All
right, welcome. Thank you everybody for joining us here at Intuit's Investor Day for 20 16. We've got a great day planned for you today. My name is Jerry Natoli. I lead corporate finance for the company, which includes Investor Relations.
Some of you might have seen Matt Rhodes over in the corner. He's back from Texas for the day. He's leaning into his new role leading finance for our ProConnect Group. I'd also like to take a second and introduce Kim Watkins, who joins us from Ruckus Wireless and on the sell side before that, Kim is our new Director of Investor Relations and please introduce yourselves on the break. So a couple of housekeeping items, great agenda, you're going to get to see the senior leaders of the company talk through our strategy and our top priorities.
We'll have a break around 9:45 where we really encourage you to go outside and see the demos. We've got some folks lined up to show you what we've been doing to try to build connectivity across our ecosystem and also invest in technology that shows up in things like mobile and data. We've got lunch at the end of the program with additional time to chat with management and see those demos. All right, here's the favorite part. Let me talk you through the 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 titled Cautions About Forward Looking Statements in the enclosed appendix for information regarding forward looking statements and restated related risks and uncertainties. You can also learn more about these risks in our Form 10 ks for fiscal 2016 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.
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 a reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. One more word on the presentations, you will see these leaders out there talking to you about the connection between consumer and small business with QBSE, between small business and the accountant group with accounts who fuel SMB success, as I mentioned, the mobile and the data. All right. So let's get going.
With that, let me introduce Brad Smith, who's going to share his reflections on our fiscal year 2016 and the company's strategy. Brad?
Right. Thank you, Jerry. I'll take the garage door opener. Does this look pretty new age to you? They can make this simple.
Green means forward, red means back. Even I can't screw this up. So good morning, everyone. Welcome to Intuit's 2016 Investor Day. It's good to see a lot of familiar faces here in the room in Mountain View and some new faces as well as those who are joining us through telecast.
As Jerry just walked you through, we have an action packed agenda for you. Hopefully, you're going to find your time with us useful and productive today. But I want to step back and just share some reflections on fiscal year 2016, which at Intuit was a strong year from start to finish. But it was also a strategically foundational year and it was foundational in our journey to transform the company's business model from a North American desktop software company to a global cloud driven product and platform company. So I'm going to focus my comments this morning providing context around our multi year change journey and our fiscal year 2016 results.
Then I'm going to shift my view to the horizon and talk about the opportunities we see in the marketplace over the next 5 to 10 years. And then I'll lay out our game plan to capitalize on opportunities and to accelerate our company's performance. Then as Jerry just walked you through, we'll have each of our leaders come up and talk to 1 of the key priorities that will drive those outcomes and then Neil will put a bow around it by walking through the financial outlook that we have as a result. So with that context, let me begin by looking back at our multiyear change journey. And our latest chapter began in fiscal year 2012.
We had exited the recession with stronger momentum than many, but in fiscal year 2012 we began to notice something. Our performance was starting to plateau. We were not out of gas, but if we plotted our performance on an S curve, a sigmoid curve, we were at this point. And we knew that there had to be an opportunity to step back and reassess. So we first looked externally at the marketplace.
And as you may recall from last year, we saw 4 fundamental shifts in the market that we thought would be catalysts for future growth or quite honestly sources of potential disruption if we did not capitalize on these things. The first was the impact of social. Now when we think social, we think LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, but social changed our expectations as end users. We no longer wanted to be customers. We now expected to be participants.
We have been trained to choose our own news feeds, our own music to download, our own apps. And as a result, companies that were going to compete in this era couldn't just produce a static product that was one size fits all. This product now needed to become an open platform, a platform that enabled end users to customize the product just for them and 3rd party developers to be able to add value while our engineers were sleeping. The second major shift was the adoption of the cloud. With the cloud, the borders came down.
The borders between geographies disappeared. The expectations that an app would work across multiple devices became the norm. And we knew to compete in this era, we were going to have to lean in to becoming a cloud driven global services company. The third was mobile. The mobile experience had prevailed.
2,007, we all saw the computer move from the desktop to the palm of our hand in a smartphone. But 2012 had given way to tablets, wristwatches, eyeglasses, even automobiles. We knew we were going to have to step back and reimagine our products in a mobile first and mobile only world. And the last was data. Data promised to be the fuel for the next wave of innovation.
We grew up in a generation where you never enter data twice. Key it into your software, it syncs up with banks, everything's automatically done. Data promise to move us to the next paradigm where you never enter data at all. It automatically pulls all the data from all the sources that you have and pre fills all your product for you and you literally review it and hit send. That's an exciting chapter, but it also invited something else, cybercrime.
So we knew we were going to have to lean in and protect and secure our data while using the data to create better products and better benefits for customers. So 4 big shifts in the marketplace that we saw that caused us to step back and look at ourselves in the mirror and we knew we needed to change our business model. We needed to transform to this global product and platform company that was operating in the cloud. And we began a multiyear journey that for many of you who've been following us for years know all too well. We updated our strategy in fiscal year 2012 to lean into the cloud, to have our products now redesigned for a mobile world.
We opened up our products as platforms and even enabled competitors to work with them and we began to capitalize on data to do some pretty cool things like doing your taxes on your mobile phone. We also updated our approach to innovation in the company. Scott Cook has taught us for years. Follow customers home, find a big important unsolved problem that Intuit can solve well and look for a moat, build a durable competitive advantage. Well, as a platform company, it was no longer just problems that we could solve well, but also those who build on our platform.
So we updated our innovation model, which by the way was the first time it had been updated since the company started. We also recognized in the fall of 2013, we were still organized as a desktop company. What does that mean? It wasn't too long ago you heard from general managers of payroll and a general manager of payments and a general manager of QuickBooks and there was always debate about who was going to cross sell each other's products, we were organized inside out. So we began a restructure to organize around them.
We declared 2 goals in the fall of 2013. We want to be the operating system behind small business success and we want to do the nation's taxes whether it's do it yourself or with a CPA and we carry the same three strategies forward from 2012. Of course, it takes you to the bottom of this page. Spring of 2014, we began to rewrite the architecture of our technology, turning it into services oriented architecture with APIs so developers could build to our products whether they were Intuit developers or others. We even refreshed our values, so we began to operate as one Intuit and not local teams.
That took us to the spring of 2015. For the very first time in our company's history, we had a OneIntuit product and platform roadmap across the company. And what you started to see, we began to resource teams that were solving 2 sided problems: accountants working with small businesses, small businesses working with 3rd party developers, small businesses working with lending institutions. And that took us to last summer. And I think many of you remember we stood here in front of you last summer.
We've gone through a pretty massive restructure. We chose to divest 3 businesses that did not fit with our future: Quicken, Quickbase and Demand Force. We finalized the restructure of the small business group into an ecosystem and we reset the path forward. That was a lot of change. If it's hard to listen to, I can assure you it was painful for the organization to work through.
But I'm incredibly proud of our employees and of our management team because we were able to change the tires while the car was moving. Through this period of time, we leaned into the cloud, we grew our compounded annual growth rate of cloud customers 12% while we preserved and continued to delight a very important and profitable desktop customer base. We also shifted our revenue mix from 61% coming in from connected services to over 73% last year and we expanded our global footprint. But this is the biggest opportunity of all. In this period of time, we have more than doubled our total addressable market.
There are three things that have been driving our total addressable market. The first, with the adoption of cloud and mobile solutions, our categories are now growing faster than they have grown in a decade. No longer does a customer walk up to a shelf in a retail store, stare at a box of desktop software and commit they're going to go home and really try it. Now they can go to a URL, they can download an app, they begin using it for free in a promotional period and if it gives them benefit, they keep using it and we bill them when the promotional period is over. You can see the numbers on this chart from fiscal year 2016.
QuickBooks being example, the total active customer base, people who are on the last 3 years version plus the cloud is up 3%. It had not grown in a decade. New users up 23%, paying users. So all of this is an opportunity for us to continue to grow. The second major driver of our TAM is now that we're leaning into being an ecosystem and a platform, we can solve additional problems for customers, which enables us to drive up our ARPC.
It's helping us drive increased penetration into the base of things like payroll and payments, but it's also allowing us to connect our ecosystem and even connect third party products. Why is that important? This year, we had 15% of QBO customers attaching to a 3rd party software product. Last year, it was 10%. Here's what happens when they attach at least 1 third party software product.
The retention of QBO goes at 10 points. That adds tremendous value to our ecosystem and to Intuit's bottom line. The last piece of our TAM driver is the ability now to serve new geographies and new customer segments. Over this 4 year change journey, we rewrote QuickBooks Online as a global platform. We now took it to 6 countries outside the U.
S. That expanded the prospect base by 150,000,000 Our prospect base had been 29,000,000 dollars We have a huge amount of headroom ahead of us. And now we're going after the gig economy. Everyone's been talking about it. We've been going after it.
We actually grew our QuickBooks Self Employed base 3x over the last 12 months. So when you put a bow around our change journey, there's been a lot of change, but we have repositioned our company on the growth curve. We have expanded our total addressable market as we look ahead. And if you need reasons to believe, the proof points showed up in fiscal year 2016. On a financial basis, we exceeded the top end of our guidance range on revenue, non GAAP operating income, non GAAP EPS and even on QBO subscribers and we had raised the QBO a Now with that being said, I will tell you this, we have a strong foundation that we know we can build on.
But for those of you who've been following into it for years, you know we're also constructively dissatisfied because we know there are things that we can do better. So what I want to do is I want to click down on fiscal year 2016 for 1 minute. I want to walk you through the areas where I see us making real progress and areas where I think we have an opportunity to take our execution to the next level. And I'm also going to share with you a color coding, how green or red are we on every dimension. This is kind of inside baseball, the same thing we share with our Board and with our employees.
So let me start with our culture. This is honestly our secret sauce. 33 year old startup, 8,000 employees trained to be entrepreneurs. We all follow an innovation model for 15 consecutive years have been in the top 100 best places to work, one of only 2 technology companies since it's been measured to be on the list for 15 consecutive years. With that being said, we're learning to operate as an ecosystem.
Speed is where we have to lean in. We've got to get better at making decisions between teams and we also have to get tools in the hands of our engineers so they can move a lot faster and be more productive. The second thing is our products are getting better. Since 2012 when we said we wanted to lean into our products, our net promoter scores are up, our conversion has improved, our retention has improved. But if you look to the right hand side of this page, you're going to hear us talk a lot about the customer benefit.
What is the single reason why the customer hired our product and are we improving that in the customer's life? And believe me, it gets down to one thing. And so we want to make sure we know what that one thing is we're able to improve that with all the actions that we take. We are starting to operate more as an ecosystem. You saw the number of accountants connected to small businesses through QBO go to over 600,000 this year, which was a significant increase, almost 70%.
We have 3rd party developer apps now numbering in the 1200, that's more than double last year. But when you go to the right hand side, we have not yet unlocked the network effect where it literally starts to create more value the more people who participate and it grows virally. But we are on a very promising trail and we'll talk about 6 of them that we've resourced inside the company when Taylo presents later. Speaking of Taylo, our engineers have been tackling tech debt. When you were born 33 years ago on the era of DAS, that means along the way you have to be willing to refresh your technology and lean into the future.
Our teams have been doing that, but we still have work to do to break our code bases down into services and to get our major product lines into the public cloud and we have a road map to make that happen. Data is the fuel. Data this past year helped us improve awesome product experiences. TurboTax this year took 40% less time to file your taxes because of the W-2s we could download and the pictures you could take with your phone and import it into the product. Now we have to do that for all of our products and continue to use machine learning to be able to automagically make everything go away.
Taxes are done, accounting is done and bills are done. Security, I'll let Taylo drill down on this later, but we made great progress as an industry and we remain vigilant in making sure we keep cyber criminals out of the data and continue to keep our customers safe. Market results, if you listen to the earnings call, there was a lot of good news about expanding TAM increasing share, but I also shared very candidly 2 areas where I know we're capable of more. Our QBO growth outside the United States at 45% is admirable, but not best we can be. We know we have an opportunity to take our game to the next level.
We have a clear game plan and road map in place. We also have a wonderful new team member in Lucas Watson sitting over there on the side who joined us most recently from Google and prior to that 17 years at Procter and Gamble and we're super excited about Global. The other thing I would tell you we have an opportunity to take our game to the next level on is the pro tax share. We continue to grow share in the do it yourself category, but we've held share for a couple of years in a row in the pro tax. You're going to hear Dan and Cece talk about using our assets from TurboTax, from QuickBooks and from ProTax to reimagine the pro experience and get that business growing again as well.
I won't steal Neil's thunder. It's kind of hard to argue with last year's financial results, but what he will remind you of is we have financial principles to grow this company double digits organically on the top line and to expand our operating margins. And we want to consistently do that every year. And so we're going to talk about how we're going to hold ourselves to a higher bar to make that happen. So there's a lot here.
The good news is anytime we focus something on the right hand side, we've demonstrated an ability to move it over to the left hand side and we're committed to doing that. The last piece of context before I set the stage for the presenters who will follow me is we have refreshed our outlook over the next 10 years. We've been going deep on these topics. These are the areas we think fundamentally will shape our product and technology roadmap and our go to market plans for the next decade. Social continues to have an impact.
Social's next chapter is no one wants to do anything alone. They expect to have constant connectivity to trusted relationships and accountants literally right there if they need them, a third party developer, even a peer or a family member. You're going to hear that get embedded into our products. Machine learning, everyone's talking about it. We've been using it.
We've been doing it and we're going to accelerate because it is the next chapter of automation. Ecosystems and platforms critical in our category. We've got to realize that everything we do is a 2 party process. Accounting involves a small business and an accountant. Taxes involve a taxpayer and the government.
We've got to create these kinds of connections. The 4th is mobile, but mobile has gone beyond touch. It's now voice, it's chatbots, it's Pokemon Go with augmented reality, virtual reality and as radical as that sounds, believe it or not, it does apply to our space as well. And last but not least is cyber criminals continue to get smarter every day. So there are five things you will hear us talk about throughout the remainder of the day.
Deeply personalized experiences which are enabled by data and machine learning that do all the hard work for our customers so we literally can get to a point where our ecosystem between our ecosystem between accountants, small businesses, developers, banks, all the different parties. We are leaning into voice. We're leaning into video. We're leaning into chat, message bots and all those capabilities are getting built into our product and of course security is being designed in. So what you'll hear us walk through today reflects the momentum that we carried forward from fiscal year 2016, these opportunities to improve our execution and these 5 major themes that we think will create catalysts for the next chapter of growth.
And it's all been put together in a 1 Intuit strategy. Our employees have this strategy and they understand from our mission to our metrics what we're solving for and how their work fits in. What I want to do is quickly walk you through these and then set up the presenters to come up and take you through how we plan to deliver. Of course, you can never come to an Intuit Investor Day without being reminded of why this company got started. That kitchen table that sits out in the hallway is the original kitchen table from Scott Cook's house where he watched his wife struggle to balance the family checkbook and said there has to be a better way.
And for 33 years, employees with Intuit Badges have gotten out of bed with one purpose in mind: to improve our customers' financial lives, to power prosperity, to eliminate poverty, to increase the odds of success for small businesses. And over these 33 years, our company culture has embraced a set of values that have been refreshed and kept contemporary, but basically breaks down to this. We want to be a 33 year old startup with 8,000 employees who believe they're entrepreneurs who wake up every day and try to improve their customers' life. And we channel that passion and those innovation skills against a common set of success metrics. This is how the Board measures my performance.
This is how every employee in the company's performance is measured. It is about delivering the best outcomes for these stakeholders in the current year, but also making decisions today that those who succeed us will have a better company to be able to run when we're gone. Now what you see here has fiscal year 2017 targets. I will tell you this, we also have a version of this that has fiscal year 2018 2019 and that is what all the senior leaders in the company's comp is tied to. My Equity and all the senior VPs and above are tied to deliver 2017, 2018 2019 as discrete years.
Now these are the goals that we measure ourselves against and we have a game plan to deliver these outcomes. You should notice the strategy hasn't changed since fiscal year 'twelve and 'thirteen. It's the same 3 core customers, the same 2 strategic goals at the top and the same three strategies that I talked about in fiscal 'twelve. What is different now is because we've gone through this transformation, we have the ability to deliver on this in a fundamentally different way than we could in fiscal year 2012. First of all, delivering awesome products, we've now come to realize awesome is not measured by us, whether it's cool with fancy technology.
It's about whether it made an improvement in the customer's life. So the center of the strategy includes the benefits that we now know matter most to these customers and we measure these in every single meeting we have. The second part of our strategy is to become an open platform that creates network effects. You're going to hear Talo Stansbury, our CTO, talk about 6 priorities we have right now that we have funded that we actually ran experiments on over the last 12 months and we've already seen the green shoots. Many of them didn't work and we shut them down.
These are the most promising ones that we're investing in. And last but not least is data will power everything in the next chapter of our strategy. We have a vision of eliminating 6,000,000,000 hours of tax prep drudgery, making it easy for accountants to simply review their clients' tax return instead of sit there and key it in through tax season. We want accounting to disappear so small businesses can just focus on running their business. And we never want anybody to have to worry about a bill again.
That's where data comes in. So this is our strategy. Of course, we've broken it down into 6 priorities and this is what you will hear about the remainder of the morning. These are the 6 key priorities that the leaders will walk you through. But I'll wrap up with this.
If you put all that together, every employee in the company has this page in their workstation, at their desktop, in their cube in their office. And it helps everybody understand what we're trying to do and how their work fits in. And what's exciting about it is over the last 12 months, we have increasing clarity. We continue to remain focused on this mission that began 33 years ago. We are clear now that we've divested Quickbase, Quicken and Demandforce that we have 3 core customer groups and we have a definition of success for each of those 3 customer groups.
We've then taken that definition of success and we fish boned it back, that's basically just looking back at what are the key drivers to get to the ultimate thing they hire the product to do. And what's interesting is when you look across TurboTax, Mint, QuickBooks, payroll, payments, pro tax, all of that, they fall into 3 buckets. Our customers want everything done because let's be honest, they don't get excited about paying an invoice or doing payroll or doing accounting or goody, it's tax time again. The stuff we do is required. If they don't do it, there's a big consequence, but it's not desired.
So they want it to be done for them. The second thing they want is they want more money in their pocket, a bigger refund, better cash flow. And last, if they have a definition of success and it could be spending more time at home with my family during tax season or it could be I want to be the next into it as a small business and I want to grow really quickly. We have to personalize the product to their outcome. And to deliver that, we have now defined the key technologies, the key engines, the machine learning and we have invested all of these assets to be able to win and deliver over the next 10 years.
There's a lot in there. What I hope you hear is a company that has continued to reimagine itself and over the last 4 years has made the transformation from a North American desktop software company to a global cloud driven product and platform company. We have the wind at our backs as we exit fiscal year 2016 with momentum. We know where we can improve our execution and we see 5 big opportunities in the future that we've now built into our product plans. Now the opportunity is to unpack what exactly we plan to do about that.
So it is my pleasure to turn over the stage to Sasan Gharazi who will walk you through the first of these six priorities winning worldwide with the QBO ecosystem. Thank you.
All right. Good morning, everybody. Very nice to see so many familiar faces. It was an absolute blast in TurboTax the last 3 years. And Dan told me that I would be very excited about small business.
And I tell you after being in the business for 4.5 months, the opportunity is huge and I'm very excited to talk to you about what our plans are to accelerate growth. And really my focus today will just be around one area, which is to talk about how we will in fact accelerate growth and build on the great foundation that's already in place. Let me start with a little bit of context. The market opportunity is huge. We have 800,000,000 small businesses and self employed worldwide, and we are just at the beginning of a massive platform shift to online.
And what's exciting about this platform shift is we are in the best position to take advantage of the opportunity. And when you look at this $800,000,000 small business and self employed opportunity, there's about $150,000,000 to $200,000,000 that are right for QBO and probably about $600,000,000 that are right for the QBSE offering. So it's a very exciting opportunity as we look ahead. Now the great news is we already have a proven playbook and track record. 8 out of 10 customers today pick online versus desktop.
Actually it's 7, not 8, But out of those that pick online, 8 out of 10 are coming over from using Excel or managing their business in the shoebox. That is what's accelerating our opportunity for growth is to show them that there's a better way to run their business. And that's what's driving the self employed growth. It's what's driving the QBO growth both in the U. S.
And worldwide. I'll start with the U. S. We're seeing great growth and we think there's still an enormous opportunity to drive growth in the U. S.
By rewriting the story of what's possible to run your business on our platform. The second is, let me break out global for you. We are always looking to improve in our global growth, but I want to break out global into 3 parts. The first part is Canada, Australia and U. K.
We actually are enjoying very good growth in those three countries and we believe we can do better and we know what to do to accelerate growth. Then there is India, Brazil and France where we are still focused on getting the right product market fit. And when we do that in the coming year, that will accelerate growth further. And then the 3rd bucket is rest of world, where we are letting the customers and data lead us to the next country that we want to double down on. Now the great news with this opportunity is the needs of the customers are very similar worldwide.
They're all looking to figure out how to grow their customers. They're all looking to figure out how to manage their cash flow. They're all looking to figure out how to stay organized and how to look professional to their customers. But there's that last mile that matters a lot. And that last mile typically is how do you deal with sales tax?
How do you deal with payroll taxes, how do you deal with taxes in general. And then there are some countries where there are nuances like invoicing. Like in France, there's a certain way in which invoicing has to get done. And if it's not done right, the small business can get penalized. But the great news is 99% of the needs are the same globally, which is where the global platform comes into play.
The second is how these customers buy. If you're a plumber in Sydney, you're going to ask another plumber, hey, what do you do to run your business? So you're going to talk to your friends and family. You're going to go search online. And then ultimately, you also get some advice from your accountant.
What's different is the last mile, where in some influencing what decisions that you make. But I think the net of it is when you step back, there's an enormous opportunity for us to have a global platform with a clear go to market that's fairly common worldwide and acing that last mile will get the product market fit right, which is what we're focused on. Now with that, let me talk about how we're going to take advantage of the opportunity. And I'll start with what matters most and the reason why we show up inspired every day to work. 50% of small businesses go out of business in 5 years.
Some of it is because they just don't have the right product to win. But a lot of it has to do with the fact that they're not business people and they don't know how to run their business and they need help. And our mission is to ultimately fuel their success and we believe that we can drive global economic growth by shifting more and more small businesses and self employed on our platform to drive their success. That is the ultimate mission that we're solving for. Now let me talk a little bit about how we will do that.
The first is ultimately we want to become the platform of choice with an open platform where it's no longer about the apps that we build. It will all be about how we integrate all the applications that a small business and self employed needs to run their business. So ultimately everything is run through QuickBooks. So you won't know where our app starts or where somebody else's app begins. It will be all integrated so you can run your business on any device.
The second is creating indispensable connections that you heard Brad talk about, and this is about connecting more than just products, but connecting the people. Let me just give you a couple of stats. Today, about 35% of current QBSE subscribers are either a vendor, a customer or an employee of a QBO user. 35% of all of those that right now are in the trial mode with QBSE are ultimately customers of QBO customers or employees. 35% plus are already Mint customers.
20% of QBO customers invoice and pay one another. And of course, the most important part of this indispensable connection is the connection between small businesses and accountants, because we know the more we connect small businesses to accountants, the more it drives their success. So that's the second part of our vision is to automate and digitize all connections between the customers, deliver massive value for the customer, and ultimately create advantage for Intuit. And last but not least, we have gobbles and gobbles of data just like we have data in TurboTax. And our goal is based on what we know about you to completely personalize all the experiences and do it for you.
So you never have to worry about running your business. You know how your business is doing because we're using AI and machine learning and all the access to the data that we have. And as you heard Brad talk about, this is not new thoughts for us. This is about how do we accelerate machine learning to deliver personalized experiences. So that's our vision of where we're going.
And if that doesn't get you excited, I don't know what will. Let me now talk about how we're going to differentiate ourselves and win globally. The first one is what Intuit does very well, which is we will deliver awesome platform and products for small businesses with soul, with personality, where we do it for you better than any alternative worldwide. The second is to deliver mobile first platform for self employed because they are always on the go and we know exactly the key jobs that we have to solve well and we will solve it better than anyone else and lead to a distribution channel that provides us more access to more folks worldwide. And we'll do this so great where small businesses and self employed will demand it from their accountants.
On the other side, we will do what we've done great for years, which is win the hearts and minds of our accountants. In fact, in the 1st 30 days in the role, when I traveled across the globe and met many accountants, and imagine these accountants, 10% of their customers are using QBO, another percentage using alternatives and then the majority of them are using Excel and shoeboxes. And when I asked them, tell me what you love about doing business with Intuit and tell us where we can improve. And they answered the question one way across the globe. And it was, you provide training, you provide service, you are treating us like an advisor and a partner.
And it's something that we are great at and we have an opportunity to actually dramatically accelerate that platform of winning their hearts and minds, while at the same time providing one platform where they can run their entire firm from practice management to all the reporting that they need and ultimately with one click getting the customers' taxes done, which is the power of leveraging the assets across our ecosystem. And the next is what I mentioned a moment ago. At the end of the day, data is the biggest currency that we have. And it's about using data to be able to get to a place where we do it for you, where we help provide insights so you know when you're about to run out of cash, when you may need funding to be able to make it to Friday, to help you understand your P and L, to help you understand your inventory, order things on demand for you. The things that we'll be able to do and are already doing leveraging data with the thousands of engineers that we have working under Taylor that are focused in this area, we believe that we can do things to drive global economic growth by making more self employed and small businesses successful.
And last but not least, we'll look at disruptive business models that drives huge benefit for our customers and demand for us. And we will leverage the scale of the company and the power of our engineers to drive rapid growth and deliver innovation at a velocity that we've not experienced before. So these are the 6 areas in terms of how we will differentiate ourselves. Now let's look back to FY 2016 and show how we were leveraging already these elements of a plan to win to deliver for our customers. I think the simplest way to describe FY 2016 is that we grew TAM in the countries that we were already in by improving our products and our platform, while expanding our TAM with self employed.
Secondly, we improved our products and platform across the board in terms of the experience, which shows up in net promoter improvement for both our accountants and our small businesses. And there are 2 areas that we're constructively dissatisfied that's informing what we do next year and the year after. The first one is, again getting the products right in the markets that we are in outside of the U. S. So they are better than any alternatives locally.
The second is to continue to improve monetization by improving payroll and payments penetration. And you can see that's already been showing up in the results that Brad talked about. More and more outside of the U. S. It's becoming a bigger part of our results.
And not only is there huge opportunity left to grow in the U. S, but we believe a bigger part of our growth will come worldwide. Now if you look at FY 2017, I think the headline I would give you all is we have a great foundation in place. And our goal is to significantly increase the velocity of our innovation and be very clear about how we're going to win worldwide with our go to market plans. And what you'll see that show up in is better products building out the ecosystem with more effective brand awareness outside of the U.
S. You'll see our self employed and small businesses platforms getting better in the next year with some big innovations that we'll announce throughout the year, along with making it the one place where accountants can deliver for their customers and run their practice. And last but not least, continuing to focus on how we improve penetration and attach of our payroll and payments offerings because that's critical to monetization in the long term. And just like we have across the company, we have clear marching orders from Brad and Neil. There are really three things that we are focused on.
The first is how do we grow our total addressable market. The second is how do we grow customers and share faster than any local rival. And the third is, we know how to monetize across the company and that will turn out to the revenue commitments that we have for you all, which I think is depicted on this page. You can expect us to deliver subs growth between 2,000,000 to 2,200,000 subs for this year and our online ecosystem growing north of 25 percent, which is very healthy growth and setting up the foundation for FY 2018 and beyond. And I think the way to think about this business is we have a range of opportunity to grow between 10% to 15% and you can see what the key levers are and it all comes down to great execution worldwide because the opportunity is huge.
I'll end with where I started, very excited about the opportunity. We are at the beginning of a major global platform shift worldwide, and we think Intuit is the best position to drive the growth, and it'll be exciting to watch what we do for our customers in FY 2017. So with that, let me turn it over to Cece.
Good morning, everyone. You heard Brad earlier reference our 2 growth strategies, do the nation's taxes and be the operating system behind small business success. I'm going to focus this morning on the accountant. And I'm going focus on the accountant as the linchpin that brings these two strategies together in a way that adds additional value to both our accountant customers and to Intuit. Now if you will think about the world of an accountant with me for just a minute, They serve their customers by doing bookkeeping and accounting on one set of systems.
They use another set of systems to do tax preparation. They use another set of systems to do tax preparation. And in some cases, they use yet another set of systems or set of applications to manage their firm. We don't think they should have to do this. And we're in the best position, a unique position to make everything that an accountant needs to do to serve their clients work together.
So our strategy is to be the operating system behind an accountant success And we're going to do that by providing one place, one single place that they can serve their that they can serve their clients across accounting and tax, consumers, the self employed and small businesses in a single seamless integrated experience. And that one place is going to be QuickBooks Online for accountants or what we refer to and I'm sure I will QBOA. Now we provide QBOA to accountants today for free. It's their way of working with their QBO clients. And as a result, we've seen an increase in account adoption and an increase in QBO referrals.
Now to do that, we're going to have to align our monetization strategy across Intuit for accountants. And so we've made a couple of key decisions. Number 1, we're going to have smaller price increases in the ProConnect Group for professional tax software. And number 2, some of the services that we've developed that we originally planned to monetize, we're going to make part of the free QBOA platform. That's going to deliver stronger value for the accountant.
Now the implications are that in the near term, we'll see lower revenue growth in the PCG business, but it's a stronger value proposition for the accountant, it's stronger for the ecosystem and in the end, we believe it will be stronger growth for Intuit overall. So let me tell you a little bit more about what we have planned and I'm going to do this in 3 areas. First, I'll give some context around the relationship between accountants, small businesses and Intuit. 2nd, I'll go a little deeper into the strategy I just highlighted with a particular focus on the benefits that we'll deliver for accountants this year. And then finally, I'll close with a headline on the financial implications.
We've shared with you previously that accountants and small businesses depend on each other. From the small business standpoint or the self employed, they use accountants to do their bookkeeping and they use accountants to do tax preparation. Of course, accountants get the majority of their revenue from small businesses. And in fact, 85% of it comes from just those two services, tax preparation and accounting. But I think the metric that is most compelling relates to the fact that 50% of small businesses don't survive 5 years and yet 89% say they are more successful when they work with an accountant.
And that's where we come in. We are central to a successful relationship between a small business and an accountant. We are the operating system behind small business success at scale. We have the largest network of accountants. And when you bring these 2 together, we deliver the solutions that enable an accountant to do their craft, to serve their clients and ultimately to make a difference in their clients' lives.
And of course, accountants are critical to Intuit. We estimate the impact of an accountant domestically to be between $4,000,000,000 $6,000,000,000 We capture about a quarter of that today and we've shared with you previously that about $1,200,000,000 of Intuit's revenue is attributed to the impact of an accountant. There's 2 ways that that revenue shows up for Intuit. 1 is in the professional tax software and attached services that we provide. That shows up in the ProConnect group.
The second is the small business ecosystem that the accountant influences and that shows up in the small business group. Now I'm going to unpack each of these just a little bit and I think you'll begin to see why we believe we are strategically advantaged to bring these 2 together. So let me start with the ProConnect business. There are 2 types of firms in this segment, multi service firms, which are firms that do both tax and accounting and that means these firms serve consumers, the self employed and small businesses. The other type of firm we refer to as a 1040 only firm.
And as that name implies, these are firms that only do tax and therefore they primarily serve consumers. Our focus is primarily on the multi service firm. It's the firm we can deliver the most value to and it's the firm that delivers the most value back to Intuit. Now the ProConnect business itself is very strategic to Intuit and it's a solid business on its own. We have majority share.
We increase customers, although we think we can do better. It's highly profitable and we have very high and increasing retention rates. In addition, the accountants that we serve have over 4,000,000 small businesses in their client base and over 3,000,000 Schedule C or self employed customers in their client base. The segment also has challenges. This is a mature segment.
The number of firms is basically flat and we face pricing pressure. So we've identified 4 levers that we are focused on to capture more share in this segment. The first, tightening our focus to multi service firms by delivering on our strategy to provide them with one place to do tax and accounting for their clients with an aligned pricing or monetization strategy across Intuit that increases value for accountants so that we can cross sell those 7,000,000 small businesses and self employed that exist within their customer base. And the reason for that is because accountants are even more valuable when you put an ecosystem lens on them. Accountants generate QBO gross new subs for us.
They're responsible for the majority of desktop to online migration. They increased 1st year retention rates for QBO. They have a lower cost of acquisition than any of our channels and they increase QBO ecosystem attach rates. Now I want to try to bring this to life to you with an example. This is an example of a professional tax customer that was only doing tax business with us.
We brought to them the entire ecosystem of small business products and services and it increased the revenue that they generate for Intuit fourfold. And at the same time, we increase the revenue for that accounting firm. Now if you take this across the base, the ProConnect unifying these strategies. Now this view is just the existing customer base and just the domestic view, which is a large opportunity on its own, but we're playing a global game. And so when you take this across the globe to the target countries that Sasan just talked about and the large opportunity that's in front of us, this becomes quite compelling.
And in every one of those countries, the accountant is key. So to win with accountants, we always start with finding the unsolved problem, the important unsolved problem that we can solve well and then we declare our customer benefit as Brad just mentioned. And there are 3 that we are focused on for accountants. We're going to leverage technology to help them save time. Because they are not inherent marketers, we're going to deliver a service marketplace to help them grow their practice.
And finally, we're going to do what they told us was most important to them, help them make a difference in their clients' lives. And that's why we've declared our strategy to be, be the operating system behind accountant success by delivering one place they can serve their clients across tax and accounting, we will deliver all three of our customer benefits on that platform in a seamless integrated fashion. Now what I want to do is give you a few examples of the benefits that we'll deliver for accountants this season on one place. The first we'll start with is saving time. Accountants work is trapped in a lot of manual processes.
In fact, 65% of their time is spent in data collection and entry. Our strategy is to eliminate that through automated and intelligent data collection, collaboration and import. We are going to leverage technology to intelligently know what data is needed, retrieve the data, map the data, import that data into the tax return and we're going to eliminate 40% of an accountant's data entry without human assistance in the coming year in our online offerings. The second example is also in time savings and this is unified workflows. If you think about it, we have a large network of small businesses and accountants who do tax and accounting together today.
Last year, we started the process with doing some data integration and we were able to reduce the amount of time it takes to do a tax return for small businesses by 2 hours. This year, we are leveraging machine learning to expand the data components that we will be mapping and importing and to broaden the workflows and we expect to be able to reduce the amount of time that it takes for an accountant to reconcile books and close books all the way to filing a tax return by 40% with our online offerings. The third example that I'll share deals with helping accountants grow their practice. I already mentioned that accountants and small businesses depend on each other. The fact is they're more successful when they work together, but they're not good at finding each other and accountants aren't good marketers.
We already have an online directory and that directory helps small businesses find accountants and it connects about 100,000 small businesses a year. But when they do the engagement, they do it outside of our products and services. So last year, we ran some experiments and we took the data that we had about accountants and small businesses and we built matching algorithms to deliver perfect and enduring relationships. That was our goal. But the thing that I think was more important is we enabled their entire interaction to take place in places that they already go within our applications.
So everything that they did to work together took place within QBO and QBOA and the net promoter score for the small business was over 80. So this year, we're building out that capability and we'll begin to expand this globally with the goal of helping accountants grow their practice and helping small businesses be more successful. And the final example I'll give has to do with helping them make a difference in their clients' lives. We sit on a vast amount of data within Intuit and our hypothesis is that we can leverage that data to help accountants be better advisors to their clients. So we will run experiments this year to take that data, convert it into insights, put it in the hands of the accountants so they can be the trusted advisor to their small businesses and our goal would be to improve small business success.
That's our story with bringing everything together to be the operating system behind small business success by delivering one place where accountants and their clients can work, grow and collaborate. As I mentioned at the beginning, we expect this strategy to have lower near term growth for the ProConnect group, but it's a better value proposition for accountants, better for the ecosystem and we expect we will also pick up share within the accountants segment and then have stronger long term growth for Intuit. And that's our strategy to accountants to be the linchpin that connects Intuit's 2 growth strategies to do the nation's taxes, be the operating system behind small business success. And with that, I'm going to introduce Dan Wernicoff to talk about winning on TurboTax Online and Mobile.
All right. Good morning, everybody. I'm going to talk to you about the 3rd priority of the 6, which is winning with TurboTax Online and Mobile. I also have the good pleasure of following my compatriots, Sasan. I've been in the role for 4.5 months.
And it's one of those roles where you're happy to enter because you're starting in a very healthy place, a place that's a great strength to build upon. So let's get grounded first in the vision. When you think about what we do, we try to help people get access to the biggest check that they get all year round. For the bulk of Americans, the refund is the largest payday they have. And when you think about what they do with that money, oftentimes you have a visualization of going out and spending it on a big TV or a car or doing something that's more of a celebration.
But the reality is for most Americans, this is about buying gas for their car. It's about buying groceries for the families. It's about sending their kids to school. So it's a very important payday. The challenge is the tax code gets more and more complex every single year.
The United States government actually governs through the tax code. And so when you have policies like ACA, it gets implemented through it. And so it makes it harder and harder for these people to complete their taxes. So we try to make what's something that's very complex, very simple. Get 180,000,000 returns done in North America, help people save 6,000,000,000 hours in terms of filing and help them get access to $350,000,000,000 of refunds.
There's 2 things that we have to do well in order to do that. The first is we call it taxes are done. It's about making the tax process have no work, take no effort, have no doubt associated with it. So it's really about confidence, confidence in our software, but also helping people feel confident in their ability to complete their own taxes. That's what this category is all about.
The second piece is more money, making sure they get exactly what they deserve and that means finding those deductions. It also means us thinking about how we can leverage their tax data so that they can save money in other ways. So these are the two foundations of what we're doing. And we're very well positioned in this space. And when you think about the category, there's 4 different methods.
We play in the 2 growth areas. Cece just walked through the ProConnex side where we do 26,000,000 returns annually and that's by helping the accountant file them through our ProConnect software. And then we also play in the fastest growth space, which is the DIY space with TurboTax, where we do 45,000,000 returns. So we have a third of the share on the pro space, 2 thirds in the DIY space, overall the number one position in the marketplace. And when you start to go down and look at the different categories specifically, you can see the dynamic of what's been happening.
There is definitely a secular trend where newer filers coming in are getting more comfortable with technology. And 10 years ago, we saw that through the elimination or the reduction of people who were doing manual filing. About 5 years ago, we saw that also accelerate with tax stores. And so we've seen this continue through time and we think there's plenty of growth to go. And when you start to look even within the category, you can see that of the people who are actually doing DIY tax, over the last 3 years, we've done a significant improvement in share, where we're seeing 6 points, 3 points alone in last year.
So not only do we see the secular trend improving into DIY, but we see our performance in the DIY space accelerating as well. On the surface, when you think about tax prep, it can seem like a lot of very simple concepts, getting data in, helping giving them help when they need it and keeping the whole process really secure. And then you think of the scale of what happens during tax and the size of the market and how many people rely on it, and it actually is not that simple. So you have 180,000,000 returns. Those 180,000,000 returns have lots of source documents associated with them.
Forms are sent in mail. People make donations through email. You have people who have all their forms in their bank account that requires their login. And so you have forms everywhere. When you think about personalization, there are things that change on an annual basis that are you would not expect like even the definition of your family is changing in the United States, which actually impacts how you file your return, how you think about what a dependent is.
And so personalizing returns is even difficult for a very simple return. And then you think about support and getting help. And the analogy I'd use is it's kind of like Christmas shopping. On one end, you have people who start on Thanksgiving and line up around a store. And on the other end, you have people who are shopping at midnight Christmas Eve.
And those are 2 massive peaks that require scaling human beings and scaling technology in a way that no one else actually does. And then when you think about the industry itself and the fact that there's $350,000,000,000 moving from the government to its citizens, it's a natural place to attract a lot of fraud and so security is incredibly important. And this is where over the last 3 years there's been a consistent pattern of developing innovations for our customers. When we think about getting data in, we're making that automatic. From pulling in and importing electronic data to OCR ing forms over 5,000,000 forms that we took pictures of, our customers took pictures and entered into TurboTax, dramatic growth.
Personalization, Brad talked about it, 40% reduction in what customers have to actually enter. That means you're both pulling data in and asking the right questions of our customers so that they don't get questions that don't really apply to them. Support, 43,000,000 interactions with our customers, millions of interactions through video chat and something we call SmartLook. We are becoming one of the largest video chat providers, and this is getting our customers interactions not just on product support, but on tax advice as well. And then finally security where there were about 20 innovations last year including touch ID, multifactor authentication where we saw a dramatic decrease in fraud in the industry.
So lots of great progress here. Now when you have a great product, it allows you to create a really strong breakthrough campaign as well. And so there were 2 key themes when we think about how we go to market. The first is how do you drive consideration at the top of the funnel? How do you have people feel confident that they can do their taxes?
And so last year, the year before we talked about having confidence in yourself that you understand the story of your life. This last year, now we helped them understand that you don't really have to be a genius, that this is something that for many people who have simple returns, they can complete it themselves. And we drove top line consideration of helping people understand that they can be confident in themselves and being able to complete their taxes. The second thing is how do you drive conversion? And it's really about taking the risk away.
And when you think about what Absolute Zero did, Absolute Zero took every risk away from trying to do your taxes because at the end of the day for a simple filer, you could get a free tax return, free federal, free state. Now this is healthy for us as well because it forces us to provide high degree of value for these customers to pay us and we're seeing significant growth in the free segment both in terms of customer growth and revenue growth. It's our fastest growing segment in terms of revenue, in terms of attaching these free customers. So great outcomes as well from the marketing campaign. So this takes us to the funnel.
And when you look at it, we had improvements across the whole funnel, consideration, logins, the actual returns filed as well as retention. So we saw everything across the board increase. In fact, one of the things that's kind of a surprise or interesting to me coming into this role has been to see just how well these customers behave, how similar they behave relative to QuickBooks. They really are subscribers. When you start to look past year 1 and they harden and they become tenured, the retention rates are extremely, extremely high for these customers, which leads us to the opportunity.
The opportunity is the inverse. That 1st year is hard. When you think about 1st year paid customers and you think about 1st year free customers, and they're the ones where we see a 10 to 20 point difference in terms of conversion. And so that's all about that first use experience, which we continue to improve and help them understand that it's easy to get the data in, we're going to personalize it for them, we're going to make them feel confident and get them to support and we're going to keep them secure. Now one of the things that would be a natural concern as you go through a big business model shift like we have is, are we maintaining ARPC of the customer base?
And we have a strong history of doing that. One of the things that we always prioritize first is acquiring customers because we know once we acquire new customers into our franchise, we will find ways to provide more value to them and ultimately we'll be able to monetize them. And you can see a couple of points in our history where TaxAct launched a free Fed edition. We ultimately matched that, and then we actually saw for 5 year period ARPC go up. Now you saw us leapfrog that promotion with our Absolute Zero campaign.
We've maintained our ARPC we're starting to really figure out how you work with a free base of customers. This is not a 1 year journey when you bring in a whole different cohort of customers. You really have to do a lot of trial and error to figure out exactly what value they want relative to the prior cohorts that we had that were paid. And so I imagine over time, we'll continue to figure out exactly what's important to them and continue to add value for that segment of customers. But you can see this trend line and we purposely brought it out all the way back to when the first free Fed offerings came into market.
So you can see that exact same trend line there. Now one of the things that's not typical is to talk a lot about what we're doing this tax season. We actually don't share a great deal of our plans, but this year we're going to do something a little bit different. We're going to talk about some opportunities that go beyond just extending our lead in DIY. So we really have this strong foundation and it feels like a great time to step back just like we did in small business and think about where is there additional TAM outside of the DIY space.
And so we have 4 additional opportunities that we're starting to talk about as a team. The first one you've probably heard before, which is really thinking about the assisted space. But in the past, we've thought about in a couple of different ways, we've thought about how to disrupt it with a DIY solution. As we think now about what the opportunity is, and I'll show some data in a second, we think it's much more about transforming it. We think that humans play a very important role in tax prep for a specific type of customer.
And rather than fight it, we think we should embrace it and leverage technology to enable those humans to actually create a better experience for customers that don't have the confidence. A second thing is one that I'm personally pretty passionate about, which is we have one of the most incredible platforms in the industry. We have a big channel, we have a lot of data and we have a lot of engaged customers. And when you look at it, even relative to what we have in QuickBooks, where I have a lot of experience around how to transform that into a platform, it's actually a more interesting opportunity in terms of the size, the scale and the access that we have to the actual consumer with real data about what they buy today and what they're spending and what their interest is. And so there's some good opportunities.
I'll go a little bit deeper there. The next one I'd say is we have an opportunity to enable developers in a different way. So if you think about some of the things that we do, some of the services that we consume internally, like an e file service, that would be the equivalent of being a Stripe for transacting with the government. We actually can connect and transact with the government all day long. Or if you think about our compliance engine, which Tayo is going to talk about in a little bit, it's almost the equivalent of AWS for compliance applications.
And so there's lots of different ways to think about our services and potentially commercialize them, which we have not done historically. And then the last piece is, as we're replatforming our product, we are globalizing it and that gives us opportunities whether it's in the consumer space or in the pro tax space and helping the small business ecosystem to go beyond the U. S. Borders. So plenty of opportunities.
I'm going to go through 2 in a little bit more detail. So the first is our track record with assisted customers. I think we have not been successful when you look at the overall assisted space. We've been extremely successful when you look at assisted cut by tax stores relative to PROs. And there's 2 things that we've discovered.
1, if you look at the left hand side here is that no matter how simple a return, there are some customers who don't have the confidence to complete it and so they will go to a pro. And you can look that there's just about as many simple returns happening with pros as there are with DIY software, even if we feel like we can solve that problem well. So that's one of the insights. The second is when you look at the right hand side, you can see that a lot of the progress we've made has actually come at the cost of the tax store. But that pros are serving a very important purpose.
They actually make people feel confident. They understand specific situations. They specialize. They have proximity. There's just the human interaction.
And so these are 2 very important insights that have made us step back and think about, are we trying to sell a DIY solution to a customer that ultimately needs to have an interaction with the human? And if you start to think back to what we did last season with SmartLook, it's a good example of how you can actually leverage technology to bring that human through the software. Now we also have a ton of assets. And so when you look at the Intuit ecosystem, there are many pieces in here. We have 600,000 accounts in ProConnect that Cece just talked about.
We have applications like Self Employed, QuickBooks Self Employed, which manages your finances every day and gets you ready for tax on. We have TurboTax, which has all of the technology I just talked about that can help you get data in. And then we have this prospect pool. Now Cece talked about the challenges of being an accountant and I'm intimately aware of those as well from my time in small business. Growing your customers by far the most important to a large segment of accountants.
2nd most important is they got into the business to provide tax advice, not to do a bunch of paperwork. Now if you think about what TurboTax is, TurboTax is the most powerful channel for acquiring customers that have a tax problem and it's the most efficient way to enter all of your tax information from a client perspective. So if you think about connecting some of these assets, you can create a pretty powerful ecosystem starting from an example like Self Employed where a customer can start with QuickBooks Self Employed, manage all of their expenses, separating business and personal, tracking mileage, doing all those things, and then it comes to the end of the tax year. At the end of the tax year, that customer can decide which method do they want to use. Do they want to use an accountant or do they want to use TurboTax?
If they choose the TurboTax, they can file pretty much automatically. If they want to talk to an accountant, that accountant can leverage all of the tools of TurboTax and QuickBooks Self Employed and get access to a brand new customer with minimal effort. And this is really something that's defensible, something that we again, we typically don't talk about our plans going into season, but we just don't think anybody can replicate this. And so this is about bringing our ecosystem together and leveraging the assets. Now one of the things, one of the very first things I did when I joined the TurboTax team was said, give me a sense of all the data that builds into a return.
And I said, and tell me how many people log in on a monthly basis out of season. And that was it was clear to me that we were the best DIY player in the industry. But what wasn't clear to me is how are people using TurboTax ambiently today without any of our help? One of the fascinating answers I got was there's 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 logins every single month into TurboTax. And what they're actually doing is using all of the reference docs, all of the data of TurboTax for them to be able to go out and get all of the financial services that they need.
Now when you go get financial services, you need verified income. Typically you need prior year returns. It's not bad to have a payroll stub. There's all types of data that you actually need at that point, a W-two. These are things that are resident within TurboTax and what we're seeing is people logging in all the time to try and leverage it to do things like get a mortgage, like get a student loan consolidation, like get a rental.
So without us doing any help, they're seeing the power of our channel, they're seeing the power of our data. So we have 167,000,000 linked bank accounts. Look at the $60,000,000,000 paid in mortgage interest through TurboTax. You talk about moving expenses, student loans, dollars 5,000,000,000 of interest expense. And then you think about the channel, 100,000,000 visitors to the site.
And this isn't just a TurboTax story by the way either. This is Mint too. Mint has a channel that has 15,000,000 customers, unique customers that visit them every year. We have 28,000,000 customers that get a refund. The IRS will give you the data that says it's about $3,000 an average.
So a lot of people are loading up cards and thinking about how they can spend their money, which is another opportunity to help them save. Then you think about engagement, so between $55,000,000 engaged users on a monthly basis. This is a powerful channel. This is a powerful platform. And when we think about it, we think about what it can do for the customer.
For the customer, we can help them save money, which has been an ultimate goal for us. I mean, if we really talk about financial freedom, it's about helping customers stretch their dollar and get more from it. Now this is highly regulated. You guys probably have heard of 7216 IRS. So this is consent driven.
We will never do anything with our customers' data without their consent and they wouldn't want us to unless we're saving the money. We have to prove the value to them. But when we do it, there's some really important things that we can link together. Again, you look at what's happening ambiently right now. Right now, customers are going to banks.
They have multiple financial accounts. They have many third party apps. They have a very complex world. It's not that different from small business where you saw 15 apps, you see lots of business accounts. We can help tie that together in a simple way by leveraging Mint and TurboTax as a platform, thinking about managing your financial identity, which is actually one of the biggest problems that consumers have today, connecting it to the right services.
So finding the best deal by leveraging their data, connecting to 3rd party apps that need to also leverage that data, ultimately even connecting to the consumer side of our own ecosystem. One of the examples that we always use is, we do payroll service. Well, on the other end, there's a bunch of employees, about 10,000,000 employees and that data should flow seamlessly into this platform as well to help them file their taxes or manage their finances. So very big opportunities when we start to think beyond just the tax return. Now, it's important to end here, which is we still are spending the bulk of our energy on the DIY space.
We are as paranoid as ever. We know it's going to be an incredibly competitive season, but we also feel extremely confident that we have the best offer in the market, we have the best marketing, and we have the best experience for our customers. When we think about the durability of the space, we're confident. As we look at the 4 drivers, we think about return growth, which we cannot control, but is highly predictable. We think about the category share.
We think of our TurboTax share within the DIY category and then our ability to monetize our customer by continuing to offer more value and more services. When you add that together, in the DIY space, we believe it's a 5% to 10% grower on an annual basis. This does not include some of those opportunities I was just talking about. Now you can imagine on the first one, it's a higher end assisted solution and so it's a different type of customer. And on the second one, it's about providing more value, which would be more of an ARPC play.
But at this point, we don't have the proof points that are making us feel like we should put that into the plan. But just want to be clear that we feel very good about the DIY space and these are other opportunities that we're starting to investigate. So like I said, I'm super excited to be joining this team. It's an awesome team with a great foundation and a great experience for customers and I'm looking forward to a lot of growth in the future. So with that, I'm going to introduce Jerry back up to do some housekeeping.
Thanks, Dan. All right, that brings us to our first break. So thanks everybody. There's coffee outside, you can refresh your drinks. The restrooms are around the corner.
If you go out and make a left and then go out through the demos and then around the corner to the right, you can find the restrooms. Please take some time and visit the gallery walk and talk to management who are going to be out there as well and look at what we've got going in terms of some of the actuals behind what you've seen on the slide so far. We will be back in around 10 o'clock, so start thinking about getting back in here right about 10. So plenty of time to chat with management, look at the demos, grab a snack. So thanks very much.
We'll see you in a bit. All right, bro. I'm going to call it an A. Okay, bro. I'll talk to you later.
Have a good one. All right, everybody. Thanks for spending the time out there and meeting with the folks at the demo stations. We're about to get started again, probably get a few more people getting their last cup of coffee or I guess their next cup of coffee depending on their addiction level. Our next topic is technology, data and security.
So I'd like to introduce Taylo Stansbury, our Chief Technology Officer.
Good morning, everyone. So I wanted to say a few words about our last three priorities, so technology, data and security. And last year we talked a little bit about our journey to refactoring some of our tech debt, some of our monolithic code bases into software that are reusable to help drive developer speed. And this year we've gotten a lot more structured about that and you saw this slide from Brad. First, we went back to say what are our customers, who are our customers, consumers, small businesses and accountants?
What is the ideal state customer benefit for each of those customer segments? So things like taxes are done or ready for review, accounting is done, bills are done, more money, more time. And then we said, what are the strategic capabilities that we require to efficiently implement all those customer benefits and what are the services underneath each of those strategic capabilities and defined those and came up with a framework that you see here. And then what we've been doing is redirecting our services journey to develop these software services to accelerate our developers, to align with this framework, to make it as efficient as possible. And what I'd like to do is talk about a couple of those to give you a flavor.
First one being acquisition of data to feed our applications and to make our customers' lives easier. As you might expect, data is the life blood that feeds our entire ecosystem of products. And there's data that flows between the products, and there's data that flows into the products from 3rd parties and out of the products into 3rd parties. So for example, bills and invoices need to come in so that we can pay them. Transactions need to come in so that we can feed our accounting applications.
Tax documents need to come in to help people fill out their tax returns. And then we need to share a lot of that data with 3rd parties. We also take customer telemetry and use that to help guide customer experiences so that they can have the most easy flowing experience to get through and accomplish their goal. Now one of the most important areas within that is the acquisition of data to feed our products. And so we've had over the last several years a pretty substantial investment in acquiring that data to feed those products.
So first is an image and OCR, so that people can take out their phone and take a picture of, let's say, a tax document like a W-two. We can zone that correctly even though they're formatted differently from different payroll providers, extract the data from it, where appropriate compare that data with other data sources that we have to ensure correctness and then populate the customer's tax return with that data automatically. Tax data access electronically is another area of investment where we go and actually work out agreements with various different parties to get those tax documents in. So again, they can automatically feed into the tax return be that a pro return or a turbo tax return. And then also to feed accounting, so be that QuickBooks or Mint on transaction access from banks and FIs to and then taking those transactions and categorizing them to make it easy to do your accounting.
So where we are in this right now is we have some $500,000,000 tax documents that we're able to ingest every year to feed our tax products. And so that actually gets to most forms, most tax documents for most customers, towards this goal of taxes are done. And then in accounting, we have we aggregate some 75,000,000 transactions a month. We pull those from some 20,000 financial institutions and then automatically categorize that to feed into your accounting application to make that job easier towards accounting is done. So that just gives you a flavor of one of the strategic capabilities that we have, one part of it, which is acquisition of data to feed our products.
So next I'd like to talk a little bit about security and fraud. The underpinning for all of this is our data stewardship principles. So we hold ourselves accountable to these. They're very simple and easy to understand so that all of our engineers and product managers and designers can adhere to them. The customers actually give us access to this data on their behalf for their purposes, not for our purposes.
And so we want to make sure we hold true to that. Want to make sure we guard their privacy. We want to make sure we guard the data that they've given us stewardship over. We agree that we will not sell their data without permission in any way that is can be reidentified back to the customer. And we will use the data to help simplify the business of their financial life and make their flow through our products easier.
So security is designed carefully into everything that we do. And we've made a lot of progress on that over the last few years. It's something that we invest heavily in mindshare and in dollars, and that's embedded in every one of our teams. And if you look at some of the things that we've done, a couple of examples of that would be pushing multifactor authentication in a fairly sophisticated form across all of our products. And as a consequence of that, we've been able to reduce account takeover by bad guys by about 85% year over year.
And one of the reasons by the way that we're able to push that out quickly across all of our products is that the Intuit identity system, including all the mechanisms for user experience, account and all the mechanisms to tie into 3rd party data sources, our own first party data sources to try to identify whether some information is coming in is from a bad guy or from a good guy. We were able to leverage that because it was a reusable software service and pushed that out across all of our products very quickly. So that aligns with the software services journey that I was talking about earlier. The other one of the other things that we did is we put some 30 new security features into TurboTax this year and that has helped tremendously as well. So at a higher level, we actually do partner with government and with rest of the tax industry to minimize fraud.
And what we've done in working with those bodies over time is to help identify what are indicators of fraud and make sure that every year we package more and more of that information as do our competitors in the tax space. So everybody is providing the same information to federal and state government, so that they can better with their fraud detection tools flag who are the bad guys and who are the people who need to be paid out their refunds promptly. As a result of this, the federal government has reduced the amount of fraud payout by over $1,000,000,000 So again, we do have this framework now that helps center all of our efforts around services. And that really does help with developer speed. We're seeing in some areas where people have adopted services up to a 10x improvement in developer speed, which goes to how innovative we can be and how responsive we can be to our customers' needs.
It also goes to, with where we have services that are shared, that means that it is much easier for us to build workflows that go between our products and data flows that go between our products. And it also means it is easier for us to create workflows and data flows that go between our customers. So worried about both of those. So we do have, as Brad mentioned before, this ecosystem of products and getting that ecosystem to work effectively together to serve our customers is a key goal for us going into the future. An example of that would be, we pay many millions of customers through our payroll tool.
And what we want to do is to and we've started to have great success with is make it very easy for the people who get a paycheck through the Intuit payroll system and whose W-two we actually produced to make it much easier for them to do their taxes in our tax systems. So we're starting to invite those people to use our tax systems and actually push their W-two directly into their tax experience, to make that an easier transition towards the goal that we talked about earlier of taxes are done. Another example would be the indispensable connection. So we have a lot of customers of QuickBooks who invoice other customers of QuickBooks and customers of QuickBooks who invoice customers of Mint. And so how do we make those e invoice, epay and the customer, buyer interactions much more fluid and much easier with 0 data entry, one click on both sides than we ever have before.
So that's a very fast growing segment and we're building out more and more capabilities in each of those products to make that process simpler, more easy flowing so that invoicing is easier, so that people pay faster, so that cash flows get better. Another example would be consumer data going into tax. If you're a Mint customer, of course, we have access to your accounts through your permissions. And with that access, we can actually obtain in many cases the 1099s and 1098s that are associated with those accounts and feed those directly into either pro tax or into TurboTax. So that's an example of consumer data into tax.
And then when you look at small business data going into tax, that's usually about the transactions. So C. C. Mentioned the machine learning that we're doing and accounting assistance to correctly take all of your transactions, categorize them right and have them end up correctly on your Schedule C to vastly simplify the process of creating a business tax return. So those are just a few examples of areas where we're starting to get true leverage from the ecosystem of products that we have, the interacting ecosystem of customers that we have and our services reimplementation, which is facilitating making these interactions go much, much more easily.
So with that, let me hand this over to Anil to talk about our finances. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our campus here in Mountain View. And for those who are participating online, thanks for coming out. In the next few minutes, I want to talk to you about 3 things.
First of all, share my perspective on 2016, talk about how our financial principles are guiding and informing our long term financial planning, and then thirdly, connect the dots between some of the strategies and the priorities you've heard talked about already this morning, how those fit in and how those lead to our financial guidance we've already given you for 2017. So first to worry about 2016, I think a great place to start is always to look at what we said last year. You know we're pretty rigorous about doing that. And so the left hand side of this slide is actually the summary slide from my last presentation. And we're quite pleased with our performance in 2016.
As you've already heard, it was a great year. Very strong growth in our online ecosystem, customers and revenue, margin expansion, margin improvement, very strong growth also in our cash flow and in our operating earnings per share, reduced our share count, returned about $2,600,000,000 to shareholders in the combination of dividends and share repurchases last year as we had the proceeds from those asset sales you heard mentioned earlier and a return on invested capital of 37% last year. So very strong year, that's all great. 2015 was a good year too. So we're pleased to show continued improvement both in growth and in margin improvements.
And we entered 2017, we're about a little over 6 weeks in now, with a much tighter strategic focus than we've ever had before with a lot of momentum and a lot of wind at our back. So we're excited. We're optimistic about 2017 and moving forward. If you've been around for a while like most of you have, you've heard us talk about our financial principles. I want to spend a few moments of those.
We think they're still incredibly relevant. Think about these as a set of guardrails or a set of parameters that we use to guide our long term thinking. And it informs our discipline and talks about how we measure the different parts of our financial planning, the different levers that we have. You've heard us talk about the first one a lot and it's the hardest one to achieve. Our first financial principle is to grow revenue organically at 10% or better, hardest one to deliver, hardest one to achieve.
We've delivered this 4 out of the last 10 years,
4 out
of the last 8 if you drop off the worst recession year and the year that we went through the ratable transition, but it's still a difficult metric to achieve and we get that. But we consider it and we still think it's relevant, more about that going forward. But just a word here, when you think about and look at the opportunity we see with the available customers in the addressable market, we think it's reasonable of us to achieve this goal and reasonable of you to expect it over the longer term. More about how we plan to do that in a second. Margin expansion just basically means that we grow our expenses at a slower rate than our revenue.
We think this is an element of good management discipline and we're committed to this over the long term. I know sometimes people think about, will we get to a point where this plateaus or is there a ceiling? I can tell you there's not one we see in our planning horizon and we just think it's an element of good management to prioritize the $3,000,000,000 plus we will spend in 2017 on those items that are the most directly connected to the priorities and the initiatives that we've outlined and to achieving customer growth. So this is about prioritization. It's about discipline.
We have plenty of money to spend, but we're committed to delivering this. We've delivered it 8 out of the last 10 years. And as we'll talk about it in a moment, our guidance for 2017 shows another big step in that direction. When you think about how we allocate or how we use the cash internally, it's always the first priority for us to invest internally in ways to grow the business. Some of these are show up on the expense side of our income statement.
Sometimes they show up on the revenue side through lower prices, promotional discounting, things like that. You'll see more we'll talk more about that in a second when we get to revenue per customer. But we always want to invest in the business first. But we do hold ourselves to the rigor of having an internal rate of return, 15% or better, that's where the benchmark where we start over a 5 year period. And we want to be realistic about the investments we make in our business.
Are they going to generate a return? Are they going to generate some goodness? And that's the bar that we set. I think acquisitions will continue to be a part of the way we build out our product roadmap, maybe the way we enter new markets. And so when you look at the tech tuck ins, the tech in technology and talent tuck ins we've done over the last couple of years, I think that's added a lot to our capability and capacity.
My guess, my expectation would be that we would continue to do those 2017 beyond. And as you know, the company generates a lot of cash flow, roughly in line with our operating income in a normal year. And we usually have cash to return either through share repurchase or through dividend increases like we've already announced for 2017. That's going to remain a critical part of our capital allocation toolbox. And then finally, our 4th goal just talks about making sure we have a strong balance sheet, which means that we can invest even in times of economic slowdown or take advantage of opportunities that may come along, even if they come along at some point in the cycle during the year, we have cash and we have the ability to do that.
Now you've heard a lot about total addressable market, a lot about customers. This is what's driving the revenue growth that we've guided for 2017 and what will drive beyond that. In a nutshell, what you see here is that we expect our active small business customers, those who pay us something every year, to roughly double over the next 3 years. And we expect the number of consumer tax returns and small business tax returns in the U. S.
That are completed with our software to grow by a third. And so it's all about customer count. It's all about getting deeper penetration into these addressable markets that Brad and Sasan and Dan and Susie have outlined for you. We get those customers' counts coming in. That's what's really driving the revenue growth.
Here's our revenue per customer 2015 versus 2016 and our expectations longer term. QBO both in the U. S. And outside the U. S.
Was roughly flat year to year. This time last year, we told you we expected a slight increase in ARPC in the U. S. What's changed from our plans is that we anticipated more of our customers, more of the growth in QBO would be desktop converts, people who came over from desktop at a higher ARPC. The good news is we exceeded our customer expectations both in desktop and in online, both in terms of customer counts and revenue.
So you see improved revenue per customer in terms of desktop. You know desktop did fine in 2016, but it caused some contraction in our ARPC, slight amount of contraction in the U. S. And about flat worldwide. No matter what business unit you think about at Intuit or which initiative or time that we are very good at monetizing customers once they get the benefit from the products we deliver, once they get accustomed to them, once they get in the franchise, we've been very good at moving up with them, up the product lineup SKU or selling them additional features and services.
So job 1 for us and you know we're going to have a good future when you see customer growth outpacing revenue growth in the short run, about flat with QBO in 2016 U. S. And outside. QuickBooks Self Employed had a nice increase in average revenue per customer in 2016. But as you can see, we think price is a critical lever and promotions are critical lever to get the customer growth we want worldwide in 2017 beyond.
So we're not building our plans assuming additional expansion in ARPC and QuickBooks Self Employed. We actually have it going flat to down. And so all those on a weighted average basis show the average revenue per customer in QuickBooks Online Ecosystem down slightly 2016 to 2015 2015 to 2016. That's what we talked about last year. That's what we told you to expect.
And again, it's a great thing. Remember that our online ecosystem revenue grew 25 percent in 2016 on a customer growth base of 41% and our plans for 2017 beyond show those accelerating rates from where we were in 2016. I mentioned desktop already and you've seen our revenue per customer in consumer tax and in pro tax being roughly the same. The theme is very consistent I think in all these revenue per customer projections is that we're looking for customer acquisition to really fuel our revenue growth. We don't want price to be a barrier.
We don't want that to be a reason for non adoption in the short run. More on that in a second. Overall, three points to make from this picture, from this chart. No surprise to you, our online ecosystem both in tax and small business is what's driving our revenue growth over the next few years. Our plans now show that we'll be 60% of our total revenue would come from QBO and from TurboTax Online by 2019.
Notice the blue panel on the top, this is the QuickBooks Online ecosystem. And as you can see, the widening of this layer on the very top just demonstrates the acceleration that we expect in our online ecosystem growth over the next few years. The third point to make here is that desktop will remain a big part of our revenue stream for the foreseeable future. These are great customers. We love them.
They're very profitable. They're very loyal to our product base and we hope to help many of them convert to online services whenever they're ready and whenever they come to us. So it's going to be a big part of our revenue stream, profitability and cash flow for the next 3 years. All right. Let's talk about what we do with the money that we make.
You've seen this chart before. I've revised it slightly to show every line but the bottom one on a GAAP basis. And I did that for a very simple reason. We're tending to think more about our goals and targets internally with including stock based compensation. No surprise to you, but equity is a bigger and bigger component for recruiting and for retaining employees and it's an expense just like everything else we do.
So the goals targets we have here, this is for 2016, are shown on a GAAP basis. So don't get distracted by that, but that's the change. The point is when you look at how we think about our margin management going forward, our gross margins are still in the mid-80s. We don't really see that changing. We don't see pressure on that over the planning horizon.
So we think that's our assumption is that's going to stay about the same. But all three of our major expense categories, sales and marketing, research and development and our general administrative costs, we think should grow more slowly than our top line revenue over the next few years. And so we think there are opportunities there to reallocate what we're already spending, to put some discipline and curbs in place internally to make us move money to the most critical resources and to the most critical initiatives and measure ourselves against driving our cost growth more slowly than our revenue growth. And so we think there's opportunity to continue to deliver margin expansion and to continue to invest for the future. If you followed us for a number of years, we increased sales and marketing a couple of years ago when we began our global expansion.
It's at a level now where we think we can continue to grow and expand and make the investments we need both in sales and marketing and in research and development, but still at a level that provides some margin expansion going forward. You've heard us talk about getting margins back in the mid-30s after we go through the business model transition. If you look at our guidance at the mid-four of the guidance, it's about 34% for 2017, which is a point of improvement over 2016. We'll see how the year plays out. But the critical thing there to be aware of and to remember is we do think we have opportunity there, continue to invest and do things for the long term, but continue to meet our second financial principle.
Sometimes people ask me of all these priorities, how do you decide and how do you prioritize where to invest money and how do you make those decisions? Brad Staff had a long planning session back in May of last year, where we brought all of our ideas, all of our initiatives to the table and four critical themes emerged. And you can see them here and you can see these are how we think about prioritization of where we spend money and how where we invest. The first one gets to delivering the customer benefit. You've heard a lot of conversation about that today.
I want to assure you that we use that as a way to decide how to allocate money and where to invest. We look for things that are delivering the customer benefit, things that are nurturing network effect platform opportunities within the company. And so that's a top of the list. Certainly anything that grows and causes our QBO subscriber base to thrive is critically important. So that's a key priority for us.
You should know that we're continuing to address tech debt. We're investing in internal infrastructure, back office systems and processes that customers don't necessarily see directly, but it impacts our ability to serve them and impacts our ability to deliver things to market quickly. And so at the same time, I think we're delivering good operating leverage and good operating performance. We're investing in the infrastructure and inside. So no deferred maintenance build up here.
And then finally, as you've heard already, privacy and security is job 1. They get the money they need to build the things they need to keep our products and services safe for our customers. Here's another look at the money we spend of the roughly $3,500,000,000 we'll spend in 2017. About a third of it is directly related to product development type activities and 80% of that is directly specifically allocated to the priorities that Brad outlined for you at the beginning of the day. This is a chart we share with our employees and it's kind of a say do thing we do internally to be sure that our spending is really matching up with the things we said were important in our strategy deck and our strategy slides.
You can also see from this without seeing the actual number that we've got big increases built into our 3 year plan and we plan to continue to invest and build product development internally. One more word on this. In addition to the monies that we had allocated across the company, Brad came in and made some additional allocations of investment dollars in 2017 and beyond and some critical things that we want to focus on, things like our tax platform, security and data, our agent tools and infrastructure experience. So, we look for areas where the business was already allocating a lot of money to those and where additional investments would help us accelerate the answer and get those problems solved faster. Slides about asset capital allocation.
I've talked already about how we use our cash, first of all, to fund internal growth and development, But we've had a lot of cash to return to shareholders. We initiated a dividend back in 2012. We've doubled it over the next 5 years. We've announced a 13 percent increase for 2017. So we think that's a great tool for us to use in terms of capital allocation and you'll continue to see it.
Share repurchase has also worked for us really well, and I'm personally proud of the fact that over the last 5 years, we've generated and returned to investors 130% of the internal cash flow that we've generated about $5,600,000,000 Clearly, the proceeds we had from the asset sales in 2016 helped with that. But that just shows you, I think, that there's no incentive for us to hold a lot of cash or a lot of liquidity on our balance sheet. If we can't use it in the business profitably, I think we've been good stewards of turning that back to shareholders. This is just another breakdown of where the capital allocation dollars went by different sources. We've talked a lot about the increase in property we had in 2016.
So you see an increase there in our capital expenditures. We do have a debt maturity scheduled in the 1st calendar quarter of 2017 and we made provisions in our cash plans for the year to retire that. We'll see how that plays out as the year goes on and see how market conditions develop. The other comment I would make on this slide is that if you look at the share count we've guided to you for 2017, you'll see that our cash allocation for share repurchase in 2017 is probably more likely to be around the average you've seen for the 5 year period. So think of something more like the 5 year average.
Certainly, we don't want to anticipate having the cash flow from the asset sales we had in 2016 for available for share repurchase in 2017. So somewhere in the $1,000,000,000 $1,200,000,000 range ought to be about right depending on what happens as the year goes on. You've seen our guidance already. We've talked a lot about this. Clearly, our revenue guidance is not at the 10% level for 2017.
We've made a very conscious decision here to really lean into customer growth and not to get too move too fast or too far on price and on monetization. We think we have those levers. We think we know how to use them quite well, but we think it can also be a barrier for people to adopt and use our products. You heard Dan talk about the tremendous success we have with Absolute Zero and getting people to try a product. And so we have intentionally invested in the revenue line and getting customers in, in 2017 and not try to go too far too fast with revenue growth.
C. C. Also mentioned the ProConnect plan for 2017. This is another area where we've actually guided a slight decrease there as we want to get the product and the experience and the OneIntuit account platform right before we really lean into price increases there. On our operating income slide, just a comment here.
I know that our GAAP EPS guidance looks funny. You have to remember that we had about $0.65 a share in 2016 that showed up in GAAP results only below the operating income line as a result of the asset sales we had last year. On a non GAAP basis, on an operating income line, you can see that we are delivering the margin expansion operating leverage that we've talked about there with our operating income growing a little faster than our revenue line. And we expect to continue to reduce the share count, which gives us an EPS growth in the mid teens along with dividend growth at 13%. So I think a very good balance for the year between investing and delivering good results in the short run.
And that leads me to my final slide. Brad talked about our true north metrics, solving for all stakeholders short and long. And I think we have a plan for 2017 that is right down the fairway that clearly delivers that. It has investment dollars in technology and expansion in sales and marketing, but it also provides some discipline to continue to provide operating leverage and margin, good growth in earnings per share and dividend. And at this point, we expect our return on invested capital for 2017 to be close to 50%.
So we're expecting a good year. I hope you can tell we're excited about it. We do think we have a momentum at our back. And now I'm going to bring up Brad to facilitate your questions. Thank you.
Thank you, buddy. Nice job. Thank you. All right. We're at that magic moment of the day.
Just to put a bow around what you've heard this morning, I know that we are famous or infamous, potentially notorious providing a lot of data that comes at you at a velocity that's hard to consume, But we often get feedback later that that data came in handy when we get the chance to kind of sit back and reflect and reread it in our own personal time. So if you had to take something out today, what I hope you take out of it is adapt and accelerate. We think about this company in decades. And if you go back to the time we began 33 years ago, we adapted from DOS to Windows. We adapted from Windows to the World Wide Web.
We adapted from the World Wide Web to cloud and mobile computing. And if
you go back and look at
the history, there is a transformational period of about 36 months where the company is retooling its technology, catching the next wave of growth and then riding higher. And we have now worked through that 3 to 4 year period between fiscal year 2012 2016 and as we look ahead, we see the next chapter of growth. It is about deeply personalized experiences using data and machine learning that makes tasks literally go away whether it's taxes or accounting. It's about starting to operate now as an ecosystem with indispensable connections. It's about using the mobility platforms with new interfaces such as chatbots and voice and continuing to ensure that we protect and secure our our research and conjecture, but actually end market proof.
And we have confidence as we look ahead that we have the opportunity to deliver on the things that Neil just talked about. So that's the summary. Somebody wrote an article over the summer that obviously caught my eye. It came through the web crawler. Why is Intuit not dead yet?
Now
you come out of imagine I was interested in reading that article.
The good news is the next sentence is because they've had the courage to continuously disrupt themselves which many companies don't do. And I really feel good about the humility that Scott bred into this company 33 years ago and all the leaders before us and after us will continue to do to reimagine ourselves along the way. So with that being said, happy to take any questions you would like to talk about. Right upfront, here we go. We'll get the microphone to you.
Hey, Brad. Brent, Phil.
Hey, Brad.
Yes.
Two big questions I think everyone has on the self employed sector. It's the majority of your TAM and then international. How do you crack the code on both those because they're the keys that they came in, if you will, for a lot of the components of the QBO?
They are. Thank you, Brent. Well, I think first of all, QBO U. S. Still has a lot of headroom.
Someone was asking me earlier of the 20 some million prospects you have in the U. S. Sort of what's the ceiling? And I said, well, if you figure the numbers between $12,000,000 $14,000,000 that could be using QBO, forget QBO ES. And we have a little over $1,000,000 now.
We've got a 10x growth rate just in QBO U. S. But non U. S. You clearly start to get into 100 of 1,000,000.
I mean, you get a QuickBooks Self Employed, the gig economy, which the forecasts are to be 40% on its way to 50% of the workforce across the globe in the next 10 years. Those are huge opportunities. It really comes down to 2 things. 1 is product market fit, The importance of us making sure we understand in those countries that we have nailed the last mile that Sasan talked about. And then the same thing with QBSC is making sure we're delivering the benefit that the customer cares most about, which is today separating their personal from their business expense, helping them know what tax obligations they have because they thought they were just doing a little job.
The government now considers them a small business. They have to file quarterly taxes and they have no idea and we want to keep them out of trouble. So we feel good that we're getting product market fit. The second thing after that is how will you build durable advantage so you can sustain growth. And this is where we're trying to connect this ecosystem.
So outside the U. S, we're building out the QBO ecosystem beyond QBO. We're looking to make sure we have accountants who use the product using the QBOA platform, making sure we introduce products like self employed. And on the earnings call, we mentioned that we had launched it recently and we have it in the U. K.
And we're launching it in Australia and you'll hear it come to other countries sooner. And that helps accountants help their clients be successful and that will accelerate our growth rate. So those are really the 2 pieces. It is truly about product market fit that solves the important problem for the customer and then unlocking the ecosystem so they collectively get value from working with each other which allows us to build a moat. And that moat takes time to build, but is also incredibly hard to break into.
If you look at the United States as a case study, there are very notable names who have come after the Intuit franchise a half a dozen times over the past 3 decades. And the reason why they haven't been successful was not the technology, it was the moat. It was the ecosystem that prevented them from coming in and that's the thing we're investing in now. So those are really the 2 pieces Brent. Right here.
All right.
On the other side.
You let me know and I will look that way. I've got lights blinding me here, blinded by the lights, ELO,
For anybody who was in my generation. So does it make it better, standing up?
There we go, Kash.
So blinded, hopefully not. One of the slides that Neil presented, I think you mentioned doubling of the small business customer base or at least on an eyeball chart, it does look like 2,800,000 subs, including desktop going to 5.6. If that's true, then we're talking about significant acceleration in on the QBO side, because desktop has been hovering at 1.1, 1.2. So if I just keep it flat line, I should we should see doubling of the QBO base between fiscal 2017 fiscal 2019 from 2.2 roughly to 4.4 etcetera. What is the mistake I'm making with my math?
Well, we love the fact that you grabbed the protractor and looked at it because this is one of the things Neil said, what if we don't have a gauge, but we actually show the line, you think they'll take the number and figure it out? But he did say doubling the QuickBooks space and about a third of tax customers, right?
So it's QBO
and it's desktop customers who
buy a product from us and your $2,800,000 number is right for the starting point.
Right. And so to answer your question, there isn't anything you're missing. That's actually what we have in our 3 year plans that we have signed up for with the Board and we fundamentally have a reason to believe. And that's why as we put together the plan for fiscal year 2017, we recognize today if we keep QBO subs growing north of 40 and the ecosystem revenue growing 25 to 30 that we will not only be able to achieve what we've provided in guidance, but it will build the foundation for the future. We think it's capability to accelerate.
So Sasan talked about this. I talked about it. I think we have more opportunity outside the U. S. Than our current 45% growth rate.
So we're doubling down on product market fit, which will accelerate that. QBSE is not only getting more penetration into the U. S. Where it grew 3x. We just introduced it in the U.
K. We're introducing it in Australia and it's coming to other countries. So as we continue to open up TAM and get the product in, you will see that growth rate accelerate. And I know we have the other sort of double edged sword of desktop. We love our desktop customers.
This year they grew 8%. We have tried, raised the price, give them incentives. Today they don't move not because of features. 14% of them said I'm not moving to the cloud because of features. The other 86% said, hey, I'm just not comfortable yet.
And so we want to work with them and with their accountants to help them get comfortable. So that base isn't going anywhere. That's a great base to build off of while we accelerate QBO and accelerate QBSE. And that's what will lead to the expansion in the small business customers. That's really the math behind the math.
Okay. Brad? Yes.
I've got the mic over here. Actually a specific tax question. On I think Dan made the statement that humans will play a greater role in tax prep and it seems like or it seems like you're upping your commitment to working with accounts and so forth. It would seem like from a tech perspective, things are going the other way that tax is a business process that there's rules and algorithms and so forth that could be applied. So what's driving your view of needing to be more of a human business and involving accountants and so forth?
It would seem like we're maybe at the point now where that 57 could start to shrink with generational and technology factors.
Yes, it's a wonderful question. Let me start with we are truly indifferent because we have do the nation's taxes that include human assist and technology. And so we do 30,000,000 returns through CPAs who use our software and then we do more than that through TurboTax. There is a secular tailwind that no one can argue with. We've been able to lay it out.
The IRS has been able to lay it out, which is technology is making it easier. So certainly, the do it yourself category has been growing faster, while the assisted has been flat. But when you deconstruct the assisted, it's a tale of 2 cities. The H and R Block and the tax stores out there, they're one category and then the other are the firms. The tax stores have actually been fighting to stay even and the Pro segment's been up slightly.
And so we do believe there will be a place for human assist as well as do it yourself. And the key is we have both assets. And how do you reach that conclusion? How many of us just by a show of hands and please humor me on this, how many of us believe we could push a lawnmower? Raise your hand.
Now honestly, how many of us mow our own lawns? We have other things to do with our life. That's how many people view taxes. And so what we want to do is say, look, how do we help use technology with the human beings that are out there for the people who don't want to bother and then bring those 2 assets together to help everyone get their taxes done and help grow our franchise. That's the role that we believe, the human assist will play.
Okay. So that's why we think it's important. Right here, Brett. Go ahead. Hey, Raimo.
Raimo Antrim from Barclays.
As you think about as you become more a platform on the QBO side, how do you think about the attach rates not the attach rates, but the attach of certain things. Think about payment. So payment Square is doing a really good job and it's going to blink into your system. And there are PayPal and other systems as well. So at what point do you kind of call it a day on payment or just kind of think about other monetization models there rather than just to kind of compete but cooperate at the same time?
Yes. So I think it steps back to the first thing we had to do 3 years ago when we made the decision to become an open platform, it has the courage to allow everyone work with our platform and that holds the bar on us to say, look, we've got to have the highest quality products or they will choose an alternative solution. But the good news in all that is if it works with QBO, it continues to build dependency on QBO as the operating system behind small business. So right off the bat, we were willing to do that. But we stepped back and we did a payment strategy and we said, let's look at small business payments across the country.
And what we said is there were about a third of small businesses that operate with a physical point of sale system and they need to have a point of sale system and they take payments and then there are 2 thirds that operate on wheels. They mow lawns, they paint houses, they clean pools, they send invoices. In this 1 third over here who have point of sale systems, you can name all the really good compelling innovative companies out there, Intuit being one of many, who are well resourced with deep pockets and they are pouring in the competitive juice there. And we said, look, we don't have a durable competitive advantage today in that space, but we don't want to create friction in the small business office. So let's open it up and allow all those parties to work with QuickBooks.
What's the benefit? If a QBO customer attaches a product like Square, QBO's retention goes up 10 points. Right off the bat, we benefit. The other side is the 2 thirds of all the payments that are happening that are invoice based, service based businesses and we produce more invoices than SAP and Oracle combined. So we've been leaning into that part and that's where we do believe we have a moat, a source of durable competitive advantage.
And so we believe by opening up the platform for the point of sale players who are good partners to us and solve important problems and putting our energy here, we have the opportunity to accelerate the collective ecosystem. And that's really been our payment strategy. So it comes down to a choice of do you have a source of durable competitive advantage? And if so, that's where you put your energy and where you don't, make sure you're making an opportunity for the customer to still get the problem solved as an open platform. Okay.
See where they take the microphone here. Okay, got it.
Hey, Brett. Jesse Hulson at Goldman Sachs. You've talked a lot about data making it easier. You've talked a lot about the ecosystem. I'm curious where you think retention can go for QBO longer term as you start to layer in these different services in a broader system?
Yes. I would tell you, you start with the reality that 1 out of 2 small businesses fail in the 1st 5 years, 2 out of 3 fail in the 1st 10. We don't accept those odds. In fact, our whole mission is improve the odds of success for small businesses. And the more we do our job at that, the more able we are to push retention up.
So if you look at today the best in class small business providers and this is where it gets hard, you'll hear enterprise companies that sell to the mid market and above really good SaaS companies whose names you know and they'll talk about retention rates in the 90s. It's almost impossible to do that in small business because they're going out of business at a rate where about 12 percent is uncontrollable. Uncontrollable means you didn't do your job to make them successful. As a result, they went out of business and you lost the customer. So right now, our payroll products are in the mid-80s.
So we have a very strong sort of statement that says, hey, we know that retention at least for small business, so we can get it into the mid-80s. And as you've heard, we're in the high to mid to high 70s. So we still have that much opportunity, but the bigger game is the more successful we are at keeping them in business and preventing them from failing, then the more opportunity we have to expand our retention. And that's the goal that we're focused on. Okay, got it.
Thanks. Ross MacMillan from RBC. So a year ago, maybe a little over a year ago, you obviously made some disposals and you sort of stepped back from M and A. The platform or the portfolio rather now is clearer. You've got the tax business and the small business ecosystem.
And in light of Neil's comments about achieving 10% growth, which is still the kind of plan, I'm just curious what your thoughts are around M and A now that you've kind of moved a little bit through this transition and whether you think there might be things you could add to the portfolio to sort of accelerate the growth?
Thanks, Ross. I can. As you know, as you look back over the company's history, we've been a serial acquirer. At the same time, we've been willing to step back and score ourselves and sit down and say what's been our track record relative to the business case we presented when we got an acquisition approved with the Board? And did it produce that 15% rate of return that Neil and I talk about when our financial principles are communicated?
Unpacked that when we shared that with you back then. We just updated it again and we're taking our board through it here in October. And I'll tell you from 2012 to 2016 we've done 25 acquisitions. We've done a handful of minority investments and we've done 7 divestitures. And then we have unpacked all of those with the business case we presented to the board and what we communicated to you when we said, hey, we've made these acquisitions.
And I will tell you we've got some very clear lessons learned. We are better than honestly I thought because I kind of sit into the pain of, oh, we slipped by 30 days and this is a quad on time. And so I remember all those little pain points. When you step back and look at it in total, we have gotten good at technology and talent tuck ins. Data scientists, people that we need to come in and help with mobile experiences, buying lettuce, which was a technology capability for inventory, bring it into the company, those kinds of assets.
Where we haven't historically done well is a bolt on business, a bolt on business like Demandforce. And the reason why is because we didn't take enough time upfront to capitalize on being an open platform and actually form the partnership first, have the reason to believe that you actually see customers attaching the product. And as a result, you have a pretty good idea of what 1 plus 1 will equal. We instead have sort of done it based upon more of a hypothesis and then we come in, we bring it in and we try to execute our way to an outcome. So what we're doing now is we're using the open platform similar to what force.com does at Salesforce and others and we're saying let's have partnerships.
If they come in and there's a really accelerating opportunity there then we can make a decision whether it's better for us and the partner to be one company or to actually work in a partnership. So we will continue to do acquisitions, but what you should hear from us is we're wiser now than we were in 2012. We now know which ones we know we need to lean into and which ones we need to actually prove in a different way through this open platform approach. Thank you. Okay.
All right. Thank you.
Hey, Brad. I'm Yoon Kim, Green Capital. So it seems like the increase in the average revenue per customer is a key metric or key factor in driving your revenue growth for your small business group from 10% today to the upwards of 10% to 15% range long term, right? So the question is, when do you expect that ARPC to increase? I think right now we're expecting that to be flat to slightly down.
And then when does that when that does happen, do you expect the margin to actually improvement to accelerate because all the attach and pricing, which is part of that metric should be higher margin business?
Right. Thank you for the question. Let me start with ARPC and Neil walked through this. We try to articulate our principles to you the way we talk about them inside and it is we believe the number one opportunity is to expand our TAM to grow our categories. The second is to grow customers.
The third from that is to grow our share which ultimately leads to the 4th which is ARPC. And one of the things that I can honestly say is having been in the small business and consumer business in this company for 13 years now, the biggest fear we have in the company is low end disruption, someone who comes in and disrupts you from the bottom. We've had lots of competitors come in from the top, big companies with great brand names who say they're going to start serving the small business market and I can assure you it's a swamp. If you drive a big tank into the swamp, you cannot get it out. This is all about a this is not a handful of quarters, it's a bag full of pennies.
And so for us, it's really important for us to understand that it is about the velocity of customer growth and not ARPC. And so the way we get that 10% to 15% growth is expanding TAM and getting lots of customers. And you got to keep in mind the customers we serve. We're serving now 70% of Americans who struggle paycheck to paycheck as families and small businesses who fail 1 out of 2. So it's not like they have really deep pockets.
Our opportunity is to go in and solve an important problem well and get them to stay with us, which creates retention. And then as they get a little more successful, they may have additional needs and we earn the right to sell them another product. And that's really our model. And so ARPC, honestly, we talk about it more externally than we ever talk about it in our operating reviews or with the Board. It's not to say we don't actually know that it's an important lever, but it's an important lever after we've actually got the velocity going on customer growth and then we earn the right to solve additional problems.
That's why we wanted to show you, for example, the TurboTax chart that says, look, we know how to do this. We went free when it was $29 a return in 2,005 and the margins were in the high 50s. We're still free in 2016 at $49 a return and the margin is 65%. We can monetize, but the first thing we want to do is grow category growth. So I'm answering your question in a way that basically comes back to the way you get to 10% to 15% customer growth.
Even if ARPC is flat, we can achieve that. But we also know we're improving retention by attaching third party software products. We're focused on 1st use so that payroll and payments attach rates continue to grow. And we know that over time that ARPC will get healthier and then that will add up to an even better outcome and that does expand margins over time. Okay.
Hi, Brad. Nandan Amladi from Deutsche Bank. A question on ProConnect. You laid out a pretty broad vision of bridging together the one place and the tax and small business and so on. That model obviously works has the potential to work in the U.
S. Market. But as we look internationally, particularly for QuickBooks Online, how does ProConnect scale outside the geographically outside the U. S? And how dependent is the QuickBooks Online franchise expansion on that ProConnect being able to scale outside?
It's a great question. If you separate ProConnect's tax product from ProConnect's accountant relationship and right now they're working with QBO to have this QuickBooks Online for accountant becomes the place. The place does a few things. It helps them manage the books of all the clients. It helps them manage their practice.
And then at the end they can push a button and go into tax software. Today we can actually do that in the U. S. End to end because we have tax software. We can also do it in Canada because we have tax software.
We've not yet declared that we're going to take our tax software outside the U. S. But as you saw, one of the investments we're making is a common tax platform, which is being rewritten to be global ready. So we could go into other countries. In the meantime, the good news is QBOA goes global with QBO, so you can still manage your clients' book, you can still manage your practice and we are working so that you have the ability to push the button and go into a third party tax software and be able to still save time for the accountant, which creates the same net effect for us, which is accountants wanting to recommend more people to use QBO.
We just aren't monetizing that piece beyond what we would do in the U. S. But that's not something that we aren't thinking about as we look down the road. So QBO ProConnect is going with QBO in all the countries. It's just the tax component right now is just staying in the U.
S. And Canada until we get our platform rewritten and then we'll make the decision if we want to go someplace else. Does that help? Great question. Thank you.
Brad? Yes.
Thanks. Hey, Brad. Scott Schneeberg from Oppenheimer.
Sounds like
there's going to be some heightened or at least a perception heightened competition from the assisted and tax this year, perhaps in the area of financial products. So part 1 of the question is if you could address what you anticipate there from a competitive dynamic, maybe things you're considering yourself. And then 2, piggybacking on another question earlier, it sounds like you're going with a little bit more of addressing the assisted first things Neil mentioned in his presentation of agents and the first things Neil mentioned in his presentation of agents and just curious about what type of margin impact we might see in TurboTax? That would be the second part.
Yes, it's a great question. Let me start first with, we anticipate an incredibly intense competitive tax season every year. We have a lot of respect for our competition. They make us better. As a result, everybody wins because the customer gets a better product.
And I know all those players, I know them personally and I suspect that they will come back with a very good game plan. As a result, we haven't been resting on our laurels. Last year, we introduced almost 2 dozen new product innovations in TurboTax. The average year would have 6. And this year's velocity, we plan to have even more because we've been refactoring the technology and moving quickly in a way that's not easily matched.
Competition can't match it. The second thing is price. How do you get more aggressive than free? And so we have done free, free, absolute 0, free fed, free state. So it's going to be hard to do it on price.
And so ultimately for us what we've been trying to do is say, okay, then what will be the opportunity? And our opportunity is to make sure that we are doing a better job with less effort to get the taxes done, to get the maximum refund without any data input. And we feel like we've got a multiyear head start because we've been talking about this as a multiyear refactoring of our technology. Now Scott, I want to talk about the assisted piece for a minute because I know over the years we have tried things. We've tried human assist.
We've tried some different things and they haven't worked and we hired a bunch of agents up. That is not what we're doing here. In fact, if you just think back to what we did last year, we introduced a new model that enabled us to connect humans and technology in a seamless experience. You'll hear more about that as we get closer to tax season, but it is not about hiring up a bunch of people that creates human capital. It's about tapping the people we already have in a different way and having them provide a much better experience for customers.
And by the way, that experience ends up making it more efficient for everybody. And so I think you're going to see not an increased investment that brings margins down, you're going to see an increased investment that actually helps us accelerate the velocity. Okay.
Hi, Michael Nemeroff, Credit Suisse. Just building on some of the previous questions on the ARPC, it seems as if the growth longer term is going to come mostly from the SE subscriber, which has the lowest ARPC currently. Assuming what are the other products or you're assuming that there's going to be attach at the SE level when right now there are no other products to attach. So longer term, the leverage in the model is going to come from attached products that you don't have currently or plan to add. Can you give us a sense of what those products could be or would look like over the next couple of years after you've got those customers on the SE side?
Yes. In the United States, for example, right now, QuickBooks Self Employed, a third of them attached to TurboTax and signed up for a monthly subscription. For all the years we've been in TurboTax, every year the tax team says we've got to find a way to have people want to talk to us more than just January through April. But anytime we call them, we say we're TurboTax, I don't want to think about taxes now. But now the ability to have QuickBooks Self Employed in TurboTax, you have the ability on a daily basis to swipe right for personal, swipe left for business, hit the button, do your quarterlies and then ultimately file your taxes either with TurboTax or with an accountant.
So that's one big attach and that applies to the U. S. And Canada. Then if you think about it down the road, there are additional things that self employed customers will need. And so for example, we have the ability to do mileage tracking and some other pieces.
You saw the demo out there. And so there will be other ways for us over time to look for ways to solve additional problems for self employed and it may be through partnerships and revenue share, it may be us bringing our own products. A great example is right now connecting with accountants. The ability for us to actually have accountant solutions and then have them using QBSC and we see ways to do that and create more value for Intuit as well. So right now the big attach rate is doing taxes, but there is a roadmap of other problems we think we can solve for the self employed and for those who actually work with self employed as contractors that we think will create more monetization opportunities.
Okay. Other questions? Thank you.
Samir Khosha with Deutsche Bank. So continuing on the ARPC track, when you balance growth and margins, are there any particular thresholds you look at for specific metrics like KRPC? But slight down is okay, but 5% or 10% or 20% or 30% down is maybe too much. Are there any metrics?
Yes. So it's interesting. The first thing we hold ourselves to is the financial principles, to grow double digit organically, to grow revenue faster than expense because we're not the government, we don't get a chance to run a deficit unless we can see a real long term yield that we have a high reason to believe and then we would be willing to consider that, but we typically are able to manage that threshold that gives us margin expansion. Then you got a business model transition that's happening now. When you move from desktop where you're pressing CDs, shipping them on pallets, selling them in retail stores and you're moving to the cloud with virtualized machines and eventually public cloud, you have a lot more efficiency over time.
And so you have a natural tailwind and a great example is TurboTax this past year was as aggressive as you've ever seen us, absolute 0 for a long period of time and expanded the margins from 63 and some change to 65. And so and that's with a lot of aggressive free. So we have a benefit of a business model transition. When we get down into ARPC, it always starts with the principles of are we actually growing faster than the competitors? Are we gaining share?
And then do we see additional problems we can solve? Or are we adding enough value that we can take price? And so those are the 2 levers we look at and we tend to look at it on an LTV to CAC basis and that helps inform our ARPC. So are we acquiring customers efficiently and then are we able to monetize those customers over time? So every country right now has an LTV to CAC target based upon where they are in their life cycle.
We know what our LTV to CAC is in the United States, but we always start with growing category, growing customers, growing share and then ultimately looking for monetization. So the short answer to your question is no, we don't have a one size fits all. We do have it on a product by product and country by country basis. Okay. I can't introduce myself in less than 2 minutes.
I certainly can't answer a question in less than 5.
Thank you, Brett. This is Keith Ellis from Morgan Stanley. Thank you. When we think about the desktop product and expectations for FY 2017, We've gone through a cycle where you guys tried to increase price a lot to drive people to QuickBooks Online that had very serious impacts on the desktop business. You pulled back on the pricing and it seems like it unlocked a lot of units into FY 2016.
How do we think about the underlying level
of demand as you head into FY 2017? It sounds like you're looking to increase price a little bit. How do we know we don't go back to sort of the bigger impacts that we see on desktop on a going forward basis?
Yes. I'll start with a little self deprecation here. It's not that I shoot myself in the foot, it's how quickly I reload. And so I will say this, we will make new mistakes, but we won't tend to make the same mistakes twice. And so we learned that there was a price ceiling on desktop, which all it did was force the customer's repurchase cycle out and that was not a good thing for the customer or the accountants and certainly not good for us.
So we've now figured out what is that sweet spot in terms of promotional price and the price for desktop. But that doesn't apply all the way up and down the line. QuickBooks Enterprise for us right now, which is 115,000 units and those are good 7 $1,000 plus units and it's growing fast. That is a third cheaper than the next closest alternative in the market. So we have places where we can capture price strategically.
And then there's other places where we know we slow down the velocity of repurchase and it doesn't make sense. So when you aggregate it up, Keith, what we're saying right now is we think desktop units will be flat to maybe slightly down next year. We think the revenue actually will be up a little bit in the desktop base and that kind of is the result of the decisions I just walked through, which is let's not go back and try to raise price again because we know what that leads to. Let's go run some other tests and see if there's different ways to get those customers happy. Neil, anything you would add there?
Did I cover the desktop piece? That's right. Okay. Any other questions? I want to thank you so much for sitting with us today for the great questions you asked both in the hallway and here.
Hopefully this information was useful and helpful. And as always, reach out to us if you have any other questions. I can honestly say we're super excited with our fiscal year 2016 results and we are incredibly confident and encouraged about FY 2017 and beyond. This is a new chapter for us and we're looking forward to just being able to match our words and our music and stand with you next year and say, is what we were able to deliver. Thank you and we'll see you again soon.