, due to hardship from this pandemic, are struggling to make their loan payment, can receive up to an 8-week deferral on loan payments with no interest charged.
We’re helping QuickBooks Payments customers get access to cash more quickly with our QuickBooks Instant Deposit offering which makes cash available on the same day. We’ll soon be launching a free version of the service that will save customers up to $3 million in fees and provide them with access up to a total of $300 million of their payments funds instantly.
Across these four initiatives, we believe we can put a meaningful dent in the unforeseen challenges our customers now face. And we won’t stop here. The United States government is looking to make hundreds of millions of dollars available to small businesses to help keep them afloat. We’re actively exploring ways to partner together so our capabilities and technology platform can help small businesses get access to these funds quickly.
There is no perfect solution for this unprecedented situation. But we know we can’t face this alone, which is why we are working together with our employees and our partners to ensure we have the greatest impact on those who need it most—together.