When Intuit bought Eagle’s TSheets, there were questions. Major expansion is planned

Intuit Inc. says it plans to more than double its Eagle workforce after adding a new building for its TSheets by Quickbooks digital time-sheet operation.

The company signed a lease last week for a new, second building at the company’s complex at 235 E. Colchester Drive, off Eagle Road north of West Chinden Boulevard, according to a memo sent to the Eagle workforce by Chris Glennon, Intuit’s San Francisco-based vice president in charge of real estate.

“This space will allow us to accommodate future growth of more than 900 total seats and will bring new workplace amenities and services to the campus,” Glennon wrote in the memo, obtained by the Idaho Statesman.

The lease was signed after visits to Idaho by Sasan Goodarzi, Intuit’s CEO, and Brad Smith, the company’s former CEO and current executive board chairman.

Groundbreaking is expected to take place in a few months, with the building completed by early 2021, Glennon wrote. Planning is in the early design stages, so details on parking and amenities have not been finalized. The company, Glennon said, plans to hold a town hall-style meeting with employees early next year to share those details.

“This major investments speaks volumes to our commitment to the ongoing success of the site,” Glennon wrote. “This is also a signal of our long-term commitment to the local community, where we will continue to drive our company culture of giving back.”

TSheets was co-founded by Matt Rissell in 2006. It emerged as one of the Treasure Valley’s fastest-growing technology startups.

The company was sold to Intuit In December 2017 for $340 million. The Mountain View, California, company makes QuickBooks software for managing business payrolls, payments and invoicing. The two companies had a five-year partnership before the sale offering customers TSheets and QuickBooks together.

At the time of the sale, TSheets had 260 employees. In a September story, the Idaho Business Review reported Intuit had added 160 positions to its Eagle workforce. The company is expanding its Idaho workforce to include more than just its time-tracking software employees.

Rissell will leave the company in December, after giving a year’s notice. J.D. Mullin, who joined the company in 2013 after leaving WhiteCloud Analytics, has replaced Rissell as the vice president of Intuit’s time-tracking segment.

As recently as October 2018, CEO Matt Rissell declared he had no intention to leave. But after the company celebrated the first anniversary of the acquisition, things started to change, and there was a greater willingness to become more tied to Intuit.

“Matt and I started talking about this a while back,” Mullin told the Idaho Business Review. “It was a very deliberate transition plan. It’s not like one week we came up for air and said, ‘We have to do something about this.’”

Employees were told this summer, and the announcement came in early August in coordination with the rebranding of the building, Mullin said.

Rissell was not made available for interviews, but his Facebook page indicates that he had intended to be financially independent by 40. He closed the sale of TSheets on his 41st birthday, retiring at 42.

“Will I be retired forever?” he posted. “Not. A. Chance.”

Rissell came up with the idea for TSheets in 2005, when he noticed employees at the four Cartridge World stores in the Treasure Valley claiming time on their time cards that they hadn’t actually worked. He called a friend, Brandon Zehm, a software engineer who built a basic time-sheet application he could use to more accurately track time worked.

They later teamed up to sell the application to other businesses. The company lost money for several years, broke even in 2010 and turned a profit in 2014. By fall 2015, it had 80 employees and was doubling in size each year.

Tsheets byQuickbooks was runner-up to T-Mobile in the “Best Places to Work in Idaho” list compiled by Populus Inc. among companies with more than 250 employees.

Neither Glennon nor Mullin could be reached for comment Thursday.