QuickBooks Desktop Retiring 2024

This week we're going to talk about, well, QuickBooks and really talk about the latest announcement that was just released about maybe a week and a half, 2 weeks ago. I wanted to let all the buzz kind of simmer down before I put this post out because I've been answering questions and adding my 2 cents in where I can in Facebook, LinkedIn, anywhere I see messages about about this announcement. It was a funny post by Jason Stats where it showed the, like almost a tombstone with QuickBooks Desktop on it. So the QuickBooks Desktop typically at the end of May, they sunset the 3-year earlier products. So they no longer support it. They shut off a lot of the features like the banking, payroll, and some of the things you probably are using in Desktop. Because they want you to upgrade to the most recent version. And this year that won't be hap— but it will be happening, the sunsetting of the, of the last product, the 3-year earlier product, which will be 2021. But they won't be making a new one in the fall like they always have. And we've kind of seen the writing on the wall on this one, because they haven't really made any new features that would wow you. In desktop. They've been really into it. The company that owns QuickBooks has been putting the funneling their resources, basically it's been mostly into QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Online Advanced, which is the product that we use at our firm. So you wanna go back in the Wayback Machine. I can tell you that I've been using the product since 1999. And I, it was in 1998 that QuickBooks was launched and it was kind of a product spun out of Quicken, which was for your personal checkbook. And I used Quicken way back then too. It was a pretty cool product. And for a while there, when QuickBooks Desktop first came out, I think they were hoping to bring QuickBooks clients into it, Quicken clients into it because they were doing their business books inside of that Quicken product and they wanted to separate Quicken for more personal use. QuickBooks was more for business and they added some more financial statements and things like that if I remember correctly from way back then. And it was a way for— they created it really to give a small business owner the flexibility and ease of use of software. At that point, we were using OneWrite Plus and we were having a lot of problems with OneWrite Plus. And I can remember talking to some of the vendors. I worked at a contractor's office and they were telling me about this new cool software called QuickBooks. I noticed when they gave me maybe a paper stub with, you know, paying me and paying with all these different invoices. They had this cool— it had some cool look to some of the things that look really modern. And I can still remember that to this day. It became really popular with businesses for sure. It was the only really software around other than Peachtree. We did use Peachtree for a while too. And this is going way back now in the late '90s, early 2000s. And it really became a product when it first came out. It wasn't really that great. It was beta-ish, I guess you would say. And it started to really improve by adding features like double entries, and kind of brought in some things for, like, my Wickenburg contract. It was beautiful. It had some job costing eventually got added to it, and the audit trail. I still remember the day that they brought the audit trail in, so you could see where the transactions were entered and what may have happened. I can remember as well that there was data file could become unstable and there were steps you had to do to keep the data file healthy and you'd have to create backups and then you could do an accountant— we had an accountant type version that came out and then we had the ability to memorize transactions back then. And I can remember the accountant copy being a big deal because we really didn't have the ability to send a file and it made a compressed file and it was really cool. All this new technology that today it just seems like a distant memory. But if you look at QuickBooks Online, it's been around quite a bit. I mean, it's been around since 2001 and I can tell you I was not an early adopter. I was when they gave us the free file and I remember having it and holding onto it. Barely looking at it, didn't have time to really start to— I knew the other product. I didn't wanna learn a whole other product. And what is this online? And I can remember all of that as part of my history of learning QuickBooks Online. And it wasn't until my daughter started to work for me and she was— I, I could see that when I got phone calls from people that they were— Intuit was heavily pushing QuickBooks Online on people. They really weren't talking about Desktop anymore. Online was their new product and they really wanted clients to go there. And I can remember thinking to myself, boy, I better learn this, because if they're selling it, and then the client's trying to work in it, and then comes to me because they've now developed their business and they need an accountant or a bookkeeper, I really needed to use it. And then I did learn it, and I gave it to my daughter. Any new client that came in, she became certified in it, and she started working it. And then I noticed that As the client work came in, she was working in online, and it was being done faster than I could do it because she was using the bank feeds. The bank feeds by far was the major driver for me to move my clients over. But as well, the ability to layer on other software and really customize it. I really love that model of being able to take a product and then add something else to it. So it's a general product, and then add something else in it to really make it tweak and work for us, whatever the industry is that your client is in. So as I started seeing her do the work quicker than me, and I was more seasoned in, in the industry, I started to look at maybe I should shift all my clients over. And that happened around— I'm gonna say 2007, 2006, 2007— that I started to heavily work in it, and then I ended up really deciding to move my desktop clients over. And that's kind of the reason why I wanted to make this, this post was so that you could— this video— so that you could hear how I did it and then maybe you could implement the same feature. Because back then I was being paid hourly and I think a lot of people still using desktop based on the answers to my questions are like, why do you hate QuickBooks Online? What is it about it that you think desktop does better? And that opened up a can of worms. In fact, it got to the point where the Law Lab members, when we got on the meeting that week, they were like, wow, you really got beat up on Facebook this week with the desktop online saga. And I remember saying, yeah, I know that people were kind of really mean-spirited as they came back at me. But I know that for me, it was a wise choice. And when I moved everybody over, I did it all around this time of the year. Mm-hmm. Where I picked up all the clients and said, I'm gonna come. This is what my plan is. I'm gonna convert everybody to QuickBooks Online. It's gonna be the only software I use. I will not be working in desktop anymore. And I actually found a lady. This is back in Rhode Island. I found a lady that in Rhode Island that was only desktop and met with her. And I told her, I found out, you know, I knew she was a, a colleague and I was gonna give her anybody who just flat out refused to change software. So if you wanted to stay with me, you had to move to the cloud and you had to come with me on online, or you had to do that, or you could stay with, you know, Mary down the street. So what happened was they didn't wanna change, they wanted to stay with me. So they were okay with moving to QuickBooks Online. But in my offering, I changed my billing from monthly per hour. We didn't have to track that anymore to a fixed fee. And I'll talk a little bit about how I got to the fixed fee number. And then I did the conversion. I was already proficient. I'd already changed my file to it and knew how to use it. And then I took my work and I, I offered to convert it for free. I offered training, which you get as a ProAdvisor. I offered to give them the training content for free, and I offered to help them on any piece of the work that they were doing. One-on-one free training. And I gave them one free hour in the beginning, and then I offered ongoing help included inside my pricing. As we moved to the cloud, I stopped at all hourly billing at that time. So the conversion happened and I stopped the hourly billing. And then what I did was I took, I looked at what I charged people hourly, and I took the biggest month, which would typically be February, January, February. and I just multiplied that by 12, increased it some to include my time that I was gonna have to give in this training. And I told them, this is your flat fee. And you know what happened after I did that? So A, they didn't wanna leave me. That was number one. So my fear of losing clients never happened, but I had a backup plan. I had a place for them to go that I let them know I cared about 'em when I did that. And B, when I made the conversion, the best part about it was I did that for free as well, which that back then was a little bit more steps, and it was a little bit more difficult. I kind of did that over, over time. I had probably about 20 to 25 clients at the time because I couldn't do and handle as many clients in desktop as I can online. And then I ended up making the conversion, doing the hourly billing, and some of them came back and said, wait, this is gonna be more than last year. I'm like, yeah, it's gonna be more than last year. But I automated a lot of things. I included Hubdoc, and at that time I included the subscription. I won't do that anymore. I let them pay for their own QuickBooks. Don't go down the road of including that in there because they get mad about $10 increases by us or $15 or $20, but they don't get mad at Intuit. So let them— let Intuit give them the hit there, including payroll. Just let them pay through their own. If they're doing their own QuickBooks, they can pay for their own payroll. And then I did all that converting and all that changing one client at a time. I set myself up beautifully that it was all done by the end of the year. And I did it at my own time, my own speed. It gave me time to work with a client. Gave me time to clean up files. If a file was huge and 20 years old, we started a new file with the QuickBooks Online, and we imported a clean list. Started with balance sheet. If it was an older client that had maybe not as much data, maybe they still had 20 years, but it was smaller. We would just do the conversion. You kind of look at it at each one to see what would be best for them. If they had a messy file, like say somebody came to me with messy file afterwards, like after I had converted my own clients, I knew they weren't messy. But any new ones that came in, if they're messy, I would actually probably consider having them start new. It's usually less money than detangling. With QuickBooks Online, though, detangling is easier because you get the bank feeds. You can pull them all in, sort, get that. You can dump in 1,000 transactions really quickly. With QuickBooks Online. And that's the beauty of it. Sometimes that's easier to do. And there's conversion things out there if you have to go back more years and you can convert PDFs into CSV files and just suck that data in really quickly and you can move big data easily in QuickBooks Online. So A, I didn't lose a client. B, I had a couple that really weren't happy with the idea, but they wanted to stay with me and they stayed. They're very happy now. I probably wouldn't even remember any of this if I brought it up. And I just kind of worked through everything that way, really methodical, on my own time, in my own timeline. And I got them over. I learned the product. I love the product. And today it's where I sit. I've been in it for all this time. I can't— it's barely hard to remember desktop, except I have one client left. I have one client that when I moved to Florida, She was in desktop. We talked about it. It never happened. And every time I would go work on her file, I would— I always call it my punishment client because it reminds me of how rigid the product is and how manual. They don't— they're not connected to the internet. Everything's typed in manually. They write a lot of checks by hand. I have to type all that in. I can't just use like the batch features. Nothing is easy there. Yeah. And it just reminds me of all that they're missing out on. And this whole thing with Intuit stopping making new— oh, hello. It agrees with me. Making a new product and moving on to not making a new product, but discontinuing the old product is really the reason I'm going to be able to arm myself with when I go see them, because I have to drive there and see them every, every every week and I charge them for travel and they're really wonderful people. I've had them for a very long time since I moved here. They're just going to have to switch. And I've actually a couple of times found them a desktop bookkeeper and left and then they end up bringing me back in. Yeah, that one didn't work out. This one, they don't do the work you do. So I end up coming back because I kind of had a special place for them in my heart. And now I've got a reason to kind of really drive this forward and get them so I don't have any clients in desktop. So I hope this is helpful in helping you maybe map out a way. Would love to open up the door of a conversation as long as it's positive. I've already been beat up enough on the internet on this topic, but I understand that when I talk to people that they all think that QuickBooks Online isn't good because the reports aren't good. I don't know where they're looking at. Let's only get the lowest tiered product. The reports are fantastic. That's kind of why I want my clients in it. They The other thing is the price. And I always look at the price of software as just that. We spend a lot of money at my own firm and my firm with Sarah. We spend a lot of money on software, but it's, it's technology and it's the future. It's money well spent. You're going to save time and you're gonna have automation and really improved data 'cause it's gonna be clean and perfect when the technology handles it. And then there's also It's really a lot of people that I do see that are really hard fast and pushing back is it's this little thing that's being done in QuickBooks Desktop that QuickBooks Online doesn't do. And just kind of look at it as QuickBooks Online doesn't do it yet because they're constantly improving the product and it is getting better. And really take a look at QuickBooks Online Advanced because you might find that those features are in that product. And I know that's some more expensive one, but sometimes it's worth it. And if it saves you time and you can talk to your client and say, look, it's going to save me time to do this work and it'll be, you'll get more data out of it, you'll have more ability to do more things and maybe you'll have the ability to add a layer on top like a Clio, like a LeanLaw and really make this product something special where you're out of being in desktop where you're logging into a computer that's at an office that maybe somebody shut off and you can't work in. So that's the beauty of the cloud. I can log in from anywhere on any device. So I hope that helps in your decision. If you'd like to reach out and talk to me, if you'd like to join our lab and really have a conversation about this, we'd love to have you. And we'll see you all next week. Bye now. Bye.