 QuickBooks Desktop 2024, QuickBooks software types and versions. Get ready and some coffee because we're locking into some non-stop QuickBooks Desktop 2024. When thinking about applying Accounting Software to our business or possibly just learning Accounting Software, one of the first questions which will inevitably come up is which type of Accounting Software do I want to be working with? Which is a complex question because there's a lot of different types of Accounting Software out there, each of them having their pros and their cons. What we would like to do here is try to think of a system where we can take this complex question, break it down into digestible chunks, possibly visualizing it as kind of like a tree diagram so we can analyze on different levels of that type of tree diagram. This is not the only way that you might want to do these comparisons but it is one way that we could do these types of comparisons. So obviously one type of comparison you might want to do is to be looking at different types of leading companies that have Accounting Software such as Intuit, Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks, whether it be the desktop and online version and make your comparisons that way and then within each of the companies that you're looking at in our case of course Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks you might then compare the types of software that they have within them. The major two types of softwares these days you can have two broad categories of software, one being is it a desktop oriented type of software, two being is it an online type orientation of the software. The desktop will typically be defined as you have the actual data file on your computer which has some pros and cons to it versus the online version in which case you have the data file on the company server of the company that you purchased it from in this case Intuit. Now this same kind of tree diagram you can compare to other companies other than Intuit as well if you're looking at competitors you could ask the question is their primary product an online version of the software or a desktop version of the software and that's one way that you could start to make your comparisons make a little bit more sense and have apples to apples type comparisons. So in this case we're looking at Intuit and we want to just compare the desktop versus the online this course will be orientated towards the desktop but we want to just first take a look at this comparison and then once we're in the desktop we can take a look at more kind of versions within the desktop so once you've decided say on the desktop for example then you have different versions such as the standard version versus the enterprise advanced versions and specializations within the advanced version. Okay so some comparisons on the desktop side one of the big questions coming up is is there a risk that Intuit is going to be canceling the desktop version. So there's a lot of debate over this if you look at the marketing for QuickBooks you can see that they're highly marketing the online version at least with regards to the market for the pro product so for the standard kind of small to mid size type of business. Now note it's unlikely it seems at this point in time that the enterprise version of the desktop which is going to be like the more advanced version which Intuit kind of sometimes thinks of as though it's a separate thing right so if they say QuickBooks desktop they might be talking about QuickBooks Pro Plus if you say QuickBooks Enterprise it's still QuickBooks desktop but that's like their advanced type version and it seems like at this point in time at least it seems like that one is here to stay because it has so much of those specialty items. So if I was to make the guess here on what Intuit is trying or thinking to do it seems by their marketing which you can see if you go to their actual webpage that they're trying to gear most people that are on the small to mid size to the online version and then trying to use the desktop version more for the advanced users that would be going towards the enterprise and the specialty type of areas and it looks like they're trying to phase out the small to mid size businesses on the desktop version will they be able to do that I don't know it seems like that's been their plan ever since the online version has been has been out there and you know as you can see by the fighters up here that the online version has the reach and whatnot so they were kind of expecting the knockout to happen like in the first round for the desktop version but the desktop version has some crazy moves and whatnot and a lot of people like the desktop version so they haven't really been able to knock out the desktop version yet and it seems like now the online version is trying to take advantage of its longer reach and it's like stepping back and it's trying to wear out the desktop version by hitting it from a range with their marketing at this point in time but who knows we don't really know if the desktop versions are going to go away but it seems to me that the that the online or the desktop enterprise will still be applicable on the advanced side of things would be for the larger companies and I still think it's going to be difficult for them to completely remove the even the standard desktop because there's advantages to them that many people like which we'll talk more about here okay so subscription model subscription model notice that one of the desktop one of the differences between the desktop and online version used to be that you can buy the desktop version at a one price and then you can use it for multiple years and you can see why that would appeal to certain bookkeepers and businesses that didn't want to pay for the new version because they just need the standard use of a standard software for multiple years and older versions of the software did quite fine did quite well it it was also useful for bookkeepers that had like small clients that didn't have any special needs because then they can buy like one version of the software and they can basically take care of the bookkeeping needs for multiple uh companies with that version of the software not even have to update it and whatnot now obviously on the intuit side of things you can imagine they wouldn't like that because if if they're trying to support multiple versions of the software that's going to be more difficult on their side so what they did is they moved even the desktop version to a subscription model