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The Painful Path of QB Desktop to QBO
I’m interested in thoughts for anyone with a professional finance/accounting staff who has made the painful transition from QB Desktop to QBO (currently being “forced” due to Intuit’s waning support of QB Desktop). QBO is made for lay people with small, unsophisticated businesses who have limited or no understanding of true accounting systems. No accommodations have been made for nonprofits as if they do not exist. You are forced into the old school approach of assigning #s to the Chart of Accounts if you want to keep the account order you have carefully curated for readable financial statements (can’t drag accounts into desired position like in Desktop). The search function is complete garbage (why not model if after the strong search function in Desktop??). Functionality and editability is limited in every process. And don’t get me started about their Payroll add-on (which will be 3x as expensive as Desktop’s flat fee for payroll), which is even worse. Spent 6 hours one day on the phone with their customer service to resolve a single payroll issue and no one could solve it – we had to jerry-rig some time-consuming manual solutions. And a hundred other issues. Again, why not model the Payroll module on the Desktop version – it worked great and was fairly flexible. Sigh . . .
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6 Replies
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Hi Mary Ellen
I feel your pain as well! While QBO certainly solved connectivity issues for so many organizations that went remote in 2020 a lot of folks are having the same reaction as you are. I really like Desktop payroll for its ability to allocate costs between classes and customers which eases our task of not only functional allocations but also allocation to grants. The enhancements certainly seem few and far between in this area. Hope to hear from others on this and perhaps what they have done to adapt to the change. Thanks for posting!
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I spoke with our CPA about this very issue and she told me their QB expert thinks we can keep QB Desktop even though QB is “forcing” everyone toward online. I am keeping my fingers crossed as we certainly cannot afford the added expense of the online payroll package. I had no idea the functionality was so backward so thanks for that heads up!
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Oh no, I”m on this train, too. QB told me that I could keep Desktop, but just be prepared that they have done zero updates to it in the last few years, don’t intend to put any time/focus into it and would eventually drop it all together. It seems it is inevitable.
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Having been in all sizes of orgs and gone through the transitions here are some recommendations.
Payroll: don’t use QB for Payroll. Look at other payroll/HRIS systems out there. I really liked Paylocity but there are others.
In the NPO space there are other options including Aplos that I really liked.
If you end up having multiple people in the accounting function look at other ERP’s like Netsuite or Intact.
If you use QB I highly encourage the use of other systems. Inventory can be managed in a good POS. Donor data in a good donor management system. Payroll is a good HRIS.
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We tried the QB online version last year and we concluded that was not fit for our organization’s needs. One of the main reasons was that we couldn’t get a report that showed detailed income with donor names. This made it impossible for us to reconcile donations. Also when we tried to deposit a group of donations in one entry, customer names were hidden. Exporting reports in Excel format is not as good as in the Desktop version. QuickBooks Desktop offers more customization.