Intuit Enterprise Suite

I am not going to pontificate about the arguments for and against desktop vs online. It really doesn’t matter – as the handwriting is on the wall.

New subscriptions for Premier are not available as of the end of September, 2024 and it is more efficient and profitable for Intuit to focus their resources on the online ecosystem.

Intuit announced their new offering on September 17, 2024 and are exposing the details inch by inch. Even pricing remains a commodity that is negotiated between Intuit and the customer.

What we can tell you, is that the essential QuickBooks Online database and API is the same as it has been before the announcement. According to Intuit’s materials, here is what the site is designed to do:

• Better tools to manage multi-entity companies
• Custom dimensions for financial reporting as found in Advanced Online – commonly known in Desktop as classes. Online uses terms such as departments, locations, etc.
• Integration with Online Payroll
• Custom Roles and controls
• AI forecasting is promulgated throughout the product

If you notice the five items I mentioned, you might ask yourself – so what is new from what we already had?

The biggest changes from our perspective are twofold: Multi-Entity companies will no longer require a separate license for each company, and the dependence upon AI.

To date, it is common acceptance in the overall business community that nobody has generated a great return on their investment in AI.

As an older person (a pessimist is only an older optimist) I have learned to sit back when hype takes off, and I can clearly see that the supporting goods and proof are missing.

Yep, AI will help – and hurt – while somebody learns how to monetize it.

My first experiences with AI and ChatGPT made me quickly realize that HOW I worded the question dictated WHAT I would get back. I got frustrated and decided I could figure it out quicker on my own.

But Intuit is investing heavily in AI in all of their products – much as Microsoft has invested heavily in their CoPilot product.

Which reminds me of the first time I opened up an Excel spreadsheet with CoPilot, a message appeared saying “results may be inaccurate”. Well, what is the whole point?

I am sure it will be helpful in some cases, but will it take the place of running a business and securing what you need to do in the future? I doubt it. AI is more like a budget as a guideline – you might follow the framework, but business changes every day.

The jury is always out IMHO.

Not much really. We are still dealing with holes in the QBO API such as the majority of custom fields, missing linked transaction information, no payroll, and minimal inventory. And there is much, much more.

We have waited for years to produce our online product, because we couldn’t offer nearly the product for QBO that we did for desktop customers, and I didn’t see a significant ROI.

But there are some things we CAN provide such as financials and sales that will be helpful. And of course our included Power BI data models – which have been a hit for our desktop product.

We are pushing hard for spring of 2025, and we are putting all of our resources into QQube for QBO.