 QuickBooks Desktop 2024, QuickBooks software types and versions. Get ready and some coffee because we're locking into some non-stop QuickBooks Desktop 2024. First a word from our sponsor. Yeah actually we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers they don't want to be seen with us but but that's okay whatever because our merchandise is is better than their stupid stuff anyways like our trust me I'm an accountant product line yeah it's paramount that you let people know that you're an accountant because apparently we're among the only ones equipped with the number crunching skills to answer society's current deep complex and nuanced questions if you would like a commercial free experience consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com 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 softwares 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 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 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 the things 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 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 which 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 so that you kind of have to update it each year now you might still be able to buy QuickBooks desktop somewhere before the date that they that they switched to the subscription model in which case you know you can it'd be good to practice with that kind of software if nothing else because because it's still good so I mean it still does all the basic kind of things and you can practice with it but going forward it looks like everyone's going to be on the subscription thing now you would think on on the other hand on the other side of things you would think that after changing to the subscription model intuit it would be easier for intuit to keep the desktop version because now they don't have to deal with supporting all the prior versions they can just update everyone the same way they do online so will that impact them as to whether they're going to try to remove the desktop version not for the enterprise they're probably going to keep that but just for like the pro uh I I don't know so multiple company files for one purchase on the desktop versus only one company file per purchase for the online now obviously in certain areas being able to have multiple company files with one purchase of the desktop even if you have to pay annually in a subscription model is beneficial because for example if you're the type of bookkeeper that has multiple companies that they do bookkeeping for with one accounting software then that's great right that you're gonna you're gonna be able to do multiple company files and only pay the one for the one software because you because it's kind of like using Microsoft's word for example you can make multiple word documents and with one file the word documents being equivalent in this analogy to the company files whereas with the online version you have to purchase a new online company file new online company per new company which so you could see what the advantages would be now for the for for intuit of course you can see why they would want to have and force everybody to purchase a new company file if you're going to be starting up a new company so I would think that would be possibly one of the tension areas where you have a lot of bookkeepers which are saying hey look I have a business model that works with what I'm doing right now with the one company file and an online saying you know we want to we want to have everybody who starts a new company file to pay for a different subscription also the fact that you can have multiple company files is great for practicing and testing things so it's great for us from a student standpoint so if you're just using this to practice with having multiple company files that you can open is really useful because then you can open a company file you can practice a certain thing and then you can open a different company file and practice something different and even if this was your own file for example for your company if you wanted to test something out like the bank feeds for example or test something out like a software integration it would be great to have a sandbox to do that with before doing it to your actual company file if you back up your company file make a separate company file and then test these things out it's a great tool whereas that's more difficult to do with the online version with the online version I can't really just make a separate company file as easily and play with it there are alternatives they have the quickbooks test drive and stuff but they don't have as much functionality and you don't have as much customization than if you were to make your own company file so static backup files versus data stored on secure server now there's two main things that come with this backup files when we have backup files traditionally we think of those as we need them so that we don't lose our data that's one use of them but another use of them is that we can use the backup files to restore our data to a prior point in time and we can use the backup files to set up separate company files so that we can practice with having a sandbox to kind of practice with so first if we think of it as just having secure data the argument from Intuit is the online version is actually better they say because your data is stored on the Intuit servers and the Intuit servers are have been triple backed up and everything so the servers should actually be more secure than your computer and therefore the online version is more secure than the desktop version now that may be true but I still think the desktop version can be pretty secure if you properly do your backups very secure you know if you properly do your backups because what you want to do on your backup files is back them up to a separate drive or online in other words you could set up your backups to basically do automatic backups and back them up to say an online cloud or at least a separate external drive so they're not on your hard drive and you have a pretty you have a very secure I would think backup system now the other thing that's a benefit with the static backups on the other hand is that I can make multiple backups so if I'm backing up every night now I have a nightly backup which allows me if there's a problem to restore to any point that I want now the online is trying to implement some of this ability to restore to a prior point and if you get the advanced online I think they have the ability to do that but it's still not as easy as with the with the desktop version plus if I want to restore the online version it might actually rewrite the file that I'm in so if I want to go back to a prior point it's going to rewrite the file well what if I don't want to actually go back to the prior point but I want to look at the prior point to see what's different and then to see whether or not I want to go back to it it's going to be more difficult to do that if you only have one company file whereas if you can make multiple files with the desktop it would be like making a separate word document or a separate excel file and then having a sandbox to test out with it to see what went wrong so it's not just that I might want to restore to that date it might be that I want to see what happened from that date or when something happened from what date to the current date when did it go wrong and troubleshoot and that way the static backup files are better to do that with also if you have an online course like we're doing here then the static backup files possibly can be used to jump forward in our practice problem for example allowing you to have the exact data that we have on our side without having to work through a very long practice problem in order to get there so from a practice standpoint from a sandbox standpoint and that kind of stuff the static backup files are actually still have a lot of advantages over the online storage on the server advantages that possibly are not simply just the losing of the data but rather using the backup files in other ways that can be very useful so the desktop version as I mentioned with the backup and multiple company files those being the major reasons the desktop version is great to practice with so it's great for a course like even if even if they got rid of the desktop version which again they're going to keep the the enterprise version you would think so it's still good to practice with and will be in use because the enterprise version has sustained layout in essence as the other desktop version it just has more functionality in certain areas but even if they got rid of all of it it would still be a great tool to practice with because of the fact that you can have multiple files because of the fact that we can restore these backup files to a certain point in the practice problem. Take that online desktops not KOJet just through like an a do a kick up hold on I got in the street fighter in any case the desktop has a consistent design whereas the online version has a changing design either of these can be seen as a pro or a con depending on how you look at it but from the desktop perspective even if you go back many years into the past and look at the layout of the desktop version it will look quite similar to the layout currently in 2024 so from a consistency standpoint that's great because you know where things are located and that's not going to change all that much whereas with the online version it's changing all the time advocates of the online version would say that their ability to change it because it's a web-based type software allowing them to do kind of a B type of testing helps them to optimize the layout of the online website and make changes to improve it so again there's pros and cons with it in my opinion I've used the desktop version for a long time the layout system is well laid out in my opinion it has the drop downs that are similar to what you saw in microsoft word before they have the ribbon with the online version the layout is fine as well but it has changed a lot and some of the changes you can argue as to whether they're being optimized changes or they're kind of catering to a certain audience they've changed things like the terminology for example they often move buttons around and whatnot so hopefully they get to a position where they find the ideal or optimized website but my feeling is that they're never going to get there because the developers always want to make changes they get paid to make changes to the website so I think that might be driving the fact that they're making changes basically for change's sake so I think it's always been a good it's always been easy to use in my opinion but you have to basically deal with the fact that they're going to move stuff around from time to time they're going to name things differently and you just go with the flow man everything the functionality will still be there but it might be located somewhere else and they might be using some new trendy language for a time period and whatnot and and that's the way it goes desktop version enterprise may fit special needs like inventory tracking better so with the desktop version you have certain things that the desktop version is better at one of them might be the inventory tracking we'll talk about some of the specializations with the desktop version which might be more applicable to certain types of industries as they get larger typically right so that's why the enterprise version of the desktop doesn't look like it's really in danger of being canceled whereas the non-enterprise or the or the standard quick books for smaller companies is the one where more questions come up as to what is happening with into it based on kind of like their marketing strategy which clearly seems to be guarantee people and steering people in that section of the market towards the online so with the online also has its own special kind of cases which we'll look at in a second it's really good with integrations oftentimes because it's a web-based software and with the bank feeds are things that it's quite good at more difficult to work from different locations so if you're getting the desktop version it's going to be on your computer so it's located on your computer and therefore it's going to be a little bit more difficult to work remotely whereas the online version being cloud based is going to be easier to log in remotely now again there's pros and cons with this because if you're in a bigger company with the desktop version you might be able to set it up so that you could still have remote access to the to it even though it's going to be on a server for example or something like that or on a static computer as opposed to on into its servers whereas the online is on the into it servers and therefore it's going to the hub point is going to be on the into it servers some people would probably argue that the desktop version is more secure that it's not on the into it servers if you have a solid kind of setup process because they would have to actually hack into your computer basically to get access to your files whereas if you're on the online version you would think that if they can log into your account then they can get into your file so that the server if of into it is secure but you want to make sure you have the double multifactor authentication and all that kind of stuff set up so that people can't access your account that way by basically having the password and and that kind of thing also you have to be careful of course connecting to the cloud based software from wi-fi areas and and and and that kind of thing so even if you want to do that you want to be careful of accessing your data from like a coffee shop you want to make sure you have the vpn and and all that kind of stuff if you're accessing sensitive information from different locations whereas if you're on a desktop version i think it works quite well if you just do your bookkeeping and you just have it on your computer so that you're not accessing it from anywhere in the world it's on your actual computer actual computer and again so that could possibly lead you to feel a little bit more secure about it but in any bank feed may be a little more difficult to use versus the online version connects to the bank very well so both of them have the ability to connect to your banks be able to pull in the data from the banks to your system however because the online version is online it's more of a seamless type of process to do that so the desktop version is pretty good it's not it works it works almost as well but you might have to take one extra step to say i want you to import the data from the bank feeds and also when you update the software every year you might have an added step to make sure that the bank feeds are properly aligned whenever that happens whereas the online version once you set it up it's pretty much connected pretty nicely add on apps may be more difficult to use for the on for the desktop versus the online for the same reason desktop version you might have access to add on apps that might give you more special features within quickbooks but because it's a desktop software it might not be as easy to integrate certain types of apps whereas if you're on the online version then you might it's easier to set up the online version you would think to be able to be adoptable to other add on type of apps now you want to be careful with what type of add on apps that you're going that you want to be using i think the online version can also lead people to basically do things that they probably that they might not want to do or might want to think about a bit more before using other types of apps and whatnot but so there could be pros and cons with that but in general if if you're trying to look at other integrations within quickbooks with other apps then i then you then you might it might be easier for some of those on the online version of the desktop okay so once we if we choose the desktop version then we get into what kind of desktop versions do we want so the standard desktop is the pro premiere plus so that's going to be kind of equivalent to quickbooks online but the desktop version that's the one that's for small to mid-sized businesses which is as you would think into it seems to be steering those types of businesses towards the online and that's where the question comes up are they trying to steer everybody off of it and then cancel it right so that and so but it's basically the same format as the enterprise but the enterprise is for the more advanced companies or bigger companies that have specialized type needs so so it's still good to use any desktop version if you want to learn it because the advanced version the enterprise version doesn't look like it's going away because it's going to be there and all of the normal stuff that's in pro premiere is also going to be in the larger packages it's just that the larger packages have more specializations so within the enterprise version then you have options such as the general business contractor so they have enterprise that's going to be set up more specifically towards the industry of contractors manufacturing and wholesale so there's special needs with like contractors because they might have like a job cost kind of system for example and manufacturers might have a process cost system which have special types of needs as well as wholesale versus retail sales not for profit could have specialized needs so at least the terminology for not for profits is going to be sometimes different than the for profit professional services and then retail and so these are kind of like the subgroups of quickbooks enterprise that you can go into so again the general tree that you want to think about when thinking about the software is what company do I want to be working with comparing like into it to other providers of the software and then within the company or even this might be your first question do I want to use online cloud based software or desktop software do I want the software on my computer or do I want it on the cloud and as you think about that question you could apply that then also to the different companies like into it versus other companies cloud based versus desktop desktop and then and then if you decide on a particular type such as we hear on the desktop if we choose the desktop then the question is what kind of desktop version do I want these are going to be a lot more similar than if I'm looking desktop versus cloud based desktop versus cloud based very different they're almost like completely different software you almost think of them as though they were different companies right because they're going to be very different look and feel although they'll have the same kind of general functionality when you get into just the desktop then you're kind of looking as though you you have one tier level and then they're giving you perks as you as you change that's one way you can kind of think of it we're not going into the different aspects of the online version because this course is focused on the desktop so now we're on the desktop version and you can say well you have the basic version and then you can kind of upgrade to the enterprise if you upgrade to enterprise then you have specialized fields that you could have just your general specialization and you might even be able to specialize above and beyond that as you go into these the more advanced enterprise users usually for larger companies with specialized needs