Tax software provider Intuit (Nasdaq: INTU) recently announced its first quarter earnings that surpassed market expectations. Despite the COVID crisis, Intuit has invested in small businesses, and the investment is paying off.

Intuit’s Financials

Revenues for the quarter increased 14% to $1.3 billion, surpassing the market’s expectations of $1.2 billion. On an adjusted basis, EPS was $0.94, surging past the market’s forecast of $0.38 for the quarter. Intuit expects this margin expansion to continue as it integrates the Credit Karma acquisition made earlier this year and sees further synergies in expenses.

For the quarter, Small Business and Self-Employed Group revenue grew 13% to $1.2 billion. Small Business Online Ecosystem revenue grew 24% and Consumer Group revenue grew 19% to $119 million.

Intuit expects to end the quarter with revenue growth of 8%-9% and an adjusted EPS of $1.31-$1.34. It expects to end the current year with revenues of $8.265-$8.415 billion with an adjusted EPS of $8.40-$8.55. The market was looking for revenues of $7.53 billion with an EPS of $7.57.

Intuit’s Product Growth

Intuit recently announced the launch of its integrated CRM and financial solution called HubSpot for QuickBooks. The offerings help businesses by accelerating sales cycles and allowing sales and finance teams to work together more efficiently. The solution provides a clear and more accurate view to businesses about their financial health. When a sale is closed, the offerings remove the tediousness of manually transferring information from a CRM into a financial management system by integrating all of the necessary information directly into Quickbooks.

The Quickbooks integration helps businesses with recognition of revenue. It helps improve cash flow by shortening the time from customer proposal to when the payment is received, ensures better accuracy by sending sales entries from HubSpot to the businesses books, and saves time by eliminating dual data entry. Together, Intuit and HubSpot will pursue joint activities that raise awareness of HubSpot for QuickBooks to attract new customers.

Recently, Intuit also released new enhancements to Intuit ProConnect, ProSeries, and Lacerte Tax that feature improvements for tax year. The enhancements are focused on helping professionals to work smarter and focus on clients. Some of the new features include the ability to take control of e-file permission, amend e-filed returns, save time with data entry and forms, and accelerate returns and database enhancements that deliver higher quality and reliability.

The market is pleased with Intuit’s growth within the SMB segment. The current COVID crisis has been particularly tough on the smaller businesses. But Intuit’s focus on the segment has delivered it strong results. Revenues from the Small Business segment grew 13% to $1.2 billion. While Intuit expects the growth in the segment to slow down to 8-10% growth for the year, it is hopeful that many QuickBooks indicators to be back to pre-pandemic levels in the coming quarters. Additionally, growth from the Online Ecosystem business will pick up and deliver over 30% growth in the year.

Its stock is trading at $347.69 with a market cap of $91.3 billion. It had soared to a high of $377.15 this month, but had fallen to a 52-week low of $187.68 in March due to the crisis.