WHERE THEY CAME FROM
In 1983, Scott Cook’s wife complained about paying the household bills, and Cook, a former Procter & Gamble executive, had a eureka moment. He thought the new personal computers everyone was buying might be able to make life easier by automating domestic tasks such as balancing the checkbook. He teamed up with Tom Proulx, a computer science student at Stanford, and they put together a product called Quicken, which they started selling in 1984. By 1988, the company claimed that Quicken was the bestselling personal financial software in the world.

WHAT THEY DO
Intuit still balances the books. Quicken, its flagship product, still helps users organize their personal finances (although it is a lot fancier now than it was in 1984), and the QuickBooks line, launched in 1992, helps small-business owners tackle accounting. After Intuit's $34.5 million public offering in 1993, the company bought tax preparation service ChipSoft, the maker of the popular TurboTax program. Intuit offers a variety of other professional services and niche products that help users manage payroll, business services, medical accounting, and real estate.

WHAT THEY GOT RIGHT
With a 70 percent market share, Intuit dominates the world of personal-finance software. In 1995, Intuit had planned to merge with Microsoft, its main competitor (which markets its own program, Microsoft Money), but citing antitrust concerns, the Department of Justice blocked the billion-dollar deal. Forced to stay independent, and therefore nimble, Intuit has maintained high operating margins, around 27 percent, and has experienced stable year-to-year revenue growth.

One of the keys to Intuit's success, especially with Quicken, is that the need for regular product upgrades keeps users hooked—many Intuit products have a sunset policy, which means they require users to buy a new version every few years. Customers grumble, but the complaints haven’t stopped them from buying, and as a result, the company is growing.

WHAT THEY GOT WRONG
Tax season is short, so Intuit's profits are seasonal and sometimes hard to track. In February, Intuit lowered its profit forecast for 2007 by about 8 cents a share, and its stock fell by about 50 cents a share. Even though profits are up, the cost of making acquisitions, such as the internet bank Digital, is exerting a drag on the company.

WHAT’S NEXT
Buying companies and creating new products is job one for Intuit. But purchases keep getting more expensive, up from the $225 million Intuit paid for ChipSoft in 1993 to the $1.35 billion it paid for Digital in 2006. The company is also expanding its product line by creating more niche versions of its software. At the same time, Intuit has raised cash by shedding some of its divisions. It sold its help-desk unit in 2006 and plans to put its professional-payroll division, Automatic Data Processing, on the market for $135 million in 2007.