03 | CASE STUDY (2020)

Integrating TSheets identities for Intuit’s M&A strategy

TSheets was an independent cloud-based time tracking app purchased for the Quickbooks ecosystem in 2018 as part of Intuit’s overall growth strategy. This use case will recap the 2 year journey for the Identity integration and migration work.


 
 

Overview

TSheets was the first of many acquisitions that would change the future of Intuit. They were purchased by Intuit for 2 reasons, eliminate the competition and acquire new customers. Integrating those customer’s identities was the first step in our long growth strategy.
 

Customer problems

  1. As a small business owner, I need all my employees and workers to track their time digitally, but it can be difficult because they don’t want to waste time creating accounts or signing in, which puts my business at risk.

  2. As an employee/worker, I need to track time in order to get paid, but I don’t want to be bothered with accounts and passwords.

Business goals

  • Ensure customer account security, enable Intuit ecosystem and migrate all customers into Intuit

  • Improve QB to TSheets attach rates

  • Improve onboarding experience for TSheets to drive greater FTU conversion

 

Meet the customers

Solving the problem meant understanding our new Intuit customers. Before the acquisition, TSheets had gained so many users from awesome product experiences and low friction onboarding. Workers make up the majority of TSheets users. If workers don’t adopt TSheets as a means to track time, the admins and business owners abandon the app, and we lose a paid customer.
 
ADMINS & WORKERS
57,000 (7%)
Susy
(pro)

1 admin
13 clients 		Sam
(admin)

2 admin
10 workers 		Latasha
(owner)

20+ workers
 
WORKERS
768,000 (93%)
Troy
(high-tech)

has phone & multiple email accounts
  		Jackie
(mid-tech)

has phone but no email
 
  		Joe
(no-tech)

does NOT have phone, computer or email account
 

Challenges for Identity

By allowing low friction onboarding and bespoke business entities, TSheets created unidentifiable accounts. To put it simply, we had no idea who these customers were. This made it extremely challenging to integrate their users into our centralized identity model. And while we were trying to figure it out, their user base kept growing, which meant more accounts to fix.
 

Key takeaways for TSheets

  1. Usernames were only unique inside a business entity

  2. Email and Phone was not required for workers

  3. No password strength policies

  4. 30 day session times

 
 

businessname.tsheets.com

intuit.com
First name   Chuck
Last name   Norris
Username / User ID admin chuckchuck82
Email   mr.norris@gmail.com
Password password P@ssw0rd4u?
Phone   555-555-1234
 

Integration & migration phases

The identity team segmented the work into phases to measure velocity and show incremental progress for our stakeholders. Each phase had unique problems with specific goals associated to them. A general overview is listed below.

Phase 1
Stop the bleeding

Change sign up screen from TSheets to Intuit for Quickbooks customer

Phase 2
Stop the bleeding, again...

Change sign up screen from TSheets to Intuit for all TSheets customers

Phase 3
Migrate accounts

Migrate all existing TSheets customers and businesses into Intuit identity system

After a 2 year journey, we successfully migrated all TSheets customers and businesses into our Intuit identity system

 
Although this migration was successful, it exploited the problems of our monolith for new growth. Therefore, we replatformed our entire identity system to a new federated model, which would enable faster connections with future acquisitions, ie. Credit Karma and Mailchimp.

$94M

Direct customer “ARR”
(was $52M)

97K

Paid customers
(was 56K)

1.2M

Workers
(was 692K)
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