Saying Goodbye to QuickBooks Desktop

Welcome to Accountants LawPod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhart.

Welcome back, my friends. How are you?

Good.

Yeah, good.

Long time no see.

I know.

Oh, my gremlin just ran away.

Your gremlin just ran away. Um, well, we have an interesting topic today, which I think is an interesting topic in the sense of We're seeing less and less of this, but we do still see it. It is a topic on QuickBooks Desktop, and it's something that a lot of legacy firms have that they've inherited. And what do we like to say to them, Lynda, when they come to us with QuickBooks Desktop? We do—

They say, do you work in QuickBooks Desktop? And I said, we work to take you off of it.

And we say bye-bye.

That's it. We just, we say we can migrate you off of it. We do not work in it. And then they'll say, Well, do you know anybody that can? And we've done this in the Law Lab and said anybody, but all the people in Law Lab are so forward thinking, like, we don't want to use it. We're not, we don't do it either. So I don't even have like a referral that I can send. Like, this person just does law firms in desktop. Nobody does.

It's very hard.

I have one client left in desktop that I am migrating this next week because the annual contract is coming up and it's $1,000.

Oh yeah, they've been raising the, I don't know why they didn't raise the rate outrageously a long time ago to push people off because they've been doing this to push them up. Intuit doesn't even want them on desktop anymore. And it was a great program. And don't get me wrong.

I loved it.

Back in the day, it was amazing, right? And when it was all you had, it was phenomenal and it was the best of the best out there. And it really was. And back in those days, remember, Steve, we had to know how to fix a data problem. You know, the data would break and we had to figure out how to fix the data problems. And I know I'll sour you too, because you worked with me.

Oh, I, yeah.

And you would receive a CD once a week to update your program.

Yep. Oh yeah. Or, and you'd say, okay, well, what's the code? 'Cause what's it doing? And then you have to go look up the code to find out how to fix the problem. Oh, it was a memorized transaction that broke, which was, was it called memorized back then or was it recur— it's memorized. They had memorized. I don't remember.

Yeah. Well, there was a bunch of key codes I had kept for myself. Well, the error codes meant X and that meant either I call support or I, I have to look for the update and then get the update. If it was available. But, um, it's also hard with hosted. But Steve, I think you hinted on the first thing is the being phased out to what Lynda was saying. I forget what the— they're not doing any more updates as of when? What was the deal?

Oh, that was a year ago. So we're in the second year now of it not being updated, which means that you're not going to be, um, there's nothing new happening and they're not gonna— one more year and they're, they're out. Like, that's done. There's not gonna be any more anything there.

No more patching to it probably either, right? Because it's about 3 years, right? They always— we've always said 3 years. Yeah.

And they don't have a certification on it. That's been gone for a couple of years too. So there's no cert, there's no more anything with it. So I think Enterprise is still there. So Enterprise Solutions, they got it.

I think Enterprise is gonna stay there, isn't it?

You know, they make a lot of money off of the add-ons. So, but I don't know. I mean, they're trying to make Enterprise Suite out of the online version, and that's their baby right now. And I think that's just to get rid of the Enterprise. I think that that's the purpose of the Enterprise Suite. So I would think that they're going to want to get like past that, but I don't know. That's a good question. I, I, it's here and I think a lot of people are going to it because like payroll with desktop was was best payroll ever.

It was.

That's— if you want to continue with that, you have to move to the Enterprise. And if QuickBooks went up that much because it's subscription-based, if it went up that much, it's going to be going up on the Enterprise too, right? So it'll be both.

So yeah, I think the interesting thing too is, uh, when they're hinting and they're saying— and now they're, you know, they did the subscription model, they've— we realized they take away a lot of, um, data information with that too. We found that out quite accidentally, uh, not by us, from a client's, uh, interaction and what it means to convert the file over to an online thing. That's a whole process in and of itself. But, um, they're clearly— I mean, we're seeing this a lot with a lot of software. Yeah. I mean, we're saying desktop, QuickBooks Desktop, but in general we see this with a lot of server-based or that style of software, moving it to some sort of hybrid, I guess you could call it. I mean, so you have one left, Steve, huh?

One left. I have one left too that she's supposed to be closing. So I'm like, I go there for like an hour and it reminds me why I don't like to work in it.

Well, it's weird. You know, when I go into desktop now, sometimes I'm like, wait a minute, how did I get over this? And I've worked with desktop.

Isn't that funny?

It is, it's really weird 'cause I've worked with desktop since 1994. I mean, I've followed it all the way along, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

But they're launching some new products. Like I talked to the CPA this morning of this one particular client and I said, his business is really small. He's winding down, he's gonna retire one of these days. You know, what do you wanna do? And what do you want him to use? And she drove me, and I can't remember the name of the product now, but it was in Quicken. And they've developed—

Oh, God.

They've developed, well, hear me out though. They've developed a program for teeny tiny businesses like this one that does not only the company taxes, but personal taxes and has Schedule Cs in it and all that, all the different schedules in it and everything does it all. I know, I know, I hear you, Sarah, but that's what she wants him to be in.

So— And Quicken's not owned by Intuit, it's owned by somebody else. They sold that. —where that was going and what, you know, I wonder.

I think she was just looking for a low-cost program for him because I was passing on the desktop subscription and it just isn't worth it anymore to do that.

No, and it's expensive for us. I mean, it's, it, that's the thing that they did to kind of really gut people off. And I think the last people that were ever going to let go of their desktop was the tax professionals. Because they would just take—

Right, yeah.

Small companies that had nothing all year and they would just dump the bank feeds in and then throw it all together and then do the accounting work on it. And it was cheap because it didn't cost them for every company, it didn't cost them. They didn't want to go to the online version 'cause it would cost them per license. But then they did make Ledger. So they had that ability to go on to Ledger, QBO Ledger, which they could do the same thing, but that had a fee to it, but it wasn't that much. They get the bank fees. I mean, think about the bank feed in desktop. How clunky was that? Oh, it was terrible. Yeah. Horrible. Has anybody ever gone through and done like the whole page and then said, oh, I need to add a vendor and went to add a vendor, vendor, and everything you had was gone? You had to go redo it again and then you had to curse and start all over again. I mean, that was—

Or the connection, the bank stopped supporting that connection. So then you have to go and redo. Sometimes I had to manually enter way back when. You know, the other thing too is a lot of times, and I'm not saying this of yours, Steve, but the things that we've seen when data comes to us, the file is set up where the client's been using what's called statement charges, which does not migrate—

Law firms.

—to an online, specific to law firms. And it's— I get the idea behind it. It is so problematic in a data migration.

You can't migrate that. It doesn't come over. There's no statement charges in an online product. There's invoices, there's sales receipts. You can't come— that does not come over when you do a conversion. None of that will come over, which is a nightmare for us when we're doing a conversion.

Can you define statement charges a little more?

I think it's just what they do is they use it as a charge. They charge the client for the work and they call it a statement charge. And then it just like, it just like a charge line item on a statement. But we don't have that in online. So you have to make invoices to cover for that. To be able to bring that data in, you have to actually manually do the— not manually, you can export to CSV and import, but it's a different layout. And then you have to teach the person doing the work that's used to doing it this way and tell them there's no way to do that anymore.

Mm-hmm.

And then it's confusing to them because they have to learn invoices, they have to learn payments, and then they also have to learn that statements are still in there, but they're not used for the purpose that they were in desktop.

Oh, I got you. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

It's a very confusing— so when you're doing the world, the two worlds is what I call them because they're really two entirely different worlds. It's very challenging for the mind to just flip it and go, oh, what do you mean it works like this? Because it's, it's slightly different in the makeup of QuickBooks Desktop on how you're going to invoice and bill people with this so-called tool statement charges versus the things that Lynda just said. And they don't always you can pull them out, but they don't always equal CSV because there's also things behind it like interest charging. And there's other things that— and those partial payments—

Oh God, yeah, I remember.

They're not equal.

No, you have to really— it makes it very complex and you need somebody who really knows what they're doing to do that migration. Don't just throw that at— you just need to have somebody who knows how to do a migration like that.

Oh, don't think you're blissfully going to walk in and be like, oh, QuickBooks said they can handle it and it works.

Yeah, I don't think that you're going to pay into it. They don't have a clue about this stuff. So this is not, this is not in their wheelhouse. You make sure you have an accounting firm that knows how to do migrations and has done desktop to online, because everyone that we've had lately, Sarah, that's been a desktop to— it's had the statement charges. They've used that method.

Yeah.

We had one that did the bank method of tracking trust. They had all these sub-bank accounts.

Yeah.

Because it's old.

You run these firms that are using this old-fashioned, like, they're so slow to get to online. I mean, how long have we been on just using online? For years, right? I can't even remember how long ago it was I moved everybody over. And this is a lot of years, like, 10 years have gone by when we've already been online that long, and they're still doing it that old-fashioned way. And then now you're bringing them in. One good thing, though, with online now, you can— it looks a little desktopy, like the, the screen.

They have changed that around. Yeah.

That will help 'Cause remember the first ones we did a long time ago? They don't, didn't look anything, nothing was similar. And to teach somebody how to work in it, it was hard. It's not as easy as it is today. And I think that that's—

Well, let's talk about apps.

Okay, yeah.

Oh my gosh. I mean, the apps that you can use in QuickBooks Online compared to what, remember in QuickBooks Desktop where you would, I can't remember where we accessed it, but you would get a page with squares on it full of pictures of different—

Oh yeah.

Do you remember? And I'm talking about different methods of how you could do things and connect to different apps that they were calling them back then. And, and it was basically what I remember. It was pages and pages of things that people had created as workarounds in QuickBooks. Do you remember that?

I do. I remember because I had one on there because it was like—

Do you have one?

I remember talking about it and saying, I got to get my name on there so people know who I am. And I wanted to get my own thing set up and I shared that. Yeah, we had— they had templates too that you could share the templates. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about is the templates. Years ago you had, um, you would go with a sample company. We had example sample companies with— yes, they had that banking method of, uh, trust accounting. Well, but we had like Construction One, this one, a doctor's office. And then that went away for a while. And then all we had Craig's Landscape, which we still just have Craig's Landscape. It's interesting how things have changed over the years with this.

And you can, you could add multiple companies.

Remember when, remember when going way back machine, remember when online, I mean desktop first when you're working in it and how you couldn't wait for September to get that big package with the book and the discs and everything in the mail. Like that was your cutting edge cuz you were getting into it first.

We had a, didn't we have a colleague once post?

Yes, when you cleaned out their closet and was selling it. Like, who wants that? Who wants that? Floppy disk. She went all the way back to floppy disk. That could go in a, you know, maybe in a museum someday.

Well guys, sometimes I see in the different accounting groups on Facebook and, you know, various places, I see people still saying, I'm using QuickBooks Desktop 2012 and I will not give it up. And it's like, but you have not been supported. You're not getting updates, you're not getting patches, you're not getting any of that. How can you keep using that?

It takes me a while when they come to us for data migration. I have to wait through because you can't just jump from 2012 up. I have to keep jumping incrementally, so I have to upgrade it. She says, "I'm letting it cook." Yeah, I let it cook because I have it like, okay.

They're in 2012, I'm letting 2015 cook, and then she moves up to the next 2018. Because you have to step the file up to the next level to be able to convert it. And it's amazing that the desktop people that come to you, you'll say, well, what version are you in? Oh, I'm not in that one. You had to sign up for a subscription, which was how many years ago? They're still in like 2012 version. And then there's all sorts of quirks. You should— first thing you should do is run that utility to see how healthy the data file is. I remember when I first—

Good point.

When I first came here, because it'll fail if it's never been like properly backed up. I first moved here and I had a guy call me, and this is way back, and he called me and he said, you know, I, I'm, something's wrong with my file. It was a big electrical firm, but it was in North Fort Myers and I had no clue. I lived near South Fort Myers. I think, how far can it be? Oh, it was an hour drive. I'm like, oh, I can come to you. Yeah, I should have known better, right? In my car and drove an hour up to North Fort Myers where there was nothing at the time. Like it was a countryside. And this one company sitting out there, big contractor. And I went in and I took a look at the file and I said, because he couldn't get it, he didn't know how to do, uh, log me in. And I looked at the file and I said, have you backed this file up every night? My server's backed up. I said, no, have you run the utility to back up your QuickBooks data file? Not in 5 years. And that file was a mess. It was a mess. And, um, we had to I think what I ended up doing, I remember having a call. I remember, I think I called William Murphy, because he was like the guy to know how to fix all the broken DigiStop files. Yeah. And Bill Murphy, so, who's with Woodard. And he knew all the tricks on how to do that. He was a big nerd on that kind of stuff, and figure out how to get this file back into a healthy state, right down to like which memorized file, which memorized transaction was broken, which was causing all the errors. And it was fascinating, because he could read the code kind of behind the, the errors was. And I learned every time, that's kind of— I learned a lot about the data files through the community page, which is where we all hung out back in the desktop days. Because there wasn't the online stuff, there wasn't a Facebook, there wasn't a, you know, there was nothing. And it was just that community.

And YouTube, if you were lucky. And that's how I—

YouTube wasn't even there then, I don't think.

No, way back.

YouTube was actually started way back, but the videos didn't—

That would be Seth.

That would be Seth, right? But it was also How, like, to your point, Steve, you have an outside app. So meaning like you're paying a separate payroll provider. How do you properly get the data in? Does it even integrate? Like, that wasn't a conversation. But that was somewhere else.

They used Desktop in QuickBooks because it was really, really good. You could do so much. You could fix—

It was a great payroll system.

Yeah. It was.

Anything that was broken, you could fix it. Now, online, not so much.

Let's talk about when they migrate. What do they expect there? And also, A really key question: how long do you have access to that file after you no longer subscribe to it? What happens to all the data? What's out there? Let's talk about that.

Sarah, we had that happen with somebody that stopped paying their subscription, and Intuit gave them whatever they had because they, they migrated to online, and they could not access that anymore. And Sarah had to open up the file because she had you know, we— they gave us a backup and she opened it so we could get into it because they had no access to it anymore.

But the purpose was to not work in it. So, so it, it's in the sense of, yes, you're not paying that subscription, so that's fine. But if we're going to migrate you or validate the migration data, we should have the ability to do that. We're not working to create things in the file. You've already migrated into the online space. But it, it does beg the question of sometimes it's like, what reports do you need? Because it's true of, of any desktop file, not just QuickBooks. So not, I mean, yes, our topic is this.

Right. Good point.

If you were to move your data out of another server-style platform, uh, a practice management that's an all-in-one, you're going to have to have reports. Excel's, you're gonna have to have things to back it up. That's a lot of institutional data to back up that does not migrate over to a new one. So sometimes what we try to do is say, what is the best tactic here? The data was migrated over, but it does— its statement, it's like a whole mess. It doesn't merge, it doesn't migrate, um, things are not in the right order. The trial balance doesn't even look remotely close to what you had in the file. Um, So to answer your question is sometimes it makes sense to start a new file, look at the data, look at the final tax return, start a fresh file, and then maybe go through and just pull out the key reports that are relevant to you and understand that you're just going to be living with— I mean, we've seen people, Lynda, do what, journal entry methods to get historical data in, and that creates retained earning issues. Mm-hmm. Because it's not always balanced to the tax return. So why not just start fresh? Historical data is back there. Moving forward, this is where you use the spreadsheet model of I want to know what I did in '23, '24, '20, you know what I mean?

Whatever you could do. I mean, QuickBooks has the ability. So if you might want to, because if you have 20 years of data in your desktop file, you probably don't want to push that into QuickBooks, right? You could just do that where you can just cut it off at a certain— Yeah. Date and then bring it forward because sometimes you want that 3 or 5 years of data to compare.

Yeah.

That's a possibility. But then sometimes, like Sarah said, you have the old version, cut the ties. I mean, a lot of times they want to do conflict checks, so they want to have the names, but you don't want to bring everything over. But if you've got the old program, you can conflict check in desktop and then not have to bring all the names over. So you're not bringing everything from the beginning of time because that's the other thing, is that sometimes people want to bring in all their date data over. And it's a great time if you're going to be doing that clean slate cutoff tax return, opening balance sheet stuff, then bring it forward, import everything starting with a fresh file. You really want to first of all make sure everything ties out. And the same if you're doing a, um, if you're doing a data migration and you're bringing over desktop to online, you need to run that trial balance accrual method and you need to compare those numbers. Don't just go to the bottom line and go, oh, the numbers are the same, because it might not be the same. I know, I see her, she's digging into China behind me, messing up my blanket like she does every day. But yeah, so it's important to be able to, to make sure you do it right. And that's the, that's the, that's a big piece. I think that a lot of people think they can just flip the switch and then they get on the phone with Intuit. Just don't do it that way because you want to make sure your data is correct and accurate.

So are you saying opening balance entries, Sarah, or that's what's messing up retained earnings? Well, how are you, how would you advise them to get the correct opening balance if they they're doing a fresh set without migrating.

Well, here's an example. You've never balanced the books to the tax return, which is 90% of the time, right? So that retained earnings is not going to be in balance. Or there could be a reason. Maybe there's different tax people through the years. No explanation. The information that was booked in doesn't actually— no one from the person doing the work has said, hey, actually, did you realize I mean, everyone makes mistakes. You gave me this entry twice and I booked it in and there's a problem. I mean, yeah, just because you got the information from the tax person doesn't make it right in the sense of they make mistakes, not intentional, unintentional. So we're just doing something recently. I know it's a conversion. I can tell it's a conversion and I'm looking at the data. I cannot get the retained earnings to balance. I'm off by like less than $1,000. I don't know what historically has happened to make that so, but the cutoff didn't come through very clean. So I mean, at that point, I'm going to do the best I can. There's going to be a book-to-tax difference and somehow we're going to have to pick it up. And it's got to be a balance sheet item. I just don't know what it is because it's not sitting in the current file.

And nobody ever tied it to tax, right? Nobody.

Most likely that's the case. I'm betting. Most likely, I bet. Yeah. I mean, I don't— at some point, depending on how you do these types of things, that's where the conversation happens. How far back do you have to go? Like, can you have this conversation with a new tax person or the existing one to understand maybe they have the information to provide you? But, you know, I was going to say we've talked so much about converting it to QBO, but what if you want to convert to a different ledger system?

Sure.

You know, what if you're in, like I mentioned earlier, software that's desktop-focused style all-in-one and you're moving to a, um, QuickBooks style online or Zero. Yeah. Yeah. You mean even Zero? So like a fresh file mentality setup is nice as long as you, like, to your point, Lynda Artesani, you have the information, you're saving it, there's a way to back it up. Um, conflict checks happen in a lot of legal practice managements. So yeah, you're gonna wanna cut, make sure that name list is accurate. We see a lot of cutting corners and like half names put in the wrong way and put in again. So like duplicate names.

So like Artesani Lynda, Lynda Artesani, L Artesani. So I'm in there 3 times. But, and, and you should really, if you're gonna get off of something like, let's say Cosmolex, cuz that's a, a all-in-one, you wanna push that data down into some kind of an Excel spreadsheet because how do you know how, how much you'll be able to access it or you keep paying for it. So you have a couple of options, but you need to be able to have access to that data because if the bar comes a-knocking with a request to do an audit and it's during the time that you were in the old product, how are you going to get them that data? And then you should push it out by year so that you're able to give them that snippet of time. You don't want to be giving them everything. You only want to give them that little piece that they're asking for.

The whole house, the kitchen sink, and all the in-between. Yes.

Yeah. The whole enchilada.

Mm-hmm. Dave, I know that you're doing this migration. It'll be interesting because you just said a different product, which kind of my light bulb moment came on. It could be a Quicken. I mean, based on this conversation, you might have to explore different methods because it may not, it's not a one for one. It's not apples for apples.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah.

I still wanna stick with a QuickBooks Online product and that's probably what I will do. For this client and, you know, I'm going to print all— print— I'm going to save all of the— I'll just use the word print. I'm going to print all the reports and save them historically. I'm just going to PDF them. And then to your point, Lynda, later on, if we need them in Excel, I'll just convert them. But I'm going to save all those historical reports so that we have something to go back against. And I'll be asking for the CPA to take a look at the last year's tax return with me. On the opening balances before we do this year's return. So, yeah, you know, so we can make adjusting entries together. Yeah, I know that you're really good at working with us.

So the function is to print, but you could also do— like, we do this a lot, we do PDF and Excel for every, every report we can because we don't know. Yeah, so we do both in this, and we do it by year. We do like an example by year, but then we do the detail, and we do the general ledger detail as well.

Sure. If you can get it out.

If you can get it out. If it's big and beefy, sometimes it doesn't come out. Yeah, but I was just thinking too, as accountants, Lynda brought up the product, we have the ledger system available to us. It's not for public, it's not for a consumer.

Only for accountants, right?

It's only for accountants. That product might actually be suitable and more competitive, and you have more ability to control the data that way, which sounds like that's what you have in that relationship. Xero offers—

Or Xero. I mean, the price difference isn't that big. Yeah, you might want to have a full functioning GL because the ledger is not for that. Yeah, yeah, it's just a bank feed and it's very rudimentary for what its purpose is.

The other thing too I just thought of at the very tail end of this, and I know we can wrap, but a lot of times you have the desktop as the accounting ledger but you have this other practice management system and then you have another system on top of it. So if you add collectively all the software you're paying plus the admin time, are you actually saving money?

Right.

No. No, you're not because you're doing— and the mistakes. I can tell you hands down on one file type that we're doing, the exposure of mistakes and the amount of time it takes for somebody to come in because at that point it's paper-centric office at this point that we're working with. It's a lot of money and time spent. That's unfortunate. It's already been spent. You thought it was right. It's not.

Penny wise and pound foolish. Yep.

Yes. We don't see any desktop file that truly does. I'll be honest with you, never has balanced on the trust side ever.

Yeah.

Unless we're doing the work because we know what we're doing, but I've never seen it. So.

Well, great conversation and very timely because, you know, as you said, Lynda, it's being phased out very soon. So it's here. I can remember when they first brought it up, we're all like, oh my God. And it's here.

Then they cranked the price up and got most of them to move on.

I know. Yeah. The Big Bird Steve voice came out. I love it.

Oh my God, Becky.

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Good topic. I think we're going to get canceled after all these topics we just did.

For scaring everybody.

We're going to get canceled for good reasons. Positive things. This was a good topic because it really is very informative. There's lots of great tips here that will help people if they're in desktop and they're like, I think I gotta move over, especially because we're in August recording this and September is the turning point time. So I can't even imagine. I haven't heard that they're not going to support it yet, but—

All signs show this.

All signs point to that, yes. Time to move is now. Yeah, we have a gun to your head.

Yeah, end of year, beginning of year, it's always so critical time as it is. And that's— yeah, it's great to have those cutoffs, but you have a lot of preparation and all that stuff too.

So yeah, and it's like you said, so if you're gonna do that fresh start, start thinking about it, start getting your ducks in a row, because it's a great time to clean up files and get rid of extra vendors and extra customers and clean up the chart of accounts and modernize it. If you're starting fresh, it's a great time to clean everything up. So when you do move over, it's fresh and clean and you got a brand new beginning.

Absolutely.

Bye-bye everyone.

Thank you.

Bye everyone.

Bye.