Linda Artesani breaks down Intuit's $10 QuickBooks Online price increase and ProAdvisor bundle hike. She argues the free ProAdvisor benefits—lead generation, training, free QBO Accountant Plus, payroll services, and marketing tools—offset the cost. Her advice: factor these savings into pricing, raise client fees transparently, and use the free resources to justify higher rates.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping, and I'm one of the admins here in the community, and I wanted to do a video to just talk about the email we all got this morning with the price increases. So we had a price increase for QuickBooks Online. It went up $10, which it's done the past couple of years. QuickBooks Desktop also got a price increase with the ProAdvisor program bundle. It's always had that. When you buy the bundle, you buy the software and you get— it comes together. So you get a price increase there as well. And I've been watching social media today and kind of sitting back and thinking about it, taking that breath and thinking about the increase and how it's going to affect my business. And I wanted to do this video because I know everybody is probably— I think a lot of people are venting right now. Right. We're all like into it's the devil. And I've been using QuickBooks my entire career. So I've been an all-only QBO girl for— well, QBO girl for the past few years, 5 or 6 years, but QuickBooks Desktop as well for a long time. And I've been thinking about the increase. And it's kind of funny because I was working on a client file and I work with a lot of attorneys and I was looking at the price that they are paying for leads. And I started to think about it because I built my business on the ProAdvisor program. And guess how much I've paid to be in the QuickBooks ProAdvisor program? Zero. I have not had to pay for the leads. They come to me. And it's almost like when you get stuff for free, it's expected. So you don't think about the value. And as I'm working through this file, and I'm seeing the amount of money that this client is paying to get the lead generation, made me think about that when I started to think about the fact that I don't have to pay for that. I get it for free. And there's other things that are for free. And that's why it prompted me to do the video because And everybody's really yelling and screaming. And first of all, there's nothing that we can do about the increase. You can raise your clients' prices or you eat the increase, right? If you're bundling, if you're not bundling, you don't have to really worry about it. So I started to think about the fact that we get the leads for free. It's a pretty big value. What about the training that we get? We get a boatload of training. I learned almost everything from all the tests that I've taken over the years and all the free training I've been a junkie on because I love what I do. So I'm like a tech junkie when it comes to, oh, a webinar. I'm even taking the ones in Canada because they've got some really fabulous ones in Canada. They have the training for advanced is phenomenal. If you haven't taken advantage of that, do it. You can get paid more. There's training, live trainings. They have live trainings. I've not done that yet. But they've got live trainings and I know a lot of people are teaching them and they're great people. We get free payroll. And that's the one thing I think a lot of people miss, that when you get your free program, by the way, your QuickBooks Online accountant program's for free. We don't have to pay for it, right? It's a Plus version. And Intuit, I'd like to get that Advanced one for free because I'm in love with that program. I've got a client on it. It's great. But we do get Plus, which is $60 or $70 now, right? Get that for free. So you start to factor those things in. So you would have marketing if you had to do marketing for some of these things. You're getting the marketing for free when you put your ProAdvisor page up, right? You get that for free. So there's no marketing there. You can actually run your business in this field if you partner with Intuit and get a lot of stuff for free. So you start to weigh that against the price increase. It doesn't make it any easier that you want to get the money back in from your client. I'm going to get a letter together, so maybe share that with the group so they can see what they could send out to their customers. I really, really, really want to enforce that if you're going to raise the prices on your client, call them, talk to them, do a Zoom meeting like I'm doing right here, and just sit down and talk to them and just say their prices are going up. It's a great opportunity to start to maybe increase your pricing. If you've been like me, I sit back and I don't want to upset the apple cart and I don't raise the rates. So now's a great chance to raise the rates a little bit and maybe raise it up enough To cover the increases from the past few times that it's gone up and then maybe raise your pricing up and try it. I mean, it is difficult conversation to have with your client, but you see their books, you see what they're charging. They probably raised their rates in the past few years. So I think that maybe if you think of it in the perspective of all the stuff we get for free, I mean, payroll, what is that worth? If depending on your firm, that's a pretty substantial savings that we don't have to pay for a payroll service and they do our payroll taxes. There's a lot involved when you do payroll and if you're not taking advantage of all of these things I'm just telling you about, take advantage of it because if you're upset about the increase, look at the benefit that you get. And then we get also those tiered things that are also in the tiers of, you know, if you're— I'm an Elite ProAdvisor, but if you look at it, you can get a lot of the savings like Constant Contact. There's some savings there too. So I think if we just sit back and start to look at the whole picture, so instead of saying I'm gonna leave and I'm gonna go back to Excel or whatever you think you're gonna do for the software, think of the time savings. Think of the things you get for free and maybe start to look at it in that perspective. If you sat in my office today looking through some books and saying, oh my gosh, look at— they're paying for leads. Right there alone, I'm saving all that money with the ProAdvisor, with the ProAdvisor page where you get the leads coming in. It's been for free. And hopefully this is helpful. Little tip from me. I know it's, it's, you know, things seem like things are always going up, right? So Hopefully this helps soften the blow of it a little bit. And, you know, feel free to reach out and please don't shoot the messenger. But I just wanted to let you know my take on it and my thoughts on it as I sit here and watching, you know, the things happening on social media. And I said, I'm just going to do a quick video. So thanks for watching. And like we always say, together we all succeed. So hopefully, maybe if you start to think of it in that way, it doesn't feel as such a, you know, an upsetting thing. Maybe leave you with a little bit of a positive spin for the end of your day. Thanks. Bye.
