Are you wondering about the future of QuickBooks? Many of you are when it comes to QuickBooks Desktop, but perhaps you might even begin wondering about "the future of QuickBooks Online."
The most recent Intuit Financial Reports for their Fourth Quarter and Full Year (2024) and their 2025 Fiscal Guidance (aka: Looking forward statement) are ripe with information about where Intuit is going with these products.
The Company's Chief Executive, Sasan Goodarzi, reported to shareholders, "Our strategy and five Big Bets are solving our customers' biggest problems as we deliver on our mission to power prosperity for consumers, and small and mid-market businesses."
Several statements reflect on where QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online are going.
First, as of August, Intuit renamed the Small Business and Self-Employed Group to the "Global Business Solutions Group." They cited the "new name better aligns with the global reach of the Mailchimp and QuickBooks platform, the company's focus on serving both small and mid-market businesses, and its vision to become the end-to-end platform that customers use to grow and run their business."
This statement is directly reflective of where QuickBooks Online may be headed.
Regarding Intuit's announced guidance for the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, Intuit included, "The company expects desktop ecosystem revenue to decline approximately 20 percent in the first quarter of fiscal 2025, but return to growth in the second quarter. The first quarter desktop growth outlook reflects changes the company made to its QuickBooks desktop offerings in early fiscal 2024 to complete the transition to a recurring subscription model, including more frequent product updates. The company expects these changes to lower revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2025 by approximately $160 million. This includes approximately $50 million that was recognized in the first three quarters of fiscal 2024, approximately $60 million recognized in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024, and approximately $50 million that the company expects to shift from the first quarter of fiscal 2025 to later quarters in fiscal 2025."
This clearly tells us that Intuit is willing to take 'hundreds of millions of dollars in lowered revenues' due to "the changes the company made to its QuickBooks desktop offerings...". In other words, it is stopping the sales of QuickBooks Desktop products like Pro and Premier that traditionally launched new 'year releases' during their 'First Fiscal Quarter' ending October 31, 2024.
QuickBooks Desktop is like a Dinosaur stuck and sinking into the tar pits. The only question is how long before the struggling beast is submerged into oblivion.
But let's get back to that 'Global Business Solutions Group' and a few statements reflecting what may happen with QuickBooks Online.
During the Fourth-Quarter Conference Call on August 22, Goodarzi reported, "In fiscal 2024, QBO Advanced customers grew 28 percent. In fiscal 2025, we are accelerating investments to better serve customers who have more complex needs, such as more sophisticated accounting and reporting requirements, business intelligence, money solutions, human capital management, professional services, and customer acquisition solutions with Mailchimp, all assisted by AI-powered human experts."
Goodarzi went on to say, "Looking ahead, we are bringing QuickBooks and Mailchimp together to create a single growth platform, differentiated in the markets where we have product market fit...", "We are in a great position to win as an end-to-end platform...".
So returning to the financial reports, it becomes pretty clear. QuickBooks Online Accounting including QuickBooks Live or Assist, Payments, Payroll, Capital, and Mailchimp are targeted for a single AI-driven platform.
Now, on October 10, at 2:00 PM Eastern, Intuit is announcing their 'latest platform offering' a new "all-in-one" solution during an "Intuit Accountants Innovation Showcase." In a short recorded video, Ted Callahan, now Director, Partner Segment, Global Business Solutions Group (title change resulting from the above mentioned SBSE Group re-naming), spoke about the upcoming innovative solution inspired by 'the accounting community's feedback and that of their clients.'
During the upcoming event the top mid-market related innovations for 2024 will be presented along with those 'coming soon' and a demonstration of the new product. Ted will be joined by Laurent Sellier, Sr. VP of QuickBooks Mid-market and Workforce Solutions, and David Hahn, Sr. VP of the QuickBooks Money Platform.
That would appear to pretty much confirm the start of a 'single platform'.
While it seems obvious (to me at least) that a single platform would evolve from 'QuickBooks (Online) Advanced', one should wonder if it will called "QuickBooks"? QuickBooks has the connotation of being 'accounting for small business' with a few small-to-medium size businesses in the mix.
With that in mind, let's remember that Intuit just changed 'QuickBooks Connect' to 'Intuit Connect' this year. Because the name Intuit is known around the globe as a financial solutions company, it seems more likely this new 'all-in-one' solution will be called "Intuit something" (other than QuickBooks).
David Leary and I had the opportunity to chat about this subject while attending the combined Oracle CloudWorld - NetSuite SuiteWorld last week. David was already preparing an 'Accounting Podcast' presentation on this topic. He and I agree that we will likely see the new solution called, 'Intuit One,' or 'Intuit Enterprise,' etc.
Still, we can speculate, can't we? That's why you want to be sure to attend my upcoming Future Forward session on The Future of QuickBooks (which is also the September edition of QB Talks). It will be a perfect opportunity for you to learn more about what I think of all this 'financial dumbo-jumbo' and 'forward-looking jargon' means regarding the QuickBooks you love means, whether that's Desktop or Online.
I will also discuss some of the alternatives you might have if you don't need or want an 'all in one' solution for mid-to-enterprise businesses.