Intuit's GoPayment mobile POS product has always offered merchants a bit more, well, credibility than some of its startup rivals. After all, Intuit is a $4 billion company built largely on selling solutions to small businesses — like its QuickBooks accounting software and TurboTax tax preparation tools. Today, the company announced a new point of sale product, QuickBooks Point of Sale 2013, that ties its GoPayment mPOS solution and QuickBooks together.

By combining the products into a single package, Intuit is offering the flexibility of accepting payments on a mobile device with the ability to load all those transactions into a tool that helps manage a business. Plus, the QuickBooks Point of Sale lets merchants scale their mobile point of sale solution, which is great since not every small business stays small forever or relies solely on a mobile phone as a payment terminal.

"With 10 years of point of sale experience, we understand the challenges small retailers face when trying to grow their business," said Chris Hylen, VP of Intuit’s payment solutions division. "By integrating QuickBooks Point of Sale 2013 with GoPayment, we’re liberating retailers from their cash registers so they can better serve their customers and ring up more sales both in the store and on the go."

Intuit, which already processes more than $20 billion annuallly, said the integration between the two products is consistent with a strategy to enable its 8 million small business customers to accept payments with GoPayment and other Intuit payment services. 

Like other mPOS solutions on the market, GoPayment offers a free app that comes with a card reader that plugs into the audio jack of an iOS or Android device. Merchants simply swipe a card to process payment. The app uses location-based services to add the correct sales tax and allows the merchant to email or text a receipt to the customer.

Now with the QuickBooks Point of Sale integration, inventory and pricing data can be automatically brought into the app, freeing the merchant from the tedious job of entering it manually. (Working on tiny mobile screens can be just as vexing for merhcants as it is for consumers.) Additonally, all that juicy sales and inventory data can be stored and analyzed later. The service also allows retailers with up to 20 locations to integrate GoPayment into their POS systems.

Intuit said its QuickBooks Point of Sale product also has a new simplified signup process and expedited account approval, meaning that merchants can be accepting payments within minutes. 

The expanded mPOS offering does come at a higher cost. QuickBooks Point of Sale 2013 software starts at $1,099.95, Intuit said. The discount rate, however, can be as low as 1.64 percent. (This compares to 2.7 percent for the GoPayment service on its own.)

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