Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Intuit's Investor Day. My name is Kim Watkins, and I'm Vice President of Investor Relations. We're really thrilled that you took the time to join us here today. We have a great day planned for you. Sasan will kick us off and take us through our strategy and our evolution to an AI driven expert platform.
After Sasan has finished speaking, we have a platform immersion experience planned. This is an opportunity for you to go a little bit deeper into our strategy. And this is actually something that we're doing that's a little bit new this year. And so I'll share more details in just a minute. After that, we'll take a short break.
And then we'll have Alex and Greg come up and take a deep dive into our 2 largest businesses. After that, we'll have a financial perspective from Michelle and then we'll have plenty of opportunity for Q and A. And for those of you here with us in Mountain View, please also join us for lunch where you'll have an opportunity to spend some time with our leadership team. I also wanted to mention here today, we have in addition to the speakers, Sasan and Michelle's staff. They're sitting around the sides of the room.
So make sure that you introduce yourselves to them and say hello. And a couple other quick housekeeping items. We have Wi Fi available. It's on the Intuit guest network. There's no access code required.
And for the restrooms, head out the door to your left and then follow the signs to the other side of the building. Onto the forward looking statements. Forward looking statements. These presentation materials include forward looking statements. There are a number of factors that could cause our results to differ materially from our expectations.
Please see the section entitled cautions about forward looking statements in the enclosed appendix for information regarding forward looking statements and related risks and uncertainties. You can also learn more about these risks in our Form 10 ks for fiscal 2019 and our other SEC filings, which are available on the Investor Relations page of Intuit's website at www.intuit.com. We assume no obligation to update any forward looking statement. Non GAAP Financial Measures. These presentations include certain non GAAP financial measures.
Please see the section entitled About Non GAAP Financial Measures in the enclosed appendix for an explanation of management's use of these measures and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. In this presentation, we may also announce plans or intentions regarding functionality that is not yet delivered. These statements do not represent an obligation to deliver this functionality to customers. Some numbers may not agree with the sum of the components nor with SEC filings due to immaterial rounding adjustments. Financial results are reported under ASC 606 unless otherwise noted.
Okay, onto the fun stuff. So as I mentioned earlier, we'll have a platform immersion experience following Sasan. Again, this is a little bit different than we've done in the past and opportunity for you really to deeply understand our strategy. And you'll be able to participate whether you're here with us in Mountain View or whether you're joining us online. We'll be showcasing our 6 top priorities, which we refer to as our big bets and showing you how we're leveraging our AI driven expert platform to meet our customers' most pressing problems.
You'll notice that many of these stations are staffed by our very senior leaders, including many members of Sasan's staff. And with that, let's get started. It's my great pleasure to introduce our CEO, Hassan Goodarzi.
Thank you, Kim, and good everyone. I'd like to welcome all of you in the room and on the webcast to Investor Day 2019. So we are very excited about today. It should be a fun day. Let me just kick off the 3 objectives that we have for today.
The first one is we want to share with you the very large and durable customer problems that the company is pursuing. The second is proof points that our strategy is working. And the third is we'll give you a glimpse into our secret sauce, which starts and ends with our people that are accelerating incredible innovation across the company. So with that, let me get started. So you all have heard Brad talk about this slide.
We are a 35 year old company that falls in love with what's most important for our customers and never the solutions that we create, which is why we've reimagined the company in the last 35 years, and we've never been afraid to disrupt our own profit pools to deliver for our customers. And that is the essence of why we've been able to lead through 4 significant platform shifts. And because of that, we've had a great track record of delivering great results for all of our stakeholders. This is a company with incredible reputation and an incredible culture where employees want to be a part of solving the most important problems for our customers and we've been recognized externally for that. And because the incredible work of our employees, we've accelerated customer growth.
And if you've been a shareholder, you've been a very happy camper. Now Scott started this company 35 years ago. Brad did an incredible job leading us for 11 years and we have the distinct pleasure of building on this incredible foundation as we look at the next chapter. And I am blessed to be able to serve with this team. And as Kim mentioned, they're here, and you'll have an opportunity to speak with them during the breaks and during the platform immersion.
But this is a team that I've served with in all parts of the company and or handpicked from outside of the company and they have incredible traits, but one of them is that they are all customer obsessed. And together, we have defined what's most important that we've got 10,000 plus employees and our partners focused on solving. And that is every customer has a common set of needs. They're all looking to make ends meet. They're all looking for the largest paycheck of the year, which in some of the countries starting with right here in the United States is the tax refund.
They're trying to find ways to save money and get out of debt. For those that have been bold enough to decide to be an entrepreneur and to go into business for themselves, there's an additional set of needs that they have. And those needs are to be able to find customers, to get paid for their hard work, to get access to capital to be able to grow their business, to be able to pay their employees, and lastly, but most importantly from a compliance perspective, to be able to ensure that their books are right, which by the way gets more and more stringent when you go outside of the United States. These are very large durable problems that we focus the entire company on. This along with 5 trends that I want to hit on are enormous catalysts for growth.
The first one is the fact that AI is reinventing new experiences. Now AI is actually not new. It's been around for more than 30 years. It's just become something that many talk about this day and age. But it's always needed access to large data sets and compute power.
And now both are available in this day and age. And it's very relevant to the problems that we try to solve for our customers. When you think about how we ensure that we deliver the largest deductions for our customers when they're doing their taxes, what questions are relevant for them to answer? How to actually get paid? How to get them access to capital because we believe that they can pay it back?
How to automate all of payroll? How to ultimately help them grow their business? AI in essence can automate everything that gets done today and it can also take the predictions that we have to make today for customers and automate all of it. So this is a catalyst for growth. The second one is access to digital expertise.
First of all, bless you, those that have been born after the smartphone, they expect digital help, whether it's chat, whether it's video, they expect it instantly. But now folks even my age across every industry are expecting digital help. This is very relevant to our industry because if you think about the biggest problem that we're trying to solve for our customers, it's confidence. People want to get help with running their business. People want help to get their taxes done.
And we believe this is an enormous catalyst for growth, marrying technology and digital expertise with technology. The third is about the fact that every consumer is trying to make ends meet. They are looking for free consumer financial apps to help them run their life, whether it's investing, whether it's improving their credit score, whether it's having access to financial products that are right for them, credit cards, personal loans, home loans, they are looking for ways to be able to run their financial life, which is why FinTech is exploding. We view this as a catalyst for growth because we have 50,000,000 customers, trusted brands, and they look to us to help them run their financial life beyond taxes and accounting. There is a significant rise in omni channel commerce.
E commerce is growing 3 times faster than brick and mortar, 40% of small businesses are product based businesses and they are looking for help to be able to sell their products online, to know what customers are profitable and to be able to understand how their business is performing. We view this as a catalyst for growth because we've primarily been serving service based businesses. And then last but not least, small businesses have always lagged embracing the cloud and they've lagged consumers. And we are now seeing a significant shift for those that are in the mud market. We define that by small businesses that are 10 to 100 employees wanting to shift to the cloud because they see that as a a catalyst to be able to run their business, grow their business and manage their profitability.
So with the context of these large durable customer problems that we're solving and these key trends that we believe are catalysts for growth, let me walk you through our game plan. And it starts with our mission and it ends with our metrics and how we measure performance across the company. As you've heard us talk in every interaction, our mission is to power prosperity around the world. You walk through middle of America, middle of UK, France, Canada, Australia and every country that we're in that we serve, people are trying to figure out how to make ends meet and prosperity is defined differently by every individual. Some are simply trying to just put food on the table.
Some are trying to help their ailing parents. Some are trying to help the community. Our mission is to power their prosperity. And we are guided by the values that have been in place for years. There's 8 of them, 2 of which have not changed.
1 is doing right when nobody is looking, integrity without compromise. The other is leaving the planet a better place than we found it. Now we've taken our aspirations and we've turned them into bold goals for 2025 because we believe we can aspire to even greater things. And the goals are around prosperity, reputation and growth. We are now in a place where we've declared a goal as to how we want to measure our mission.
Our goal around prosperity is we want to double household savings. In the United States at 7%, By 2025, if you are on our platform, we want you to be saving at a 14% rate. 50% of businesses have a success rate, which means 50% fail. Anyone that's on our small business platform, we want to increase that by 10 points. And if that number moves over the years, we always want to be 10 points better than those that are not on our platform to measure ultimately how we power prosperity around the world.
We want to be best in class as one of the most reputable companies in the world because what we do, every interaction that we have, every choice that we make matters and it impacts our reputation and we want to be known best in class just like we are when it comes to employee engagement. And last but not least, we set some very bold goals for 2025. I can't share the details of it with you, but what I would tell you is today, we have 50,000,000 customers, we aspire to have 200,000,000 customers by 2020 5, and we also have a growth rate target that we've set internally. And this informs our 3 1 year plan True North goals. And as you know, because you've heard Brad talk about it for years, we are very intentional in terms of running the company focused on delivering for employees to create an environment where they can do amazing work because by doing that, they will deliver incredible experiences for customers and doing that with our partners drives shareholder growth.
As you can see, all the metrics are empty. Staying true to tradition, we share with you what we measure, but not the actual goals. But please know that we have very specific goals for each of these stakeholders and it's what me and my team get held accountable for to deliver for the company. Now with these bold goals, we have a crystal clear strategy that we are pursuing. And the essence of our strategy is focused on 3 core customer benefits.
It's about putting more money in their pocket. It's about eliminating work and drudgery so they can focus on what matters to them. And it's about complete confidence. If you forward the clock 20 years from now, these three benefits will still matter. And the essence of our strategy that we've been talking about is about an AI driven expert platform.
Let me unpack that very quickly. The platform element is truly to be
an open platform where we and
others can build on the platform to help customer problems that I mentioned. The second is about significantly accelerating the application of artificial intelligence. We've defined artificial intelligence as machine learning, knowledge engineering and natural language processing. For us, machine learning is about taking rich data sets that are customers' data sets and building decision engines and algorithms to automate all experiences for our customers. Knowledge engineering is about turning rules and the relationships between data into code.
And natural language processing is about taking the interaction that all of you have in this room and others with products and services and revolutionizing those experiences. We have shifted a significant amount of our resources to revolutionize experiences because of AI and very specifically those areas that I mentioned. And then last but not least is expertise. The largest customer problem that our customers face is confidence. No matter how easy you make the platform, they still want to know somebody is going to be there to help them, whether it's through chat, whether it's through video, whatever the means may be.
And so we view that the marriage of technology and people on our platform will revolutionize experiences and will give us the opportunity to digitize the entire service industry, hence AI driven expert platform. With that context, let me share with you the 5 bets that we actually shared with you in the February earnings, but let me make them more explicit. Five bets that we've declared across the company. Now these bets in essence are priorities. These bets go after the largest customer problems that matter most.
And we believe that they are the largest drivers for growth for the company, so we can have a healthy company 10 years from now as we do today. Let me walk through each of the 5. The first one is about revolutionizing speed to benefit. When a customer comes to us, whether it's to help them do their taxes or they simply want to invoice and get paid or they want to pay their employees, whatever reason they come to us for, they are looking for that benefit instantly. If they are managing their business in Word or in Excel or in Google Sheets, we've got to deliver benefit instantly or they'll go back to the old way.
We have 155,000,000 customers that come to us and 110,000,000 of them are not our customers, hence the size of the opportunity. The focus here is 2 things, never enter data and accelerating the application of AI to revolutionize experiences because we believe that there is a big conversion opportunity to turn all 155,000,000 customers folks that come to us into customers. So revolutionizing speed to benefit for our customers. Now no matter how great we make this platform, whether it's an app we've built on our platform or it's an app somebody else has built on our platform, By revolutionizing speed to benefit, we believe that it's also critical to connect people to experts on our platform, which is our 2nd bet. The largest problem our customers face is confidence.
It's why just in the United States, our 86,000,000 people that choose to have somebody else do their taxes. It's why small businesses go to pros, enrolled agents or bookkeepers in the United States and in every country that we serve to help them run their business. And we believe the marriage of an incredible platform that focuses on speed to benefit and having people connect with experts on our platform can revolutionize experiences for our customers. Hence, what we've been talking to you about with TurboTax Live and QuickBooks Live. Whether it's helping you get set up, whether it's giving you help along the way, whether you're trying to run your business or view your taxes or run your financial life, or if you want all of us to do it for you, we will connect people to experts.
The third that is about unlocking smart money decisions. As I mentioned earlier, customers are looking to make ends meet every customer that we serve. They live paycheck to paycheck every week. They're trying to figure out how to put food on the table and they're actually looking to figure out how do I best save money? How do I ensure I'm actually getting the best personal loan, auto loan?
What can I do to improve my credit rating? We have an opportunity to move beyond just tax and accounting to truly unlock smart money decisions because we have 50,000,000 customers, a trusted brand and with the permission of our customers leveraging their data to deliver benefit beyond taxes and accounting to be far more relevant than we are today. The 4th bet is about being the center of small business growth. 50% of small businesses go out of business in a 5 year period. And the largest reason they go out of business is cash flow issues.
We want to be the place where in your pocket you have an assistant that helps you run your business, whether it's do you want us to help you get paid access to the money based on the invoices that are coming in? We can give you access to your money earlier than even before it comes in. You're going to run out of money by Friday. Would you like access to capital to be able to make your payroll? Can we just make your payroll payments for you?
We believe that we have an opportunity. You're going to see this in the platform Immersion so in essence be the center of small business growth, so they can actually focus on their growth and not on running their business, which is not where their core competency is. But we also want to transform the omnichannel commerce world. 40% of small businesses are product based businesses, and we have an opportunity to help them sell online, know which customers are profitable and being able to connect that to their inventory so they can run their business in one place, being the center of small business growth. And then last but not least is about disrupting the small business mid market.
We have defined that as customers that have between 10 to 100 employees. These are customers that in some ways are very similar to very small businesses, but in some ways they're very different. They're like mini corporations. They send out a lot more invoices. They have more employees.
They have to there's a lot more payroll transactions. And what they are looking for is to be able to run their corporation, very many corporation compared to the small businesses that they were. So before it may have been just Mary and I running the business and now there's a CEO, a CFO, a Head of Sales, a Head of Marketing, which means there's only certain people that can have access to invoicing. There's certain people that can have access to payroll information. So roles, permission, doing things in volume matters a ton.
This is a problem we've solved on desktop and we know how to play this game and we're aggressively moving to solve it in the cloud in the mid market. Those are our 5 bets that we've declared across the company. We've galvanized the entire company around these bets. We've mobilized our investments to focus on these bets and this is our entire plan on a page with the bottom of the page the key metrics that we review. Please know that each one of these metrics has a goal.
We just remove the goals for your viewing, but we know exactly what our targets are and what we want to achieve for our customers. Now we have a saying in the company that life is about 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. And so let me give you a quick lens as to what we do to ensure that we can execute against what we've delivered. And this is the essence of our secret sauce. It's been around for 30 plus years.
We just focus on strengthening it every year. The first and the reason why we fall in love with our customer problems and not the solutions is because of the methodology that we teach. In fact, 3 years ago, Brad and Scott got out on the road and they trained every single employee on the method of customer driven innovation and design for delight. This is about a methodology that helps us understand what problems matter most to our customers, can we solve them well, And then the second is how we go solve it, which is in essence design for delight. We've trained the whole company and now Diego that you saw the picture of earlier, you're going to meet him when you go to the platform Immersion.
One of his measurements is to ensure that everybody in the company is trained in applying this methodology because this is part of our secret sauce. The second is Intuit's operating system, which in essence what we focus on and how we run the company. When I took over earlier this year, but when I was announced last August, I went out on the road and talked to a lot of our employees and I wanted to know what are the things that they most want to preserve and what they love about the company. I also asked what do you believe we need to improve. I got a long list of what they want us to keep doing and preserving.
There are 4 things that we're focused on improving that came from the inside of the company, and that's what you see here. I'll just highlight a few of them. One of them is to take our game to the next level to be much more customer obsessed. And the second is having data and code win arguments, not opinions. And so that has informed our Intuit operating system and how we run the company.
I'm not going to go through the details of this, but to simply give you some exposure that we have a system in which we run the company. It starts in December when we actually declare our 6 year plan. It's what I just walked you through, our 2025 goals, the bets for the company. We then agree on our 3 1 year plan True North goals and what we're going to execute in the year to come. And then we focus the rest of the year on premium on execution.
I'll give you a lens into one thing that we focus on. It is called our operations and input goal review. Operations is simply is looking at our KPIs, availability, performance, quality, how are we delivering for customers. An input goal we define as things that we are going to deliver against our bets or core innovation. It could be deliver XYZ in payments, deliver XYZ in payroll, deliver XYZ improvement in TurboTax Live.
We get the officers of the company together once a month, an officer owns each input goal across the company, and we review how we're doing against the operations of the company and how we're doing against each of the input goals. And you can see that we have 100 plus input goals against each of the bets that I just walked through and 180 input goals that are driving core innovation across the company. I simply share this back to the broader point that we have the methodology for execution excellence because that is what has made the company great for the last 30 plus years. And it is ultimately what's allowed us to lead through the 4 platform shifts starting with Scott and what Brad has led for 11 years and what we are excited about, which is leading in the era of artificial intelligence and transforming experiences for our customers. And it is this premium on execution if you look at the right hand side of the page that will allow us to deliver for customers and build advantage.
It's about getting more and more customers to use products on the platform, whether we built it or somebody else to deliver the benefits that we've committed to them. It's about ultimately using artificial intelligence to automate, putting more money in their pocket, eliminating work and drudgery and doing it with total confidence. And it's about the more people we get on the platform, customers, experts, partners, the more we create a network advantage. And it is this that will allow us to penetrate a very large TAM that we have, almost a $250,000,000,000 TAM that consists of growing the core, its financial management solutions and taxes in the United States, both do it yourself and assisted. It's about connecting our customers to the ecosystem of services, payroll, payments, going beyond the taxes.
And it's about expanding globally. Let me end with where I started. We are a mission based company. We are a purpose driven company. We are guided by our values and we have a crystal clear strategy and a set of bets that we've galvanized the entire company around.
And we view every day it's about execution because that's when we make the difference for our customers. Now what you're going to experience the rest of the day, and I'll bring Kim up in a moment, The best that I just went through, you're going to experience what that feels like and looks like so it becomes very real for you, both in the room and on the webcast. And then Alex and Greg will come up here and bring all of this to life in terms of how we deliver for customers in the segment. So it will be great to catch up with you throughout the day. And with that, let me bring Kim back
Thank you, Sasan. Okay. We are ready to head into our platform immersion experience. But before we do that, I have quite a few logistics to get through. So for those of you joining us online, there's a link on the landing page that will take you to a website where you'll have the opportunity to be immersed in each of our big bets.
Each one contains roughly a 5 minute video. So it'll take you about 25 minutes to get through the entire thing. And we'll start up the presentations. Again, we expect to start up in about 75 minutes. For those of you all in here in the room with us in Mountain View, take a look at your badge.
You have a number on the bottom left corner of the badge. That will be the first experience that you'll start with, but don't worry, you'll get to see all 5. So what we'll do is, we have plenty of volunteers and signage that will get you over to the right experience to start. And then we'll be at each experience for about 10 minutes inclusive of Q and A. And when you hear the chime, that's your cue to move to the next experience.
So you'll be moving with the same group from experience to experience in 10 minute blocks. Don't forget to take a pen and paper with you. We've got notepads on everyone's table if you want to take notes. And we'll also have our senior leaders and presenters mixed in with the groups. So please don't approach them now to ask questions.
You'll have plenty of time throughout the day at lunch and during Q and A to do that. And then I also wanted to mention before we come back in this room, we'll take about a 10 minute break. So you have a chance to take a bio break and then we'll be back in this room and again you'll hear a time to direct you here. So we're ready to roll. Enjoy the experience.
Everyone can come in and take your seats, we're going to start back up again with our next presentation. I'll give everyone just a second to sit down. While other folks are coming in, I just have two quick announcements. I wanted to mention that we're featuring a number of our QuickBooks customers here today. You may have already seen the coffee station is one of our customers.
We have a snack station. And at lunch, we have a vegan station and a dessert station, both customers and our parting gifts. So please make sure you support them and don't miss that. Just wanted to say a huge thank you to those folks for being here with us today. 2nd, we're going to be sending out a survey via e mail after our program today.
We would just love it if you would take some time to fill it out. Our intent is to make sure that this day is most valuable to you and so we'd really love your feedback to be able to do that. And so with that, I'm going to bring up our next speaker and introduce Alex Chris, the General Manager of our Small Business and Self Employed Group.
Ox? Thank you, Ken.
Good morning.
So as I walk through the Small Business and Self Employed Group story, I'm going to hit on 3 things. First, we'll look back at FY 2019, then we'll ground ourselves in what's most critical to our customers and how our strategy delivers for them. And then we'll look forward and see how that strategy builds on the growth that we expect going forward. So to begin, let's start with FY 2019. It took us 15 years to build up our first million customers in QuickBooks Online.
We delivered 1,100,000 net adds in FY 2019. That's the 2nd straight year of over 1,000,000 new customers. I'd also like to highlight the 58% international growth. That's 1,300,000 customers now outside of the U. S.
Or 28% of our total online base is now outside of the United States. I'd also like to talk about online ecosystem revenue. This is the key metric that we look at. We talk about ensuring that we deliver greater than 30% online ecosystem revenue growth every year. And we delivered that in FY 2019 with 38% growth in online ecosystem revenue.
We also did that by opening up 2 new massive markets that you just saw in your experience, our move into the mid market with QuickBooks Online Advanced as well as expanding into the assisted market with QuickBooks Live, and we'll talk more about that in a few minutes. I'd also like to highlight the 34% growth in online services with payroll and payments. We're also seeing a nice shift towards full service payroll and that's again assisted market that plays well into our QuickBooks Live strategy. Also, the 35% app attach with 3rd party and first party applications, Again, we're just scratching the surface, but it's nice to see us continue to increase there. And speaking of just scratching the surface, we are just at the beginning of the large market opportunity ahead of us.
With over 800,000,000 small businesses and self employed around the world and 56,000,000 prospects that visit us every year, we are focused on ensuring that we have the right first use experience, ensuring that we can deliver a speed to benefit when they get to us and bringing many of these customers that are non consumption using pen and paper or Excel into the financial management software space. We also want to ensure that we're delivering product market fit and building products that have high retention rates. And as we continue to see the growth in our new businesses as well as outside of the U. S, we're excited to see our retention continue to hold. But let's now ground ourselves on what's most important to customers.
You heard Sasan hit on this before, but we are very clear on what's important to small businesses and self employed around the world. They need to get customers, they need to get paid, They need to pay their employees. They need to find the capital when they need it the most. And when they have that crisis of confidence or they have a question that they just need an answer to, they want to be able to seek that expert to be able to get that advice. These needs are very consistent and they've been durable for years.
But our customers' expectations are actually changing. They're no longer satisfied with 5, 10 or 15 different applications that are disparate and that they have to create ways for those apps to talk to each other. They are looking for a platform for one ecosystem that removes friction and allows that data to integrate well. And that is the core of our strategy. Way I like to talk about it is we are in a shift for being the source of truth for your books to the source of truth for your business.
That means we are the place where all data comes together. As one of our 3rd party app partners once said to me, at the end of the day, all roads lead to QuickBooks. And we take that mandate very seriously and believe that we should be that destination where all apps, whether it be ours or the 700 apps on our app ecosystem, all flow together and delight our customers. We have 3 pillars of our strategy: grow the core, connect the ecosystem and expand globally. And I'll walk through each one of those and talk about some of the innovations we're bringing to market.
In Grow the Core, we are focused on delivering the best financial management solution in the market. 4 years ago, we expanded down market with our self employed product. And this year, we expanded up market with QuickBooks Online Advanced. We now deliver a solution from 0 all the way up to 100 employees. This is critical as we've seen almost 10% to 12% of our base outgrow our existing QuickBooks Online solution.
These are customers that love the solution, have their data in one place, have learned the interface, have trained themselves on our product. They don't want to outgrow QuickBooks. But we haven't yet delivered the need the features that they need. Well, now we have. With QuickBooks Online Advanced, we're delivering roles and permissions, we're delivering advanced reporting, we're delivering the care that they expect with Priority Circle and we are bringing together this app ecosystem of 700 applications, many of which already serve the mid market.
Whether it's advanced reporting, whether it's capital or whether it's time tracking with fleet management, you can find the applications that you need already integrated into an ecosystem. This is a $40,000,000,000 opportunity that we are now moving into, but it's not new for us. We've been playing in the mid market space for over a decade with QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise. Combined with Desktop Enterprise and our QuickBooks Online Advanced, we now serve over 200,000 customers in the mid market and looking forward to see that continue to grow. The second innovation I'd like to highlight is QuickBooks Live.
You've heard a lot today about the confidence that our customers struggle with. Well, that goes a couple of different places. First, 40% of our customers or small businesses say that bookkeeping and accounting is their least favorite part of running a business. We also have talked to many of our non consumption partners, the folks that are on the sidelines, again, not using any financial management software, and many of them say they're just not ready for FMS. They don't have the confidence that they can actually run it themselves.
We believe that with QuickBooks Live, we will move many of those non consumption folks into the category, expanding from DIY software that we've been traditionally delivering to now an assisted service where they can just come to us, hand the bookkeeping over to a certified team of experts and be able to run and focus on their business. In Connect the Ecosystem, again, we want to make sure that we are that source of truth for their business. And this is being the center of small business growth. What I want to talk about today is the most important thing that customers face that will likely put them out of business or keep them up at night and that is cash flow. When we talk to customers, it is the thing that stresses them out more than anything else.
And we've been innovating on payments, payroll, time tracking and capital for a number of years to be able to optimize their cash flow opportunity. In payments, as you saw in our experience, we now have the ability to provide next day payments or even instant deposits when a customer gets paid. That's very important as we have 400,000,000 invoices that flow through QuickBooks every year. Of course, only 12% of those are payment enabled. That's just a fraction, albeit 43% increase over last year.
We're just getting started as our small businesses start to turn towards digital payments. We've also put over $400,000,000 of capital into our customers' pockets. Much of this, as you saw again in the experience, are customers that may not have qualified through a traditional bank. We're able to see a 3 60 degree view of our customers, not just their past history, but also their future, the invoices that they're sending, who their partners are, and that gives us the data points that we need to be able to ensure that they have the cash in hand and available when needed the most. As we move to payroll and time tracking, 2 years ago, we acquired the number one time tracking solution in the market with TSheets.
That is now fully integrated with payroll, which creates a best in class experience for our customers. A small business can now have their employee in the field, have them automatically be checked in to a job site using our geolocation feature, have that data flow into the home office and have the appropriate person approve their time, have payroll be run and have it deposited in their employees' accounts all in the same day. This is a massive innovation in the industry when it comes to cash flow. Traditional payroll suppliers would take 10 to 14 days in advance notice to take money out and then you would need to run time tracking on top of that. We shortened that 2 weeks down to same day, which again allows our small businesses to have the money in their pockets when they need it the most.
And finally, expand globally. I mentioned we have 1,300,000 customers outside the United States now. A lot of this is in established markets that we've planted the seeds in many years ago. I'd like to highlight the U. K, where we were the 1st making taxes digital compliant product in the market.
That gave us a huge tailwind, both brand with accountants, with our partners and with small businesses and delivered the 78% growth that you see here. We're still in early, early innings in making taxa digital, and we feel that with the product that we have in the market, we're well positioned there. In our emerging markets, our strategy is clear. We want to ensure product market fit. We know that every market, while we can take our platform there, we have to deliver that last mile in order to ensure that we are the best in class FMS product in that market.
Let me highlight France as an example. France has unique receipt capture requirements. If you walk into a small business in downtown Paris, you will see reams and reams of binders with receipts that they have to hold on to for 7 years per compliance. We worked with our local small businesses and accountants to build the best in class mobile receipt capture technology, where small business or an accountant can now take a picture of their receipt, have that OCR ed, digitized, moved into the cloud and auto reconciled in QuickBooks, and they no longer need those reams and reams of binders. This has given us a lot of momentum with accountants where they are now recommending the product.
And as you can see, 143% growth. And France looks very much like the U. K. Did just a number of years ago. So all of this comes together with a focus on our customers, what's most important to them and our strategy to become the source of truth for their business.
To set the context on this journey, I want to take you back just a few years ago on when we first launched QuickBooks Online. Early 2000s, we launched QuickBooks Online to the market and our focus at that point was ensuring that we had product market fit. We wanted to be the best FMS solution in the market. We also wanted to make sure we had the basics of money in and money out with payroll and payments. And we wanted to plant the seeds of our ecosystem with 3rd party apps.
We ended 2010 with 200,000 QuickBooks Online customers and $100,000,000 in revenue. If you move to the next chapter, we wanted to plant the seeds in our international markets. We know that it takes time to deliver that product market fit, we wanted to get an early start. And again, we're now seeing that pay off. We also were first in understanding the movement towards self employed, the gig economy, independent contractors, and we launched our QuickBooks Self Employed product, which now has over 1,000,000 customers.
Now fast forward to today, and this ecosystem is now coming together. We've moved upmarket from self employed into the mid market. We've expanded from DIY software into the assisted category. And we brought together a full ecosystem of applications, advanced payroll, payments, time tracking, capital and an ecosystem of 700 applications that all work together to become the source of truth for your business. What this does is gives us a lot of flexibility when it comes to meeting our customers where they are and expansion in ARPC.
So this was the traditional story that we've told you, which is people come in with us, they start with QuickBooks Online and then maybe they advance to payroll and payments. What we're seeing now in the market is our customers coming in with lots of different front doors and lots of different permutations. Let me walk through a few of those with you. Some of our customers look like Anna, where they'll come in again with QuickBooks Online, expand to payments. And as their business continues to grow and they see an opportunity, instead of having to be denied for capital or have to turn down that opportunity, we're able to, in the workflow of QuickBooks, recognize that opportunity with them and provide them a capital offer right then and there.
They can one click, have the money available and expand their business. Or it may look like Marissa who starts with self employed and use us for payments. She may be invoicing her customers and realize that her customers actually want to pay her in the moment with their credit card. She uses our GoPayment product to be able to take that credit card and her business continues to thrive. It's going so well that she now needs to hire a contractor or another employee and she can now transition seamlessly into QuickBooks Online and expand into payroll.
Or maybe John that doesn't start with QuickBooks at all. His biggest problem is making sure that he's tracking the time for his employees. So he starts with time tracking first. And then as he continues to see his business grow, he realizes that he doesn't want to be spending time calculating sales taxes and he doesn't have the confidence to do it himself anymore anyway. So he comes to us and hires our experts at QuickBooks Live and continues to grow his business.
As his business grows, he doesn't have to leave the franchise anymore. He can continue to scale up with us, continuing with Live and even on into our advanced product. This flexibility and ecosystem coming to life, becoming the source of truth for your business gives us a lot of opportunity to meet our customers where they are. And it's this strategy that gives us the confidence that we need to continue the long term growth expectations that we have here of 10% to 15%. So with that, I'd like to bring up Greg to walk you through the consumer group.
All right. Let me start by taking a look back at the never to be forgotten year of last year. That was the year of tax reform. It was a year of government shutdown. It was a year that not only we'll be launching and scaling TurboTax Live as a platform.
It's the same year that we launched and scaled our Turbo Mint platform as well. The same year we had a CEO change. It was quite a year. And when I look back at last year, look at our report card, just a simple reflection of how do we do during such a time of, I'll call it, turbulence. So our goals were to extend, to transform into disrupt.
First, we want to extend our lead in DIY. What that means, did we grow the category? Did we grow our share? Did customers love their experience and decide to stay with us? So did we improve our retention?
And fundamentally in a year like tax reform, is so important that we grow our filing, particularly our totally free filing, did we achieve that? And the answer is yes to all those despite the year that we went through. In terms of transforming the assisted tax category, again, I mentioned we scaled our virtual platform. We feel good about that. We delighted customers and our pros on both sides of that platform.
As a matter of fact, we actually grew the number of new filers by 3x that came from a prior year assisted tax method. Strategically, that's a very important point because that tells us that we're on the right track to transforming the assisted category and penetrating the TAM that is there. Now what about disrupting consumer finance? As I mentioned, we scaled our virtual consumer finance platform, which is a platform that connects consumers to partners so that they can improve their financial health. We introduced 2.5 times the number of marketplace offers.
We've grown our monthly active users now to 4,000,000 and in fact we have over 37,000,000 consumers on our consumer finance platform. All that was achieved last year. We feel very about what that means on the path that we're heading. The scoreboard ultimately comes down to do we deliver the revenue growth? You recall, we raise our expectations around revenue growth and we delivered 11% revenue growth as well as 7% TTO customer growth as well.
So pretty successful year during very turbulent times. And from there, that's the last I want to do looking back at that year, we survived it and we're pretty proud of our results. The rest is going to be looking forward. So first of all, when we look forward, it always starts in the same place. And you've heard it time and time again today, it starts with our customer problems.
It's so easy to read and particularly for us in this room to hear our customer problems and not truly relate to the severity of those problems. We talk about making ends meet, maximizing your tax refund, trying to save more, trying to pay down debt, trying to improve your financial health. That sounds I mean, it sounds like pretty meaty problems. But when you sit down in the customer's home, as we routinely do and you in their environment and you hear their stories about what keeps them up at night, the things that they worry about, the things that they wish for, what's getting in the way of their success and their happiness. It's truly compelling and we know that we have an opportunity to make a difference in their lives.
That's why falling along with the problem and not the solution is so important to us. One example of this is that one mindset change that we've gone, undergone recently is after over 30 years in the tax business, figuring out how to maximize the customer's tax refund. What we've discovered through the same process that maximizing the tax refund isn't just about making it bigger. It's also about how you maximize the impact that refund can have on their financial life. And this is when you start to realize the opportunity to follow the customer problem has taken us to an area of growth where we can extend our impact from tax to actually beyond tax.
Now that we find that inspiring, which brings us to how we in the consumer group support Intuit's mission of powering prosperity around the world. What we fight for every day is we fight for financial freedom from our customers, not just by doing tax, but moving beyond tax. In the way that we're going to achieve that bold goal is becoming an AI driven expert platform, which you've heard a lot about is the key to the success and how we can make a dent to make an impact in the lives of our customers. Now that platform sits on top of an amazing ecosystem, an ecosystem that starts if you look at around the 1 or 2 hot position with 50,000,000 unique filers. These are filers that we have amazing relations with and that relationship is expressed digitally in the form of data.
And that data is something that is our customers and our data stewardship principles and our focus on building trust are key for us to think about how can we help tap into this ecosystem and drive amazing breakthrough benefits for our customers. Those 50,000,000 unique fathers also give us $82,000,000,000 of opportunity to put a bigger refund in their pocket. Dollars 82,000,000,000 of refunds we're responsible for. Beyond that, it's not just the tax business. Our payroll business is an ecosystem where we're actually delivering payroll and paychecks over 14,000,000 workers.
And those pay workers amounts to $180,000,000,000 $180,000,000,000 of paychecks that sits in our ecosystem. We also have over 600,000 tax experts and PROs that serve in the assisted market and generate tremendous benefit and tremendous value to both the accountants as well as the customers those accountants serve. And then finally, we also have partnerships. We have partnerships with financial institutions and we've talked about the 95% coverage, but we also have over 20,000 financial partners that we connect with in a very meaningful way to deliver benefit. And we've introduced Turbo and Mint as a consumer finance platform.
That all sits within our ecosystem and with that ecosystem connected with being an AI driven expert platform, we can do some amazing things. So let's talk about how we're going to apply that in order to win, in order to make a difference in the lives of our customers. Our first objective is to extend the lead in DIY. Extend the lead in DIY means that we want to revolutionize the speed to benefit. We want to revolutionize the speed to benefit, which is related to getting to a tax is done experience with no friction and no effort.
And to do that, we're going to leverage data and artificial intelligence driven experiences in order to remove that friction as we build confidence. That's how we're going to extend the lead in DIY. We also intend to transform the assisted category to penetrate that $20,000,000,000 of TAM and to address needs of our 86,000,000 assisted filers that currently are filing with others. We're going to do that by connecting people to experts and connect those experts to people. In effect, building the virtual workforce platform that from that platform we'll be able to add tremendous benefit to our customer lives specifically and probably primarily getting to a taxes are done experience with complete confidence.
That will be revolutionary in the market and we're starting to see those results. This will transform the way people think about doing taxes. We'll talk later about the TAM and why that's so significant, but that's the second part of our strategy. Our third objective is to disrupt traditional consumer finance. Obviously, when you hear about those results of the pain points that exist and that have been around for our customers for year for forever.
Whatever is going on in the system, the financial system isn't working on their behalf. It's just not working. We can do better. Our intent is to take the assets we have in our ecosystem, our capabilities that we derive from being an AI driven expert platform and put that to work for our customers. So we are creating a platform, which essentially is a marketplace that's driven by connecting our customers to financial partners and institutions that are able to deliver amazing benefits that help them reengineer their financial life.
That's our 3rd objective. And eventually when we get to these become more mature, we see opportunities that because this is a global problem, it's not just a U. S. And Canada problem. Now before we go further into that strategy, let's set a little context around the industry that we compete in.
Want to start with the view of the tax industry. So in the tax industry, we show this every year. You'll see this past year, there's 155,000,000 IRS tax returns. Our goal is to focus on growing our share of those total IRS returns rather than focusing on just to do it yourself space. This is another example of a mindset shift.
We said we fall in love with the problem, not solution. And the problem that we fell in love with for years was maximize your refund and enabling you to do your taxes yourself because that was so important. But the reality of it is there's over 86,000,000 filers out there that don't want to attack themselves. Their problem isn't about ease, their problem is about lack of confidence. Our responsibility as a category champion is to grow the category, to grow the number of filers that can leverage technology to have an effortless experience and when they have total complete confidence that they got the biggest refund possible and that refund they put to work in their financial life to deliver the maximum benefit.
So the responsibility of championing the growth of the category, as I think about this year looking forward, number 1, there are 4 things we need to focus on. There still is going to be a lingering effect and impact from tax reform. The confusion, questions and opportunities. And so it's important for us to not forget that and to make sure that we as a leadership brand will continue to provide the access to assistance to help people navigate that change and start to re optimize their financial life. The second thing we need to do is because we've launched this new hybrid category and we expect competitors will continue to develop potentially follow the approach that we're taking.
It's important we drive awareness of that, we improve that experience and we continue to make dramatic innovative improvements for both the pros as well as our customers. The other thing that we're driving as you know, we've talked a lot about AI driven experiences. The reality of it is we can deliver on a taxes are done vision. We can deliver that once we start to leverage the ecosystem we have, the AI driven experiences that we can bring to market and deliver a much more personalized tax experience. We believe that will help us drive growth in the category.
And then finally, our ability not only to focus on the average customer, the average consumer, but think about the fastest growing segments that are underdeveloped for us, self employed, our Latinx customers, even some of our emerging millennial investors, those kind of segments when you get closer to them, you see unique opportunities to solve some of their problems uniquely in a way to drive category growth. So that's so that we view the landscape and how we intend to grow the category. One thing that's another big opportunity for us to grow our business is to optimize our funnel. So what you see in our funnel here is that we have 99 people that visit us, 99,000,000, thank goodness, 99,000,000 people that visit us. However, many of them only 42,000,000 or so go on to actually truly consider and then file with us.
This last year was $45,000,000 When you think of those that actually file with us, only $32,000,000 of those actually go on to complete. So what's important on the funnel is that we need to figure out how to drive more traffic. We need to figure out how do we actually drive greater consideration, more conversion, greater levels of retention and greater levels of delight. The good news this last year is that we're able to grow our retention by 2 points, but there's still opportunity for us to optimize the way the experiences of our customers. That's one way to grow is by optimization.
The other way to grow is for us to innovate and penetrate underdeveloped markets. In this case, it's the TAM related to the assisted consumer tax market, the $20,000,000,000 opportunity, where we today currently only have about 28% share of the returns and only 12% share of the revenue that actually happens in that category. We see opportunities to penetrate that category with TurboTax Live and significantly increase our share of both returns as well as revenue. The other part of the growth strategy goes into how we think about growth. When you look at the chart on the right, what you'll see here is that we have a history, we've a history where we've accelerated recently our ability to innovate at the high end, to innovate the high end by going after underserved customers where I like to say is where complexity lives and friction still exists.
That's at the higher end of the market. And as we develop better solutions like TurboTax Self Employed coupled with QuickBooks Self Employed that enables us to penetrate and drive growth at the higher end of the market. But also important is that we grow on the lower end of the market that we serve those problems and those pain points that we've talked about. We've done that with innovating around our totally free offering that we started years ago And our ability to not only grow that, but grow that at accelerated rate as we aim to base the top end of the market allows us to have a steady increase in the accelerated expansion of ARPC, our average revenue per customer or per return. So the thing I want you to see here is that I've learned over the 7 years that I've been here that to be successful in this business, you can't walk, you have to run.
You have to run hard, you have to run hard towards innovation. And we've learned how to run and to them at the same time. So with that, we'll transition to what does that look like as we apply going forward. So extend our lead in DIY tax prep, I shared with you a lot of the numbers in terms of the opportunity. But what about the proof points?
Are we making progress? We feel good about our progress. Number 1 is that we've added over 2,000,000 new self employed filers and Latinx filers last year. We're proud of that, yet we see a significant opportunity to grow. The other thing we're proud of is this last year, we had over 13,000,000 filers that paid us absolutely nothing.
13,000,000 filers that paid us absolutely nothing, which is 2,000,000 more, a 2,000,000 increase over the prior year. Why do we care about that? We care about that because those filers, they haven't paid us anything. However, they have big problems. They have big opportunities.
And so therefore, it's a very important part of our market. And we'll talk a little bit later how they fit into our strategic lens of the market view of the market. So beyond that, one of the things that we mentioned before is AI driven experiences. When you apply it the correct way, you can actually reduce the time it takes to file. You can reduce the friction.
We've done that with 8% of our filers that can file in less than 30 minutes. And we have many filers on our platform that could actually file in a much faster period of time, below 15 minutes. Beyond that, we actually have in DIY by applying personalization to our experiences, we've increased our retention by 4 points over the last 2 years. 4 points, pretty significant given that opportunity. And then finally, as we pursue AI driven expertise in order to personalize our experience, we now have 52% of our self help answers personalized.
I think the last time was around 30% we shared that with you. We're making progress. We can extend our lead in this core business by revolutionizing the speed to benefit. Transforming the assisted category, again, dollars 20,000,000,000 of TAM, dollars 86,000,000 consumers that actually prefer expertise and are seeking out experts and we have an opportunity to make and transform that experience. Over 10,000,000 of those assisted seekers, they churn between value methods each year, 10,000,000.
There's an opportunity to have to develop and deliver a better experience, a better solution. The proof points, we're early in this journey, too early to conclude that we've got it all cracked and figured out. We have opportunities to improve the experience. However, we have doubled the number of self employed filers on our TurboTax Live platform. We have a 4x increase on the number of Latinx filers now falling on our TurboTax Live platform.
70% of the new filers that we've grown came from a prior year assisted tax method. So we're growing the category, we're bringing new users. This is a 2 sided platform. One of the big things we focused on is our ability to improve both the consumer experience and the pro experience at the same time. We saw a 52% increase in our pro NPS versus the prior year.
That means we're making the pro experience amazing. And why that is important is because when a customer who needs assistance connects with our Pro, we see their conversion rate go up by 32 points. 32 points, that's dramatic increase. Now, so what's our goal? Our goal is to make sure our customer our pros spend more time connecting with our customers rather than navigating the back office elements of trying to be a pro on our platform.
That's what we focused on last year. And by doing that, we've increased our net promoter and they actually spent much more time serving customers. Disrupting consumer finance, that ambition is earlier, it's very early in that journey, but we know we feel compelled to actually have to extend our relationships beyond just tax. Why how can we do that? First of all, we do process and deliver $82,000,000,000 in refunds.
We have $180,000,000,000 of paychecks that we issue in our ecosystem through QuickBooks. We now have 37,000,000 registered users on our platform, 4,000,000 who are active. Now we just gotten started, we're 18 months into this in earnest. The opportunity is massive. The proof points that we're making progress are pretty impressive as well.
Whenever we actually personalize an offer by prequalification, we see a 10x improvement in conversion, a 10x improvement in conversion. Whenever we personalize an offer, not just by prequalifying, but actually enable consumers to pre fill on our partner platforms, what you see is a 5x increase in account creation. That's our partner benefit. So ultimately, we also have expanded our partners. Now we have over 39 partners, whether it be for credit cards, whether it's for lending, whether it's for mortgage, 39 partners that we partner with to deliver consumer benefit.
And that's now over 100 plus offers that we put in the market. Now I mentioned we're early in the journey, but by maniacally focusing on the customer problem and leveraging our ecosystem and our capabilities to do good for our customers, we can actually deliver amazing results. So let me put up this all together because we've shown the pieces, but it's not like it's 3 separate businesses. The reality is when you serve 50,000,000 filers, every single filer has their own journey. And that journey looks different year to year.
And if you want to know how does all how these things fit together deliver customer benefit, what's the revenue model, the business model that supports all three of these strategies together, I want to walk through a few of these examples just so you can see how the pieces connect. In this example, you have Emma who is a recent college grad and she's gone into the workplace and she's become successful. She's becoming more and more successful and as she starts to become more and more successful, she decides to get into investing. And with investing, she joins TurboTax and she moves up from being a deluxe customer to now being a premier customer. And actually because of that, she also cares a little bit more about getting priority access to experts and she cares a little bit more about things like audit defense.
So she actually adds our MAX bundle. That next year, she's actually become more successful. Her lives become more complex and she's now sought out Premiere, TurboTax Premiere Live. So now she's looking for that live assistance. And because she's trying to find ways to maximize her income and her income and her monthly balances, she decides to go ahead and refinance her student loans.
You can see her lifetime value for us increased dramatically in each year and that's just one of the stories. There are other stories here that are very similar. When you actually look at Tracy, she paid us absolutely $0 She was one of those customers that we said pay us absolutely nothing. So in the 1st year that was the case. Even in the 2nd year, she did not pay anything to us for filing taxes.
However, since she doesn't have a checking account and she wants more access to her money faster, she put all of her deposit on her TurboCard. And then that next year, not only that, she's gotten married, her and her husband now filed itemized deductions. So now she's in Deluxe and then they go collective together to actually go through and find a better credit card in order to manage their personal finances. The stories go on and on and on. These are 3 of the stories, but I'll tell you there are over 30,000,000 of those and those stories create massive opportunity for a win, win, win.
We can win by helping the customers achieve what they're looking for. We can win by helping our financial partners achieve what they're looking for and ultimately our shareholders as well. So with that, the last thing I'd like to reiterate is that we shared last year our forward looking guidance. Our long term expectation is for us to continue to deliver somewhere between 8% to 12% growth. I'll remind you last year was 11% and we're excited about the progress we're making.
So with that, let me hand it over to
Michelle. Good morning, everyone. It's great to see you all here. Thank you so much for coming today or for joining us on the webcast. I'd also like to say thank you for all of your support of Intuit over the last year.
We've gone through a lot of content this morning. So thank you for your attention, and we're almost to the Q and A section. So I hope you found the platform immersion experience helpful for understanding how we're solving some of our customers' most important problems as we move towards becoming an AI driven expert platform. I'm going to share how this strategy translates into thinking. So let me start as I have in the past with a look back.
Now on the left side of the slide, you'll see the key points we closed with at last year's Investor Day. The right side shows how we performed during fiscal 2019 against that opportunity. Our performance in 2019 was strong across each of our businesses with 13% revenue growth at the company level. Our 2 main online platforms, QuickBooks and TurboTax, are now $3,900,000,000 and growing over 23% combined, with small business online ecosystem revenue growing 38% for the year, which is well ahead of our expectation of better than 30 percent growth. Strong revenue drove double digit GAAP and non GAAP operating income growth and we remain pleased with our ROIC and the consistent dividend increases we've been able to provide.
Overall, a really great year, and I couldn't be more proud of the team that delivered these results in fiscal 2019. Now Sasan shared our total addressable market earlier and I'd like to share proof points that our strategy is working and positions us well to penetrate our nearly $250,000,000,000 addressable market. We saw strong traction across our platform in fiscal 2019. First, we see a long runway ahead for our core QuickBooks Online and TurboTax Online products. We have strong growth in the core with our online ecosystem revenue growing 38% in fiscal year 2019 and TurboTax growing 11%, the 2nd year sequentially of double digit growth.
We're focused on solving the biggest problem our customers face, which is confidence, by connecting them with experts in both tax and small business on our live platform. 2nd, we continue to build out additional solutions for our customers here in the U. S. To solve even more of their problems, which include getting paid, accessing capital to grow, making ends meet and paying off debt. We saw strong growth in our payroll and payments businesses this year and are seeing continued success with TSheets.
QBO payroll grew 35%, QBO charge volume grew 40% and the number of customers on the TSheets platform grew 60% to 1,200,000. And in the consumer group, we're seeing great interest in our turbo product as we build out our consumer finance platform. As we've shared following last year's tax season, we have 14,000,000 registered users on the Turbo platform. Now 3rd, we remain focused on expanding outside of the U. S.
Where subscribers grew 58% last year to be 28% of our QBO subscriber base. This strong QBO sub growth was driven by the UK, Australia and Canada, where we've achieved product market fit. And we're seeing progress in markets like France, where new innovations are saving customers hours of time each month. Now we use our financial principles to guide the decisions we make and these should look very familiar as they remain unchanged from a year ago. You should know that we challenge and discuss them each year as we go through our 3 in-one year planning process and we reaffirm them as a management team and confirm them with the board.
Now let me provide a little bit more color and context on each one. First is double digit organic revenue growth. We continue to see a large opportunity ahead in serving consumers, self employed and small businesses to grow the company's revenue double digits as we solve a broader set of customer pain points. Next, we focus on growing operating income dollars faster than revenue. It's good discipline for us to approach each year with expenses growing slower than revenue.
As we've said, we manage margins at the company level, so I wouldn't focus too much on small changes you might see in the operating margin of a business unit, given the leverage we get from cross company platform investments. Now we've been asked if we're targeting 50 to 100 basis points of margin expansion each year. We are instead focused on operating income dollar growth as I said a minute ago. Our focus is on driving durable double digit revenue growth by solving a wider range of customer problems rather than driving towards a particular level of annual margin expansion. Next, we deploy cash to the highest yield opportunities targeting a 15% ROI over 5 years.
This principle is key to managing our business for both the short term and the long term. Whether we're looking to expand Chibio internationally or as we invest in our expert platform to deliver more confidence for our customers across our businesses, This threshold is key to making all internal investments that will deliver for years to come. We also apply this same hurdle to any acquisitions that we may consider. After this, we return excess cash to shareholders. This speaks to our stewardship of how we handle the capital we generate and comes in the form of buybacks and dividends.
On share repurchases, we utilize a smart grid to achieve a rate of return over time that exceeds our own cost of capital. And finally, we managed to a conservative investment grade balance sheet that can sustain our business through all types of economic cycles. This has served us well in the past and actually lets us lean in during downturns to emerge even stronger on the other side. Now I mentioned in my opening that the QBO and TTO platforms are driving accelerated revenue growth and we expect this will remain the case going forward. In 3 years, we expect approximately 70% of our revenue to come from these offerings.
And our desktop offerings remain very profitable, which allows us to invest in new products and markets around the world. As we've shared before, a large amount of the revenue we expect to see in fiscal 2020 will come from existing customers, which means we have a highly predictable revenue model. In fact, we expect about 80% of our revenue this year to come from customers that we already have or who are expected to return based on past behavior. Additionally, our products are needed by customers in all economic environments, which has helped us to remain resilient during some of the prior downturns. Underpinning our growth expectations is our ability to continue adding new customers across our businesses.
And this provides an opportunity to serve a broader set of customer pain points across a larger customer base. Starting in small business, you'll see a summary of the customer opportunity. In QBO, we still have a large runway ahead of us in the U. S. As well as internationally.
As Alex said earlier, we're focused on delighting customers, providing the services customers need to make QuickBooks the center of their business growth and expanding our platform and scale internationally. This is all in service to moving from being the source of truth for our customers' books to the source of truth for their business. As we've said before, we expect total subscriber growth to moderate as we place a greater focus on additional services. You've already seen the initial results with recent acceleration of our online services, and we continue to focus on monetizing our customer base while also adding new customers. On the right side, you'll see total paying customers.
This includes QuickBooks Online, our desktop subscribers and desktop unit sales. Once again, our total net adds grew in fiscal 2019. And our desktop base remains relatively sticky, and we're seeing the majority of the customers who are new to QuickBooks choosing QBO. Moving to the consumer group, Greg shared how we're focused on growing our share of total tax returns. This past year, we're pleased to drive growth in the do it yourself category as well as our share within it.
Our investment in the free experience was very well received by our customers. And as we focus on transforming assisted, TurboTax Live opens up the $20,000,000,000 assisted segment of the tax prep market. Our TurboTax Live customers tripled versus the prior year with the product now a meaningful revenue contributor to our business. As Greg and Alex shared, we have a strong monetization model across our platform. TurboTax is there for our customers as their financial lives become more complex.
Our customers may evolve from a lower price or even free offering in the 1st years of their filing their taxes.
And that
may move into a product like Deluxe or Self Employed or TurboTax Live as their needs change. And along the way, we can add value with other offerings like our Max bundle or personalized offers for credit card or mortgage products in Turbo. We have a very similar model in our QuickBooks business, where the platform flexes to each customer's journey. In addition to our QBO platform, where customers can scale from an accounting product like self employed or simple start, all the way up to the mid market with QBO Advanced. Services like payroll, payments and QuickBooks Capital also scale and add value as our customers grow.
At the end of the day, everything we do is customer back. There are a wide variety of customers in each of our businesses and we're focused on serving them in a way that solves their problems, provides them value and gives us the opportunity to monetize in different ways. However, customer counts are less useful as a way to understand short term revenue. So we plan to share detailed customer numbers annually instead of quarterly. We're therefore making a few changes to our disclosure.
First, we will no longer be reporting customer metrics on our quarterly fact sheet. And second, we're changing the timing of when we report tax units and plan to do so only on our fiscal Q3 earnings call in May. Now across all of our businesses, we're able to improve monetization as we increase the value we're providing to our customers. ARPC is not something that we manage to. It's the output of the various decisions, we make regarding customer and revenue growth.
Now that being said, we recognize that it is a key input for many of your models. So looking at QBO Worldwide, we saw an increase in our ARPC this year, driven by our U. S. Business, which was partially offset by growth in QBSE and the non U. S.
Business. Going forward, we expect QBO Worldwide ARPC to increase. This will be driven by our maturing customer base in the U. S. And increased monetization via online services and new product innovations like QuickBooks Live and QBO Advance.
Outside of the U. S, we expect to see an increase in ARPC from our maturing base and lower promotional activity. Turning to QuickBooks Desktop. We see an increase in ARPC due to strong growth in our enterprise solution, which we expect to continue. And in consumer tax, we saw another year of strong ARPC increases due to the contribution of TurboTax Live and product lineup adjustments for the new tax legislation.
This was offset by our investment in the free experience. We expect growth of our TurboTax Live offering to continue to drive ARPC higher. Durable revenue growth and disciplined investment have driven our operating income growth historically and we remain focused on both going forward. So walking down the P and L, gross margin has been stable in the low to mid-eighty percent range and we expect that that will continue. Sales and marketing is an important area of focus as we grow our businesses and build our brands.
And LTV to CAC targets provide the guardrails for our investments in small business, while the consumer team focuses on a 1 year payback. As for R and D, we benchmark our spending against other tech peers to make sure we've got the right amount of investment in innovation. This is a key element as we evolve into an AI driven expert platform. Now growth in R and D investment was a little slower in fiscal 2019 following the significant investments that we made in fiscal 2018. We continue to see opportunity in G and A to generate some leverage as we grow and we're working hard to make sure we're best in class here.
Now there's always interest in where we're focusing our investments, so I'd like to go a little deeper in that area. At a high level, our approach has not changed. We invest in the highest yielding opportunities with a focus on investing to drive durable growth and accelerating speed and velocity, all within the context of our financial principles. And making deliberate trade offs to allocate investment to the best opportunities remains a core element of our DNA. Looking ahead to this year, we will be investing in several areas to accelerate growth, which Sasan highlighted earlier.
These include connecting people to experts, unlocking smart money decisions, being the center of small business growth and disrupting the mid market. Underpinning these is a focus on revolutionizing speed to benefit. In the future, we will be allocating more of our investment dollars into these areas to drive durable growth over the long term. This does not mean we won't continue to invest in core innovation and running the business. It does mean we will be very deliberate about what those investments look like.
It's important to us to be effective stewards of capital. This includes investments in organic growth drivers as well as acquisitions to accelerate growth in talent and technology and help fill out our product roadmap. Over the last 4 years, we've returned approximately $5,500,000,000 to our shareholders through share repurchases and dividends. We repurchased approximately $560,000,000 in shares during fiscal 2019. And I'll touch more on repurchases in a minute as this remains an important tool to return capital that can't be invested profitably in the business.
As for dividends, our Board declared a 13% increase in the dividend for fiscal 2020. And going forward, we expect our CapEx to remain at approximately 2% to 3% of revenue. Now our philosophy and principles on share repurchases remain consistent with what we've shared in the past. That said, let me just quickly review how we manage the program. We limit repurchases to cash that can't be profitably invested in the business or used to make prudent acquisitions.
We apply rigor to this process by utilizing a smart grid to drive various levels of repurchases at each price range with a goal to exceed our cost of capital on average. At a minimum, we expect to offset dilution over a 3 year period and to be in the market each quarter. We're pleased to be guiding double digit revenue growth for the company in fiscal 2020. We expect small business and self employed revenue growth of 12% to 14% and consumer revenue growth of 9% to 10%. This guidance is what we released back in August, so no changes here.
We exited the year with strong momentum across our businesses, and we expect this to continue as we make our way through fiscal 2020. Here is our guidance for operating income and EPS. No changes here versus what we communicated in August. We're pleased to be guiding double digit operating income growth, which is in line with our financial principle of growing operating income dollars faster than revenue. And we remain focused on making the right investments to drive durable growth across our businesses and are pleased to do this while also growing operating income dollars faster than revenue over time.
So in summary, we had great fiscal 2019. We're set up to continue our strong performance for fiscal 2020 and beyond. Our focus on being an AI driven expert platform unlocks opportunities to better serve customers across our businesses. And I look forward to connecting with all of you throughout the year and keeping you apprised of our progress. And with that, I'll say thank you and I'll pass it back to Sasan.
All right. So thank you for being patient all morning in the room and everybody on the webcast. So this is the Q and A part. I am the one that's standing between at least those in the room standing between you and an amazing lunch outside in the California sun. And I hope everybody on the webcast has lunch plans.
So with that, I'm going to turn it over to you for questions. Just raise your hands. There are mic runners. We'll get the mic to you and we'll jump in.
We'll start here.
Hi, Robert Simmons from RBC Capital.
Why do you only look at
a 1 year payback on the consumer investments?
Typically, based on the tax side, typically we focus on ensuring that there is a 1 year payback. Now we also use our judgment to make decisions. We'll make decisions that have in the past that have a multi year payback. When you look at TurboTax Live, there's huge investments that we're making there that don't just have a 1 year payback. And then especially when we look at helping our tradition on the do it yourself tax side, because we believe it's has been our tradition on the do it yourself tax side, because we believe it's the best investment choice to make.
But we use our judgment and there's been many years where we won't just look at a 1 year payback.
This is Hassan Brent Thill with Jefferies. You mentioned earlier that you're doing very well with service based businesses, but 40% are product based. Can you just give us an update in terms of how you're doing in that product based businesses? What are kind of the mile markers you're looking at for continued success there?
Sure, sure. So, to build on your question, 40% of small businesses are product based businesses. We actually have 30% of our QBO customers are product based businesses. As we look at the e commerce capabilities that we have versus the capabilities we need to have for our customers, that's really the area where we're focused. And very specifically, the biggest pain point for our customers is they want to see everything that they're selling in one place.
They want to understand are those customers profitable and then ultimately connecting that to their inventory so they can run their business. Our first mile tracker is ensuring that our customers can actually see all of their orders in one place to be able to better serve the 30% of our customers that are in our base today. But beyond that, we believe we can actually grow the number of product based businesses by first solving that problem. And then beyond that, we can help them understand profitability of their customers. We can actually help them understand which channels are more profitable and connecting all of that to their inventory.
But first mile marker is seeing everything in one place.
Hi, Sasan. Ken Wong from Guggenheim Securities. This question
is about TurboTax Live. How should
we think about the growth in adoption coming from whether it's going to be adding more live reps or can you continue to get efficiency gains that you guys saw last year when you increased units by 3x while holding reps essentially flat?
Yes. So, first of all, we have a lot of confidence in efficiency and effectiveness because as you heard Mark talk about in the platform immersion, this is a technology led innovation. And we treat it like a manufacturing plant. What are all the processes that you have to go through to deliver for a customer and how do we automate all of those processes and how do we leverage machine learning and knowledge engineering to be able to automate everything so that we route the right call to the right pro or enrolled agent and ultimately make sure they have the insights at their fingertips to be able to deliver for the customer. And our proof point is the fact that we have we saw significant customer growth last year versus the year prior, but we actually delivered that experience with 2,000 pros.
And the net promoter of those pros significantly increased year over year because of that efficiency and effectiveness. So we do have a lot of confidence that we can, in essence be able to scale this, at ultimately maintaining the operating margin levels the company level. Our number one focus right now because we are so early is actually the customer. How do we really nail the first time use experience for customers? How do we ensure we're there for them when they need us most?
And then how do we ultimately nail the full service experience that we'll be launching in the coming year?
Right here.
Hi, Dylan Hire, Select Equity. I just have a question on cyclicality. You talked about customers living paycheck to paycheck. Those are typically the ones most susceptible to going out of business during a downturn. And I know that people get laid off, so they start new businesses and you speak to that.
If you could speak to net customer adds or losses in a downturn, either what it's been historically, how you expect it to look any different during the next downturn?
Sure, sure. First of all, I'll start with history because it's our best teacher. And when we had the financial crisis in 2,008 and when you look at our performance in 2,009 as a company, we're quite resilient as a company comparing us to most of our peer companies. We actually grew revenues 4%, while most of our peer companies actually declined in revenue. And that's primarily because of what we do.
We help our customers do their taxes during tax time, at least in the United States. You still have to do your taxes whether times are good or bad. Now there may be less folks that are having to file their taxes, but that's an area where we're very resilient. On the small business side, there is an impact and the impact typically is around your charge volume, how many employees you may hire, bless you. But small businesses actually need us at those times more than ever because they're relying on us to help them get paid.
They're relying on us to help them get access to capital. And that was one of the reasons why in the last downturn, we were quite resilient and the number of customers coming in and going out was quite consistent. We believe that it would actually be a bit different if and when we do hit a downturn this time because most customers are actually online versus desktop and they're looking for access to other applications, multiple apps to be able to run their business and we believe that we will actually be needed most in the next downturn than we were even in the last downturn.
Hi, Michael Yeh from Saickel. I was hoping you could talk about some of the ancillary services on top of the QuickBooks platform. You obviously have the TSheets and payment. So what are the areas that you're most excited about for additional growth in that area? And how do you think about doing it yourself versus partnering with somebody like bill.com or the other partners that you have?
Sure, sure. I'll take you back to the customer problems that we talked about because that really is the core of what drives all the decisions that we make. And when you look at the what we've identified, it's really about small businesses want help to be able to grow. Small businesses want access to their money as fast as possible. They want to be able to get access to capital to be able to get more inventory and grow their business.
They need to pay their employees. And so the investment choices that we're making are really all around helping them get paid fast, ensuring that we're leveraging machine learning so we can understand if you're creditworthy and therefore can we loan you money, automating the entire payroll process and in fact allowing you to hold on your money the longest because typically if you have a payroll product, it leaves your bank account about a week or so in advance of having to pay employees. So really looking at automating all of that. It's not one thing that excites us. It's actually the combination of leveraging the ecosystem, as you heard Alex talk about, to help deliver run their business with a phone in their pocket, where payroll, payments, capital, time tracking with TSheets is all connected.
So it's not one thing that excites us when we think about the growth, but it's about the series of customer problems that we're trying to solve that we believe allows us to actually shift from being the source of truth for your books to truly the source of truth for your business. Now in terms of your other question of how do we think about applications on our platform, what do we build versus what do others build, where do we partner, where do we buy, I would tell you all of that is also driven by our customers and their needs. If you just look at payments as an example, we're an open platform. And so our customers want to get paid the way customers are willing to pay them, which is why we have PayPal and Square on our platform inclusive of the choice of using our rails. And so we let the customer drive that choice.
We let them ultimately decide what applications that they want to use. And we'll have multiple payroll products on our platform. We'll have multiple payments products on our platform. And we'll also then have apps like TSheets, like Method on our platform where whether it's time tracking or be able to grow your business, if we don't have the app, we'll ultimately partner with someone to do it, is why we have 700 apps as we think about the possibilities to serve our customers. So what is core for us is really about having a platform that can consume our customers' data so we can innovate for them using machine learning.
And payments, payroll, time tracking capital are really core to help deliver for our customers and everything else we partner on.
Thanks, Hassane. Josh Beck from KeyBanc. So when I step back and look at the day, it seems like retention is flat to improving. You've outlined some pretty bold ARPC scenario. So it certainly seems like LTV to CAC is moving in your favor.
So maybe you could just talk about the trends that you're seeing from LTV to CAC ratio and how that dovetails into your investment philosophy?
Sure, sure. Well, our investment philosophy is very much aligned with what you heard from Michelle, which is we want to make sure that we can fund the big bets that we talked about today. We want to make sure that we're funding the core innovation and technology capabilities that we need to build across the company. And ultimately, that is what drives where we make choices. And it's all in context of the financial principles.
We want to make sure that we're focused on customer problems that allow us to drive double digit revenue growth, delivering operating income growth faster than revenue growth. So that's one bucket, which is how we think about investment and how we think about ensuring that we stay committed to the principles that we've communicated to you all. On the other side of your question, for us, conversion, retention and engagement remain the key metrics that we look at. If I just use the Small Business Cookbooks platform as an example, 80% retention is actually a good place to be because the 20 when you look at the other 20%, half of those go out of business. So the opportunity that really remains is another 10 points.
And so really the key is continuing to deliver services to drive more engagement on our platform, but to really improve our conversion. Because as I mentioned earlier, there's 155,000,000 folks that come to us and 110,000,000 are not our customers. And the illustrative example we use internally is we don't sell English bulldogs. People don't come to our website to look at pretty dogs. They come to solve an important benefit.
And we believe that's a huge opportunity for us. Really nailing conversion and engagement are the biggest things what we're focused on when you think about the big bets that we talked about, when you think about the core innovation that we're focused on.
Thank
you. Vik Kullar, I have a question on tax. Given your increasing mix of free, you had 13,000,000 filers up to mill. Should we expect tax revenue or consumer revenue to be more in the midpoint, 9% to 10% even for the next couple of years versus typically the high end?
Yes, sure. Thank you for the question. First of all, what is unchanged is our strategy that Greg talked about, which is we want to extend our lead in the do it yourself category. We want to transform the assisted category We want to disrupt consumer finance by solving the problem of helping our customers make ends meet. And what we did last year was not unique to any other year where we focus on bringing customers in that are fit for our free product.
And ultimately, if it means they don't pay anything, we're comfortable with that because we're focused on solving additional problems. And so I wouldn't translate what metrics you heard Greg talk about relative to free as anything connected to a mid range, low range or high end of the guidance. The guidance is 8% to 12%. We're singularly focused on customer problems and the strategy that I just articulated earlier. And free has always been a very important part of how we drive growth.
And last year was not unique to any other year.
Thanks. Matt Fowle with William Blair. Had a question on the QuickBooks International. So based on the numbers in that slide, it seems like UK has had the most success. I'm trying to figure out why that is relative to the other countries and I know there was some regulation in the UK making taxes digital initiative.
How much did that play into the success in UK? And do you need something like that to happen in other geographies to sort of see the same traction?
Sure, sure. So to the question that you asked, last year we grew international subs 58% and we look at the countries that we serve in kind of 2 buckets, Canada, UK and Australia where we've hit product market fit and we're being very diligent about investment levels versus what's possible in terms of acquisition. And then there's Brazil and France and India, which is more emerging markets that you heard Alex talk about. We actually feel very good about all three countries, UK, Australia and Canada. We have product market fit in all countries.
We're investing even more so in the product, investing in top of the funnel. UK just happens to be in a unique situation with making taxes digital that there has just been it's been an amplification of growth. And as you heard Alex talk about this, we were actually one of the first to be ready with making taxes digital. And with product market fit, with additional investments, with making taxes digital, you're just seeing a convergence of multiple things that's allowing us to accelerate growth versus other countries. But we feel really positive about all three of those countries.
And we don't really need a make taxes digital occurrence in the other countries to continue the growth that we're experiencing.
Hi, Sasan. Kirk Materne with Evercore. When I think about your broader strategy around an expert driven platform powered by AI, AI. One of the things about these product, these live products would be a heightened sense of engagement with your customers, meaning you're going to be talking to them more frequently. This isn't an annual discussion.
This is an ongoing discussion, which when you look at the ARPC opportunity for you that was highlighted earlier, would to me signal that perhaps the iteration around ARPC growth could actually accelerate, meaning you're talking to these people more often. So instead of waiting a year to have them upsell product, you can now might happen around 3 or 6 or 9 month basis. So I'm just kind of curious if you have any anecdotal evidence around that perhaps, I realize it's early, but when I think about the ARPC opportunity plus the fact you're going to be engaging more often, To me, it seems like ARPC has a pretty significant way to go if you look at where you're at right now. Thanks.
Sure. First of all, I'll start with the foundational way to think about ARPC is what you heard from Michelle. We really don't solve for ARPC internally. We solve for the customer problems that we want to solve and ensuring that we're ultimately adding value and then making sure that the value equation is such that we deliver against the revenue expectations, and the operating income expectations that we share. With that said, I think the hypothesis that you have and the question that you have is a really good one and that we do believe there are possibilities there.
And I'll just use QuickBooks Live as an example. And again, as you heard from Mark and Rich, it's very, very early. We're in massive learning mode. It's still early for TurboTax Live. But what we're seeing with QuickBooks Live is that they're actually their use of payments and payroll, although early, is actually higher than it is for a QBO customer that's not a live customer.
And not only is the ARPC of a QuickBooks Live customer higher, but then if they also engage more because they have confidence in the platform and they have confidence in the bookkeeper that's helping them and they start engaging with more payroll payments and potentially other benefits, it could lead to potentially higher ARPC. But it's important that the walk away you should have is the ARPC is more in line with what Michelle talked about because we're so early that it won't be material. But as you think about the next 5 to 10 years, certainly, live expertise delivers confidence. And the more customers are confident, the more they engage with the platform, the more they buy. And so the story that you're kind of articulating, that's behind your question, could be an interesting one when we think about ARPC.
Sterling Auty from JPMorgan. Just want to follow-up on the question on the free program.
It feels like the media hoopla has
finally died down, but are all the inquiries and issues behind the company definitely? And is it going to change either the marketing or the go to market around consumer tax for the season?
Yes. Yes. Let me start with just setting the scene in terms of the root cause of what you just shared, which is us being in the media and then I'll get directly to your question. We have a difference of opinion with our critics. We believe that a consumer knows the story of their life better than anybody else.
And we believe that they are the ones that should do taxes for themselves. We do not believe that the government should do the taxes for consumers, in essence being the ones that sends a bill, audits them and collects it. And by the way, 2 thirds of the consumer population also wants to be able to have control over their taxes. We believe in that. We advocate for that because we believe that's the right thing for consumers, particularly of course in the United States.
There are critics that believe that the government should do the taxes for consumers. That is not an area where we will ever agree. Those consumers ultimately use us as the platform to be able to communicate what their agenda is. It's not personal. They have their agenda.
They're just using us as the market leader to make a broader point through multiple different avenues, Free File being 1. So I want to just start with that context, and I do not believe the media tax will end. They will continue because they are these are just differences in opinion, and we will continue to stand up for what we believe is right from a consumer perspective. With that said, it absolutely does not change our strategy moving forward. In the last 5 years, we have 55,000,000 customers that have paid absolutely nothing.
That's more than the entire industry combined. The Free File program, which is a philanthropic effort, we have been probably the largest donor of that philanthropic effort. And we're going to continue to stay on par with what we're doing and by the way the facts on our side. Now if we ever see anything that would suggest we need to do something differently, we'll learn from it and we'll adjust. But we feel very good about what we stand for and ultimately to set the expectation, you'll probably see more.
Because the reality is just like any other company when you have critics, the critics don't stop.
Thank you for taking the questions and thank you for hosting us today. When I was looking at your long term targets, so relatively unchanged versus last year, but still sort of fantastic growth. In the 2025 sort of framework your goal milestone, you talked about accelerating revenue growth. And I want to see if you could be more precise on what you mean by that? Is that do you think as the business sort of mix shifts more to small business that that's going to have a tailwind in your revenue growth?
Or if you can just sort of clarify, what you meant about accelerating your growth revenue?
Sure. I'll start with what remains unchanged, which is our guidance for the year of 10% to 11% revenue growth and of course then how we communicated the guidance for each of the business units. And that's I think what you all should hold us accountable to and what we're committed to you all for, full stop. We have higher aspirations as we've always had. If I were to remind you of 2,008 when Brad took over the company, we were growing single digits and the aspirations that he set for the company is we're going to grow double digits and that was always our financial principles, but several years in a row we've delivered double digit growth.
And so we've simply set our aspirations to what we believe is possible. And we believe in it because of the customer problems that we're solving. We believe in it because we truly can leverage this notion of being an AI driven expert platform, to be a platform where us and others can solve customer problems, leveraging AI that frankly existed 10 years ago, but the possibilities are very different today and what we can do with it versus 10 years ago. And now expertise on our platform that allows us to really go after non consumption, really a door that opens for us that otherwise was hard to crack. And we believe based on the customer problems, based on our investments, based on the proof points that we shared with you today, that the possibilities are greater than what we're delivering today.
And so therefore, we've set a goal for ourselves internally. And it's not just financial goals. We've set prosperity goals, reputation goals and growth goals. And that we're striving towards those because we believe we can and we need to hold ourselves up to a higher bar.
Thank you. It's Jen Loe from UBS. I think one of the themes that really came through in the digital experience or walking around the different booths was the emphasis on AI enabled services and obviously that came through the presentations as well. But Michelle's guidance also called for flat gross margins and a focus on growing operating income faster than revenue. We've seen TurboTax Live come in and be very efficient because of the high utilization there, but that is sort of a more seasonal business and sort of a point in time and still fairly young.
As you start to get into things like full service payroll and QuickBooks Live, which potentially could be very large businesses over time, Do you see sort of a hard line in terms of how big those businesses could be within the whole or how do you kind of adhere to those types of 83% sustained gross margins in context of some businesses that could be quite large, but also have an intensive people component to them?
Sure, sure. Thank you for the question. A couple of things I would say. One is, we have enough experience in the areas that you mentioned that one, we don't see any structural issues. In fact, what we see is an enormous opportunity to apply technology to be able to get into this notion of connecting people to experts that opens up doors to non consumption or folks that would never even think about us, but now they can because we actually connect people with experts.
And it is having years ago had manufacturing experience. This is just like a manufacturing plant except what's different is we can apply technology. And so we don't see technology we don't see structural constraints and we still remain very confident with our financial principles, that you heard Michelle talk through in terms of being able to drive top line growth, but also being able to drive operating income growth faster than revenue. And actually, because we're managing margins at the company level, which is very important because we're using platform services, expert services now across the company to in essence deliver against what you saw out there. And so we believe we can build the big businesses here and do it in such a fashion that from your lens we look like a very, very healthy company and abiding by the financial principles that we
mentioned.
Sasan, just a question on capital deployment. Many of us that have watched you for a while saw a phase of M and A and some of the M and A didn't work too well. You've been a little more gun shy on M and A. Do you you're going to have a capital balance of close $4,000,000,000 by the end of the year, so at least in some of the models.
Do you
think differently now, on M and A than perhaps some of your past peers or not?
Sure, sure.
First of all, I would start by saying we're not gun shy at all. We've just a history can teach a lot of lessons. And under Brad's leadership, we would study what's going well and why with acquisitions and what's not going well and why. And that's only taught us where it works and where it doesn't work. So one, we're not gun shy is point number 2 number 1.
Number 2 is we're very focused on the customer problems that we talked about today. And where we look at M and A is where there's potential talent acquihire opportunities, where there's capabilities that we lack and or where there's just the company that we could buy to help us accelerate and think about one of the bets that we talked about. Is there someone that could really help us accelerate and cut down our speed to market by several years? And so our philosophy actually hasn't changed. I would just tell you we're smarter today than we were 5 years ago 10 years ago.
And that actually gives us more confidence in what we should do and what we shouldn't do. And that by the way informed several acquisitions that we made. TSheets is 1, Apladex, which has actually helped us beef up our automation tools across the company. And another recent acquisition that we made that's actually helping us drive accelerated AI application across the company. So we're smarter, not gun shy, but we also want to make sure we're very prudent about how we put the money to use.
Thanks. Hey Sasan, Scott Schneeberg with Oppenheimer. Just want to go back to something Michelle mentioned with regard to reporting. It looks like you're going to discontinue customer metrics and also tax metrics during the tax season and not until May. Can you just elaborate a little bit about what's behind the thought process there and maybe some areas of focus you'd like the investor to look at instead?
Thanks.
Sure, absolutely. First of all, you should have confidence, just as we've done today, that once a year, you will have access to a number of metrics that will give you confidence around how we're performing. 2, we will also share sufficient information on quarterly basis, so you have confidence how the company is performing. Specifically to your question about the customer metrics, we're solving for clarity and something that would actually be an indicator for you all versus something that would cause confusion. So let me use a specific example.
In small business, as you look ahead, we are now opening our front doors to acquiring customers through multiple different doors. You can just, in essence, come into the front door with T Sheets. You could come to the front door with payroll. You could come to the front door buying a QBO sub that opens the doors to many benefits for you. And so now what is a sub no longer is the way you used to be able to look at a And so we decided to be able to holistically share with all the metrics with you once a year versus on a quarterly basis because we believe it will actually lead to more confusion as to how the company is performing versus clarity.
And with tax, our plan is just to provide you our tax customer metrics, unit metrics at the end of tax season when we do earnings simply because of the fact that as we look at just the last couple of years, the tax teams have delivered more confusion than the clarity when we report them in February. So this is our entire focus is solve for clarity and confidence for our investment community for you to look at what we look at internally. And one key metric in small business we've talked about is online ecosystem revenue growth of 30 percent. And we want you to just focus on that because that ultimately will tell you the health of the franchise beyond what we share on a yearly basis.
With Northcoast Research. Sison, one of the products you've had success with is QuickBooks Capital. You've talked about that for the last couple of years. I'm wondering, as you have capital, what type of capital you would use, your own capital to grow that business? And how much of, would you put that on your own balance sheet?
Yes. First of all, I would reiterate the customer pain point around getting paid, paying their employees, having access to capital. And so we don't look at capital as just a standalone business. We look at it as the power of the ecosystem to be able to solve for and The other is we've teamed up with a blue chip firm where we have access to in essence to their capital. And that's the path that we are moving forward with.
And we will ensure that we have access to enough capital whether it's through the marketplace or even through the partnership we have with a blue chip financial firm to be able to serve our customers. What we don't want to do is become a bank or get close to that line, but we want to make sure that we can solve this problem well for our customers. Any other questions in the room? I can tell you all want lunch. Well, let me if there are no other questions, let me just maybe share a couple of remarks before at least in the room we take you outside in beautiful California for some lunch.
1st and foremost, thank you for your investment and time today. Thank you for all your questions in the room and thank you for your support. We are ultimately at your service when it comes to events like this to help you understand what we stand for as a company, which is where I'd like to end. At the end of the day, we are a purpose driven company. We are a company that stands for powering the prosperity of our customers all around the world and we are very focused on doing what's right and standing up for what's right.
And I could not be more proud of our team in this room and the 10,000 employees and the many, many partners that we have that help us every single day to deliver for our customers. And so for our employees, for our customers and my team in this room indebted to all of you forever and all of you in this room, thank you for all your support. Thank you for all your questions. And for now, we will end the session with the webcast. And for those that are in the room, we're going to go outside.
The management team will be here, so you'll have access to all of us. And we have ordered sunshine and great food. So we'll see you outside. Thank you very much.