Last week, Intuit announced a major expansion to their PayByCoin software, which allows Quickbooks customers to issue and pay invoices in Bitcoin with a single click. Previously, the software worked via an integration with Coinbase. Now, they’ve announced that their support is expanding to include BitPay, the other leading Bitcoin payment processor, and Coinbase’s primary competitor.

From the BitPay press release:

“Intuit’s addition of BitPay will allow over 700,000 businesses who use Intuit’s Quickbooks Online to accept bitcoin payments with the global leader in bitcoin payment processing. […] Both BitPay’s service and Intuit’s PayByCoin service are completely free, making bitcoin the cheapest and most convenient payment option for any business to receive payment.”

In order to get a better idea of what this change means for customers and where the service is going, we spoke to two Intuit developers, Manish Shah and Clinton Nielsen. Here’s what they had to say:

PayByCoin now supports both Coinbase and BitPay – competing services. What features or value does the new BitPay integration provide to the end user that Coinbase did not? Are there notable differences between the two platforms?

“Our goal is to help small businesses to start accepting bitcoin payment. By supporting both, Coinbase and BitPay, PayByCoin makes it easy for their existing customers to quickly enable bitcoin payment in invoices sent from QuickBooks Online.”

Bitcoin invoices have a few major advantages – internationality, low fees, no chargebacks, etc. Have you seen those advantages reflected in the industries that are quickest to adopt the technology?

“Since our initial launch we continue to see interest from small businesses who are early adopters and want to offer different payment options to their customers. We believe that more small businesses would start accepting bitcoin payments to benefit from the advantages as it becomes easier for their customers to acquire bitcoin.”

What’s it like developing Bitcoin software? How does it compare to using more traditional payment processing APIs?

“The development is similar to other integrations involving modern restful services. PayByCoin is a mashup of publicly available QuickBooks Online APIs and bitcoin payment processor APIs.”

What sort of adoption are you seeing from your PayByCoin product? Is it a major feature of the day to day business, or more of a preliminary experiment?

“Once activated, PayByCoin becomes an integral part of the business as all outgoing invoices accept bitcoin payments from their customers. We have seen a steady growth in the number of bitcoin enabled invoices created daily.”

What’s next for PayByCoin? Where do you guys see your service going over the next few years?

“PayByCoin is constantly evolving based on customer feedback. We will continue to focus on growing the number of small businesses activating PayByCoin feature by making it easy to accept and record bitcoin payments in QuickBooks.”

Bitcoin invoices are a great way to bring small businesses into the Bitcoin ecosystem, and a way to show off the advantages of the technology. We wish the Intuit team well, and can’t wait to see where they go from here.

Logo via Intuit’s Press Room