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Continuing our series of business apps for the iPad, today we look at accounting and finance apps.

Accounting is probably one of the last applications that you'd expect to do extensively from the iPad. We doubt that you'll want to shift fiscal staff to working extensively from iPads, but giving them on the go access to critical business applications could be a good thing.

Accounting juggernaut Intuit has made some significant enhancements to its online accounting services and will announce today a series of new apps and partner supplying vendors. The Intuit Partner Platform and Intuit Anywhere SaaS solutions will make it easier for small businesses to extend their existing QuickBooks accounting software tools by federating user's identity across participating vendors.

Today Intuit and Salesforce.com announced a partnership to bring Salesforce.com's customer relationship management software into Inuit's QuickBooks Online service. Intuit will resell Salesforce.com's CRM solution, which will integrate with QuickBooks Online and synchronize customer data. The integration is designed to prevent users from having to enter data into two separate systems.

This is a coup for Salesforce.com, which will get exposure from one of the most popular cloud-based business accounting vendors in the world. The Salesforce.com integration will be available from Intuit App Center next summer.

The month of April begins tomorrow and for businesses and individuals in the United States, that means there's only two more weeks until the deadline for filing your federal tax returns.

As the deadline approaches, a growing number of businesses are turning to the Web to not only do their filing, but also to find accountants. The demand for online accountants has risen by 90% over last year, according to data released by oDesk, the job outsourcing site.

Believe it or not, QuickBooks Online has been in operation for an entire decade. To celebrate, Intuit published an infographic, which visually breaks down some of the Web-based accounting software's vital stats.

In ten years, QuickBooks Online has processed $5 trillion in revenue for its small and medium-sized business customers. That's equivalent to one third of the gross domestic product of the United States.

Check out the infographic below for more details:

Zoho launched the 26th addition to its growing suite of Web-based applications: Zoho Books. It's now available both from Zoho and from the Google Apps Marketplace. It costs $24 per month, with two users included. Additional users will cost $5 per month.

The application also integrates with Paypal, Google Checkout & Authorize.net to receive payments. Bank transactions need currently need to be adding manually, but Zoho spokesperson Raju Vegesna says bank integration will be implemented soon.

FinancialForce.com announced today an agreement today to purchase Appirio's Professional Services Enterprise product. FinancialForce.com is a provider of accounting and back office solutions for Salesforce.com's Force.com platform. PS Enterprise is a web-based product built on Force.com for professional services teams to manage "people, projects, customers and transactions." This will give FinancialForce.com and PS Enterprise users a unified service for handling CRM, billing and project management.

Chalk another one up for the post-PC era: ADP recently launched RUN, a slick-looking mobile version of its popular payroll application. The app integrates with the desktop version of ADP's software and enables fiscal staff to: review and enter payroll, edit hours and pay rates, manage direct deposits, enter vacation and other time off, calculate taxes and more. Interestingly, ADP chose to release this for iOS before BlackBerry, but ADP is planning BlackBerry and Android versions by the end of the year. The free app may herald the future of enterprise computing dominated by mobile applications instead of desktop software.

Today, SalesForce partners FinancialForce, the first native accounting package for SalesForce.com, and CloudApps, a new breed of carbon management solution, announce their products integrate to enable carbon credits to be managed in accounting terms within the Salesforce platform.

In reviewing this integration and observing the momentum of the ecosystem we see another clear example of the advantage in being both first in a new platform - and going native into it. This seems especially true in the cloud as it is positioned for massive growth.

Yesterday I spoke with lean startup guru Eric Ries who is hosting the Startup Lessons Learned conference this Friday in San Francisco and at live simulcasts around the world. Ries says he considers entrepreneur turned educator turned public servant Steve Blank to be his mentor in the startup world, and Blank will be among Ries' lineup of speakers at this week's conference. Blank will give a talk he's titling, "Why Accountants Don't Run Startups," (or Customer Development 2.0 on the conference site) which details the major differences between startups and large companies - a speech whose slides Blank posted to his blog via SlideShare late last week.