The Future of QuickBooks Desktop: What’s Next?

Everyone has been wondering what the future of QuickBooks Desktop will be. Some may say that QuickBooks online is the future in cloud technology. However, Intuit Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Small Business Financial Solutions, Dan Wernikoff, said, “We are never discontinuing it. I can’t see a time when we are not doing a desktop release. We will still do over a million units of the desktop this year. The point we make about new users, over half are coming into QuickBooks Online this year? It’s still almost half that are coming in to the desktop also.”  Intuit has been trying to make it very clear that QuickBooks Desktop will not be discontinued anytime soon. However, if you go to Intuit’s website it’s difficult to find information about any of the desktop products. (Source)

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While QuickBooks Online is a global platform, Intuits CEO Brad Smith states that “We are making important product changes to continue to delight our QuickBooks desktop customers, many of whom will be cloud customers in the future.” For those of you worried thinking that the end of QuickBooks Desktop is near, you’d be happy to hear this. “Our goal is to attract them with a compelling online experience and incentives to move to the cloud. To that end, we are strengthening our desktop products beginning in 2-15 by delivering ongoing releases to continuously improve the product experience, support operating system updates, and provide access to connected services.”

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Let’s figure out why people might be worried about QuickBooks Desktop disappearing. Many people believe that QuickBooks Desktop is more expensive than QuickBooks Online. Intuit has only just recently increased the price of the desktop software in the beginning of 2015. According to Sleeter, “Intuit still sells a lot of units of the desktop product, and they recognize that their existing desktop user base represents a significant source of income.”

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Another reason why QuickBooks Desktop isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, is growth. With QuickBooks online, users have to pay for each file separately, whereas QuickBooks Desktop charges at a flat rate, giving your company the opportunity to grow. If your company begins to grow with QuickBooks Online, you’d have to pay for each file per user which could cost thousands of dollars. QuickBooks Desktop encourages companies to grow by offering access to mobile devices, unlimited automatic data backups and much more. In the end, your company can benefit from using QuickBooks Desktops, therefore it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

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