Intuit plans to let go of its businesses including Quicken

Intuit announced its most recent quarterly report and surprised everyone when it said that it will sell Quicken, Demandforce and QuickBase but will keep TurboTax and other products.

The move will help the company with its goal to concentrate and invest in businesses that can help support their ecosystem and help them reach their business goals to become the operating system of small businesses success and to handle the US' and Canada's taxes.

Quicken was launched in 1984 as a desktop accounting program and is considered Intuit's major product. Demandforce and QuickBase are also among the company's varied software programs geared towards businesses. Three years ago, the company bought Demandforce for $423.5 million.

Quicken is a personal finance tool and Demandforce is a software program that can help provide better customer communications and marketing. QuickBase is a software tool that aids developers in creating applications.

The company wants to improve its growth by concentrating on its major businesses after it endured a difficult tax season for a popular tool. Recently, Intuit also experienced difficulties when it estranged a few customers by modifying some of their products' prices and tentatively stopping tax processing due to the service being used to file falsified returns.

Brad Smith, president and CEO of Intuit, said that the company plans to invest in areas that provide long-term payoff because they plan to prepare Intuit for revenue growth for the next fiscal year and for strong consumers.

The selloff will reduce revenues by $250 million and Intuit predicts that they will earn around 10 cents per share for the next fiscal year ending July. They also expect to earn $3.4 to $3.45 billion excluding items and $4.53 to $4.6 billion in revenue including items.

By the mid-90s, Quicken began to slow down in bringing profits but Intuit found ways to improve its marketability. By the year 2000, Quicken is said to have approximately 15 million users. However, the past fiscal year has been real slow for Intuit's core software tool.