Goodbye QuickBooks Desktop

By Geoff Suval, Regional Managing Partner, J. Galt Finance Suite -

QuickBooks Desktop (QBD or Desktop) was first released by Intuit in 1983. Since its introduction, tens of thousands of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) have come to rely on QBD, daily, to manage their books and accounting needs.

However, QuickBooks Desktop will be retired soon, and ongoing support will be sunsetting. Despite Intuit’s proactive outreach to existing QBD users, this will still take many businesses by surprise and leave them scrambling for a new solution.

When will this momentous change happen? Unfortunately, it’s difficult to get an exact date. It could have been as early as midnight on January 31st, 2023, but other reports say, “after May 31st, 2023, with no more critical security updates starting on June 1, 2023”. And different dates will likely apply to the different versions of QuickBooks Desktop.

What is certain, however, is that QuickBooks Desktop and any ongoing support for its various versions is going to end.

As mentioned above, Intuit has been actively communicating the QBD sunset with its current Desktop client users. To date, many of those clients have not been responsive.

If history is any indication, when other popular products and services have been retired in the past, things have not gone smoothly for those that have come to rely on them. Human nature causes people to wait until the very last minute to find alternative solutions. This almost always leads to problems for businesses who can’t afford the disruption.

Many QuickBooks Desktop users who have put off migrating to a new solution will try to leave Desktop en masse. This will create a log jam of businesses needing to migrate their data and get properly set up on currently available QuickBooks Online (QBO or Online) solutions in a hurry.

This will cause pain and frustration for the tens of thousands of SMBs that will need assistance with the process of migrating their data from QBD to the upgraded QBO options.

The sooner you decide to migrate from Desktop to Online, the better.

Experienced QuickBooks Solutions Providers (QSPs) are available to help make your migration from QBD to QBO seamless.

When Intuit introduced the Online version several years ago, it was NOT the tool that many hoped it would be. Initially, QBO wasn’t as user friendly and didn’t have all the capabilities that its Desktop devotees had come to expect.

However, over the past few years, and as the result of extensive customer feedback, numerous upgrades and new releases, QuickBooks Online’s functionality is now better and more comprehensive than anything previously available with the old Desktop versions.

So, now is the time to explore QuickBooks Online anew. QBO has the capabilities and functionality that successful small and mid-sized businesses need to operate more efficiently and profitably than ever before.

Please don’t wait another day. Make the call and partner with a QuickBooks Solutions Provider with a long history of working with Intuit and strong experience in helping companies migrate from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online. If you have questions feel free to contact me at gsuval@jgalt.io