Quickbooks Desktop EOL Announced

[HCHTech]

from r/MSP today:

QuickBooks Desktop is finally dying​

We knew it was coming but see the announcement email below sent to a ProAdvisor accountant.
TL;DR: New QuickBooks Desktop subscriptions will stop being sold, other than Enterprise, after 7/31/24. Renewals will continue for existing Desktop clients. My guess is that after the normal three-year support window that Desktop will be dead.

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Important Desktop Product Line-up & Price Changes
Hello,
Today we're announcing important changes to Intuit QuickBooks Desktop that may impact your clients.
After July 31, 2024, Intuit will no longer sell new subscriptions of the following Desktop products in the US:
• QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus
• QuickBooks Desktop Premier Plus
• QuickBooks Desktop Mac Plus
• QuickBooks Desktop Enhanced Payroll
What is not changing:
• Existing Desktop Pro Plus, Premier Plus, Mac Plus, and Enhanced Payroll subscribers can continue to renew their subscription after July 31, 2024*. We will continue to provide security updates, product updates, and support for existing subscribers.
• All QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise subscriptions (Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond) will continue to be available for purchase for new subscribers after July 31, 2024. Enterprise Gold, Platinum, and Diamond include integrated payroll.
• Accountants can continue purchasing QuickBooks Accountant Desktop Solutions, including ProAdvisor bundles, through our Accountant Sales team after July 31, 2024.
What actions to take with your clients:
While we strongly recommend encouraging your current Desktop clients to move to QuickBooks Online (for more info, click here), we realize that some customers may prefer to stay on Desktop at this time.
• If you have clients on non-subscription versions of QuickBooks Desktop Pro, Premier, or Mac that wish to remain on Desktop, we recommend they purchase a QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus, Premier Plus, or Mac Plus subscription through our Sales team before July 31, 2024.
• If you have Pro Plus or Premier Plus clients that have been considering Desktop Payroll, we recommend they purchase a QuickBooks Enhanced Payroll subscription before July 31, 2024 or upgrade to QuickBooks Enterprise Gold, Platinum, or Diamond, which include integrated Payroll and can be purchased after July 31, 2024. Alternatively, QuickBooks Online Payroll is available to Desktop clients and is a standalone full-service payroll solution that also offers HR support, Health and 401K benefits.*
• We also recommend that all of your QuickBooks Desktop clients upgrade to the latest version of the software by July 31, 2024. QuickBooks Desktop 2024 includes the latest features and security updates. If your clients are on an active QuickBooks Desktop Plus subscription, they have access to QuickBooks Desktop 2024 with no additional charge and simply have to install the update.
In February 2024, we will notify all QuickBooks Desktop customers of these changes. This gives you and your impacted clients 6 months to purchase a Desktop accounting or payroll subscription if they want to remain on the Desktop platform.
QuickBooks Desktop Product Line-up Changes FAQ: www.firmofthefuture.com/product-update/faq-desktop-stopsell
Starting on January 8, 2024, the fee for each direct deposit paid through QuickBooks Desktop Payroll will increase to $4
• This price change impacts QuickBooks Desktop Enhanced Payroll for Accountants when using direct deposit to pay W2 employees.
o Because the employee direct deposit fee is billed directly to your clients, Intuit will send a 30-day notice to your impacted clients, addressed to the primary principals' email address on file.
• For clients on "legacy" Enhanced, Standard, or Basic Payroll plans without monthly per employee fees, the new fee will apply when paying W2 employees via direct deposit.
We appreciate you and your clients' loyalty to the Desktop platform over the years, and we will continue to support those customers on a Desktop subscription after July 31, 2024*. However, we highly encourage you to prepare your clients for the future by helping them move online. There are many benefits enabled by an online platform that can't be realized through desktop software, including time savings, the flexibility to work from anywhere, and a customizable ecosystem of connected business solutions. To help you prepare to move your clients online, we've created dedicated support materials written by accountants who have successfully migrated their own clients and want to help pave the way for yours. Keep an eye out for additional resources as we help you manage through this change with your clients.
Thank you for your business and your continued support of QuickBooks.
Sincerely,
The QuickBooks Team
*QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus, Premier Plus, Mac Plus and Enhanced Payroll subscriptions
Availability, terms, conditions, pricing, special features, and service and support options subject to change without notice.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Old news, you had to beg, plead, and pry if you tried to buy those products inside the US for a year now. The only on premise Quickbooks they will support is Enterprise.

 

[timeshifter]

Hallelujah!!

 

[ThatPlace928]

I'm still using Desktop Pro 2017. Haven't seen any updates that I can't do without so I'll continue to use it. It does exactly what I need it to. Intuit has become greedy. All I see in the email you posted is upgrade, upgrade, upgrade...... translating to money, money, money.

 

[Markverhyden]

Been on our radar for a while. Have a couple of customers with it. One is self-hosted the other is using Right Networks.

 

[HCHTech]

Yes - nothing unexpected for sure, but at least now we have the official announcement. I wish there was an obvious alternative, but they have so much of the market share that most businesses & accountants will just roll with it and pay. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The lack of feature parity in QBO and the lack of any reasonably-priced alternative for SMB were both conscious decisions by management, and I'm not keen to reward that, frankly. I'm on QBDT 2019 until it stops working, luckily I don't need to do payroll in QB, so I'm with @ThatPlace928. Once it quits working I'll have to decide. If my accountant can stomach anything other than QB, I'd love to switch just on principle!

 

[Metanis]

Sounds like an ideal situation for a competitor to gain market share.

 

[ThatPlace928]

Yes - nothing unexpected for sure, but at least now we have the official announcement. I wish there was an obvious alternative, but they have so much of the market share that most businesses & accountants will just roll with it and pay. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The lack of feature parity in QBO and the lack of any reasonably-priced alternative for SMB were both conscious decisions by management, and I'm not keen to reward that, frankly. I'm on QBDT 2019 until it stops working, luckily I don't need to do payroll in QB, so I'm with @ThatPlace928. Once it quits working I'll have to decide. If my accountant can stomach anything other than QB, I'd love to switch just on principle!

Older versions' backups can still perform in newer versions, if your customers send them to an accountant. They just won't be backward compatible. I have a customer right now trying to decide whether to go with Sage or set up in my 2017 version at the start of the year. He self-taught and his books have been screwed up for years. I've fixed everything I could this year but I believe a fresh start in 2024 is in order. He still uses a spreadsheet accountant out in California so he's doing far more work than he needs to, since he doesn't use QB for reports to verify his spreadsheet.

He doesn't like the cloud anymore than I do and his subscription is currently a little over $350 every year, which we both find ridiculous.

 

[britechguy]

He doesn't like the cloud anymore than I do and his subscription is currently a little over $350 every year, which we both find ridiculous.

There was a long discussion in this very venue about replacements for QuickBooks earlier this year. The short list I kept after looking at a number of the options:
Akaunting (free, open-source, aimed at small business and freelancers)
Wave Accounting (Accounting software is free, Payroll and Online Payment Services are both paid add-ons)
NCH Express Accounts Accounting Software (free version for very small business, 5 or fewer employees, very reasonable 1-time payment for current Plus or Basic version, with option to have a “perpetual update” subscription for $21.50 per quarter)

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

The lack of feature parity in QBO

Have you revisited in the past year?
Not too long ago, yeah...QBO was a watered down version, missing some features many SMBs want/use.
But in the past 2 years, esp in the past year....Intuit has really poured a lot into QBO.

Even our accounting clients that hated QBO, and recently revisted it, they're now saying it's gotten quite good.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Yes - nothing unexpected for sure, but at least now we have the official announcement. I wish there was an obvious alternative, but they have so much of the market share that most businesses & accountants will just roll with it and pay. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The lack of feature parity in QBO and the lack of any reasonably-priced alternative for SMB were both conscious decisions by management, and I'm not keen to reward that, frankly. I'm on QBDT 2019 until it stops working, luckily I don't need to do payroll in QB, so I'm with @ThatPlace928. Once it quits working I'll have to decide. If my accountant can stomach anything other than QB, I'd love to switch just on principle!

I'm sorry... what?

There are HUNDREDS of alternatives. Zoho, Wave, Xero, Freshbooks... Many of these platforms are FREE to use for SMBs in many contexts. Wave in particular is monetized via credit card and payment automation systems, so you're free to use it without paying a cent if you use your bank for electronic payments.

Intuit has decided to exit this market, because it's flooded and to be honest the other products are just better. Anyone still on Quickbooks is only there because they refuse to learn something new, or they've been lazy and letting it sit half dormant and unsupported despite it being mission critical software.

Want FOSS you can self host? Fine... https://github.com/bigcapitalhq/bigcapital

 

[britechguy]

Anyone still on Quickbooks is only there because they refuse to learn something new, or they've been lazy and letting it sit half dormant and unsupported

Substitute any number of things for "QuickBooks" and the statement remains true. The power of inertia is immense.

I'd say you could have said exactly the same thing about Microsoft Office for many years prior to the introduction of M365, which is not truly "just a replacement for Office" but an entirely novel ecosystem that didn't exist before. But heaven knows most people stuck with Office not because myriad alternatives, and good ones, did not exist, but because it was simply easier to avoid change.

'Twas ever thus, and ever shall be. Humans work that way, whether working that way is a good thing or not.

 

[SAFCasper]

This already happened June 30th this year for the UK version of QuickBooks. They killed it entirely. As soon as you open QB Desktop you are greeted with a message about it being discontinued and that's it. You can do absolutely nothing else with the program, not even view your data or run a backup/export.

The only way to access data if not migrated away already is to uploaded it to QBO. Thankfully there is a free service provides a temporary instance of QBO in read-only mode if you don't have a subscription. Allows running reports and exporting data. Although they made a strange decision that you can't use a .QBB backup file to restore your data. Only works with the .QBW file.

Obviously take all this with a pinch of salt as they may do it differently outside of UK.

 

[ThatPlace928]

As soon as you open QB Desktop you are greeted with a message about it being discontinued and that's it. You can do absolutely nothing else with the program, not even view your data or run a backup/export.

That's what happened to my customer, when his subscription expired. Not a message about being discontinued but about his subscription expired. His hands were tied, until he renewed. Now, we just need to get him into something else before it expires again.

 

[HCHTech]

I'm sorry... what?

All right - I'll explain my position, and then you can tear it down ok?

Ask your accountant how many packages other than Quickbooks they are willing to work with. I have accountants as clients and I can tell you that every client of theirs that DOESN'T use Quickbooks is a lot more work for them and they charge them more. The reason there isn't an obvious alternative is because of the infrastructures that all of the accountants have bought into. It's not just about what I want or am comfortable with. My accountant has to work with whatever I end up using. So if I don't use QB, part of the money I'm saving (maybe all of it) would be spent in extra charges from my accountant.

Make sense now?

 

[britechguy]

Make sense now?

Kinda, but I have to ask, can't these accounting suites save files in competitors' file formats, much like any word processor, spreadsheet, etc., can these days?

If not, this is the next "big upgrade" area, and it's going to become even more important.

 

[Sky-Knight]

All right - I'll explain my position, and then you can tear it down ok?

Ask your accountant how many packages other than Quickbooks they are willing to work with. I have accountants as clients and I can tell you that every client of theirs that DOESN'T use Quickbooks is a lot more work for them and they charge them more. The reason there isn't an obvious alternative is because of the infrastructures that all of the accountants have bought into. It's not just about what I want or am comfortable with. My accountant has to work with whatever I end up using. So if I don't use QB, part of the money I'm saving (maybe all of it) would be spent in extra charges from my accountant.

Make sense now?

It does, but also doesn't.

The ecosystem in my market has shifted, and the choice of accounting software now boils down to what the accountant likes. There are accountants that like Xero, others that like Zoho. So the choice is made by the accountant themselves, with many of them acting as resellers for the software, with partnerships with companies that specialize in data conversion.

My accountant doesn't ever see my Quickbooks, he just gets a specified report at the end of the year he uses to do his thing. But I don't hire him for general book keeping. If I needed the latter, then well... I hire someone else to do that. And with cloud based software hosting, you can hire someone anywhere on the planet they don't have to be local. So you're free to hire an accountant out of Phoenix that does one of the many alternatives if that is a problem. The market has already adapted to this, you just have to get on the phone.

This applies to Quickbooks Online too, if that's what your guy likes you continue to pay Intuit. Choice is yours, but you can change... but yes it means finding a new accountant sometimes.

 

[GTP]

My accountant (a firm of about 6 staff) refuses to work with everything except Quickbooks and MYOB.
They explained it's not viable for them to be knowledgeable in anything else.

 

[Larry Sabo]

My accountant just wants a suite of standard financial reports, which I produce using QuickBooks. They used to accept the accountant's data file produced by QuickBooks, but only if the QB version was no older than three years. That's all their QB accounting package would accept as input and they were not going to maintain numerous older copies just so they could import customer QB files. If I switched to another accounting package, all it would have to do is produce the standard reports.

The prospect of QB suddenly locking me out of my accounting data scares the hell out of me, so I think I'll set up a parallel set of books using NCH Express Accounts. It offers a CSV import option that should work.

 

[Sky-Knight]

@Larry Sabo Intuit doesn't just arbitrarily lock people out. Those that had that happen had their subscriptions expire.

If you're still on an old perpetual license, those are still working. Though... they aren't supported anymore so who knows when they won't.