Only yesterday Square announced its ever expanding retail availability (20,000 outlets nationwide), and today competitor Intuit GoPayment is following up with some major news of its own.

Intuit is now merging its traditional POS software, QuickBooks POS, with its mobile offering (and Square rival) Intuit GoPayment.

The two solutions will now be able to communicate with each other, syncing both inventory and financial data from Computer to mobile or vice versa.

Intuit has been in the POS business for 10 years and its QuickBooks POS solution is aimed at the small to medium sized business customer.

That’s great for convenience when merchants work with clients face to face, but what if a small business has to send a customer a bill.

Currently, the company has 200,000 SMB retail customers who together reach 23 million customers across the US Combined with GoPayment, the businesses process $6 billion in transactions annually.

Intuit GoPayment launched back in summer 2009, and now competes with Square, VeriFones PayWare, PayPal Here and many other POS Light solutions, as Chris Hylen, VP of Intuit Payments, calls them.

The GoPayment mobile app is free and the basic service includes no monthly transaction or cancellation fees.

There are no set up or monthly service fees at all, so it costs you nothing to keep it handy in case you ever need.

The swiped transaction rate is 2.7% for pay as you go users, and, like Square, it has eliminated the per transaction fee.

These rates will not change as a result of the integration between the two products, and customers can still sign up for GoPayment as a standalone service.

Its flagship products and services, including QuickBooks®, Quicken® and TurboTax®, simplify small business management and payroll processing, personal finance, and tax preparation and filing.

POS solution customers, however, will now have GoPayment bundled in with the cost of the boxed software, whose price will not change either.

Or what if merchants simply don’t want to pay the fees for accepting credit cards.

With QuickBooks POS, businesses can manage multiple locations, track customers, create and management inventory, run reports, and more.

There are also features that allow it to track employee clock ins and clock outs and automatically calculate commissions, as well as advanced controls which allow businesses to lock down permissions for certain tasks by user.

Post integration, inventory levels and transaction data can sync between the products both ways.

By doing so, GoPayment can then work as either a lightweight alternative to a traditional POS, or can supplement a traditional POS system with mobile capabilities.

While Intuit doesnt reveal the size of its GoPayment user base, it has been moving to expand the service outside the US In January, GoPayment became available in Canada, and now, says Hylen, Intuit is exploring a variety of countries and geographies, and its strategy is to move aggressively in terms of international expansion.

(QuickBooks Online, it should be noted, is already available in Canada and Singapore, for example.) However, integration between GoPayment and QuickBooks POS is not yet complete for Canadian business customers.

Although the POS solution is a somewhat old school, Computer only product at present, Hylen says the company is exploring bringing that online, too.

Originally targeted at field trades (contractors, plumbers, electricians, etc.), the GoPayment user base is now 40% service based customers, and just 17% field trades with the rest being retailers.

Were seeing a lot more businesses that are using it every day to run their business, and are bit larger than the single hairdresser, says Hylen of the typical GoPayment user.

GoPayments integration with Intuits POS solution is just the one of many steps the company is taking to create a platform from its separate products, both business and consumer facing alike, Hyden explains.

Further down the road, the company has plans to bring other products like its payroll solution, website solutions, and financial data tracker Mint.com under the same umbrella, too.

Thats the larger story for Intuit, weve had separate products and we now need to get to an ecosystem, says Hylen, because thats where the power comes for the customer.

Nicole Hansch is a business journalist based in Sydney, Australia. Nicole has a passion for financial markets and breaking news stories and loves writing about business news, stock market, and economic opinions that matters most to its audience. Nicole spends a lot of time discovering and researching latest financial markets and industry news stories in order to make sure the latest and greatest stories are brought to you first on BigBoardNews.com.