QBO Multi-Company Discounts are Here!

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QBO just became the most cost-effective way to keep books for clients with multiple companies. Using one of my real-life clients let’s do the math.

One of my clients bought QuickBooks Desktop Accountant Edition (so they could simultaneously open two QuickBooks Desktop companies at once), it cost them $1000.00. They also opted into Cloud Hosting so all users could concurrently work, that's 3 silver users at 69.00 a month for a total of 207.00 a month in hosting services. If we factor the software cost and monthly hosting over 1-year, that's really a total of $299.33 per month. But for comparison later I'm just going to use the $207.00 per month.

Now let's look at the previous QBO pricing for one of my clients who has 8 companies with QBO Plus subscriptions. Under the prior pricing without multi-company discounts they would pay for 8 companies at 50.00 a month for a total of 400.00 a month in subscriptions. Can you say 'ouch'?

With the new QBO Plus wholesale multi-company pricing my client with the 8 companies will pay 25.00 a month for the first company and then just 5.00 a month for the other 7 QBO Plus companies. When you add that up it's a total of just $60.00 a month!  "WOW, what a savings."

The previous pricing structure of QBO has been one of the obstacles for businesses that had more than one company file and it simply became excessive around 3 or 4 company files, so they elected to use a desktop product in a hosted environment. 

But that's not the only good news, there are a couple of other wins for our clients. In the case of my client they have been wishing for a true 'view only user' and now with QBO Plus it’s a free feature!

With QBO running all of their multiple companies they can open as many of their company files at one-time just by using multiple Chrome browsers. This means more transparency, more efficiency and even more cost effectiveness.

So here is a little comparison chart I put together that recaps the pricing I listed above.

I realize that not every client will have the same savings as this example, but for my 'real life' business with 8 companies these are the numbers, You can see for yourself how much of a savings the new QBO Plus Multi-company wholesale discount pricing is going to realize for them.

So you may be asking, "what are the terms and conditions" for this new pricing.  Well here are the FAQs:

Eligibility

  • Only Intuit QuickBooks Accountants can offer this pricing, it's part of the 'wholesale' offerings we can provide to our clients.
  • Pricing only applies to QBO Plus subscriptions and they must be NEW to QBO.
  • The client must be based in the US (these are US QBO subscriptions only).

Pricing

  • The clients 1st QBO Plus company is billed at the regular wholesale price and each additional QBO Plus subscription is billed at $5.00 a month up to 14 companies.

Terms of Offer

  • This offer lasts 5 years, at the end of 5 years the client's pricing will go back to then-current wholesale pricing.
  • In-order to keep offer active during the entire 5 years at least one primary and one additional company within the bundle must remain subscribed without interruption, and remain active users and clients.

Billing

  • The Intuit QuickBooks Accountant will be billed monthly for the regular wholesale price of the 1st QBO Plus subscription and $5.00 a month for each additional up to 14 companies. 

Get Started

  • Currently, you must call Intuit at 888-350-1725 to get the bundled discount.

Some people will be disappointed that the new multi-company discount plan doesn't apply to existing QBO users who need additional companies....we can only hope that Intuit will reconsider this.

By discounting the subscriptions, the overall service isn't being discounted, it's the same QBO Plus for every Company, and now the cost of multiple subscriptions shouldn't really get in the way of facilitating the 'best plan' for the client's overall needs.

I'm by no means the only ProAdvisor who has pushed this idea with the people at Intuit even though I wrote an article about the need for it. I suspect a lot of you have pointed out the fact that big companies simply were not going to shell out for multiple 'full price' subscriptions when they had a lot of company files associated with their businesses. 

One high-ranking Intuit official told Murph during Scaling New Heights last summer that Intuit already had 'this need' high on their list of critical topics for the future of QuickBooks Online.  It appears that they heard what ProAdvisors were telling them, and they have responded with a great deal for those clients needing to migrate multiple companies to QuickBooks Online Plus.