I just got into accounting about 5 years ago, and during my time at school, I did not hear one bit about QuickBooks Online. We had a class that was partially devoted to learning QuickBooks, so it’s not like any of intuit’s products weren’t mentioned. When I started working, I started mostly using QB desktop, but have been given more and more clients to work on that use QBO. The essence of my experience is that it has made me feel as though QBO is relatively new.
I talked with a retired accountant recently and asked him if QBO had been around when he was working, and he said it’s been around for quite some time. I was rather surprised. I then decided to look up exactly when QBO launched, and cannot find any information whatsoever on this topic. The best I can find is that there was a major outage in service in 2009, and there was nothing in those articles suggesting that the software service had just launched, so it must have been around a couple years before it. I can also find a press release about the “All-New” QBO in 2013 I think, but it’s clear that’s just a major overhaul (obviously, it had to exist in 2009). The Wikipedia article for QB says nothing other than QBO exists. Intuit’s article doesn’t give a date for launch either.
Anyone have an idea from their personal experience, or can point me to a history of accounting software that would have the information?
“Intuit has served small businesses and accountants with QuickBooks for more than 20 years. The company was an early innovator in cloud accounting when it first launched QuickBooks Online in 2001”
Catch is most businesses didn’t have broadband access back then so doing anything online wasn’t practical. The first time I worked with Quickbooks was and there was talk about switching to Online, but we kept to the standalone version.
Ok, thanks. 2001 definitely seems really early for cloud computing, for the reason you stated. So I guess maybe it’s only been picked up more slowly by the folks at my firm and/or Intuit is aggressively pushing it more recently and/or my perceptions are just way off.
I guess I failed to mention that another reason that it felt new was that it uses a completely different code base than QuickBooks desktop, although I’m not sure exactly why I would think that was a sign of being new. It still is baffling to me that they even have different code bases and different ways of handling various things.
Cloud based software is the big push for companies because they can better monitor pirated software and charge more through a subscription than a single purchase. Unfortunately, this is the wave of the future (Office 365, Abobe Online, etc).
I’ve worked at various companies over the years and it drives me crazy when people say, “Oh, you know Quickbooks, so you’ll be able to easily do this.” I always know when an Accountant is involved in the writing of the Job Description or the interview when it’s mentioned, “What version of Quickbooks have you worked with?”.