If you haven’t already heard the news, Intuit is sunsetting the Intuit Education program that provided free student licenses for QuickBooks Desktop (QBDT), ending with the 2021 version.
It is our understanding that QuickBooks will move to a subscription-only pricing model. Instead of businesses buying a copy of the software, all companies will be required to subscribe instead.
As with other softwares that follow the subscription model, QuickBooks Desktop Users will receive regular enhancements and upgrades as new features are released. Additional services like receipt management and online bill pay sweeten the deal.
But from our perspective as part of the academic community, subscription-based pricing means Intuit has no way of providing software downloads to students without having a payment method on file.
While Intuit will continue selling their QuickBooks Desktop software for the foreseeable future, all of their innovation is happening in their Online platform. For this reason, Questiva Consultants has made the transition to developing a comprehensive QuickBooks Online curriculum.
If you already have QuickBooks Desktop 2020 or 2021 installed on your classroom computers, your software will continue to work for the next few years. Because there is no longer any way to buy standalone copies of QBDT 2021, students will be unable to download the software for use on their own computers effective August 1, 2022. In addition, Intuit typically has a 3-year life cycle per version, meaning that your QBDT 2017-2019 copies may soon stop working.
Questiva Consultants will continue to offer our QuickBooks Desktop Complete 2020 and QuickBooks Complete 2021 curricula, textbooks, sample files, and all supporting materials, as long as you are able to keep using your software. Going forward, we will not, however, release an updated 2022 version of the textbook.
We encourage your school to begin making the transition to QuickBooks Online, the web-based version of the QuickBooks. To replace the old Desktop academic program, Intuit Education now provides free portals to instructors, where you can create free 1-year QuickBooks Online student accounts and manage your classes from one dashboard.
This will mean a major shift in how you teach your courses. Making the transition to the cloud-based version (which we call QuickBooks Online or QBO) will be challenging at first, but exciting and rewarding in the end. We are ready to help with your transition effort.
Intuit has been putting all their development resources into QBO, while QBDT has remained largely unchanged over time. The opportunity to explore all the innovations in the industry and time-saving features should be welcomed by all instructors, because you know that you are training your students for success in the modern workplace using cutting-edge technology.
We, at Questiva Consultants, remain committed to helping you and your students learn QuickBooks for job success by keeping up with the latest developments and trends in bookkeeping and accounting.
