Nine months ago, I wrote that I was betting on Intuit Enterprise Suite.
It wasn’t a blind bet. I liked what I saw, I believed Intuit was serious about the product, and I was already
putting clients on it. But I was also very clear about what was missing.
Inventory was the big one. For a lot of the businesses we work with—distributors, manufacturers, wholesalers—that wasn’t a small missing feature. It was the feature that could stop the entire conversation.
Nine months later, that conversation is very different. And inventory isn’t the only thing that changed.
In my January article, I mentioned one client, a magazine publisher, that had started with five entities in IES.
Their CFO saw the consolidated reporting and said, essentially, “Why aren’t we doing this with the rest?”
They grew to seventeen entities.Today, they’re at more than forty—and they’re continuing to move business over from NetSuite.
That, to me, says more than a feature list ever could.
There’s a real feature list behind that growth, and I’ll lay it out below. It matters.
But what matters more is what happens after a client actually starts using the system.
Are they looking for a way out? Or are they asking what else they can move in?
This client keeps moving more in.
Here’s what came out this year: three major releases, plus a new industry edition.
Manufacturing, in early access. Bills of materials and manufacture orders, part of the bigger inventory push.
Construction edition. Job costing, AIA-style invoicing, and WIP reporting, maturing quickly. Construction features are now also available in QuickBooks Online Advanced, so for some contractors, Advanced may be the right solution.
In January, inventory was the key reason many clients still had to stay on Desktop. Some inventory features, like unit of measure, are already live today. The rest of a full inventory line starts rolling out in November, and more coming on-line in February:
These are exactly the things I’ve been waiting to see. For the distribution, manufacturing, and product companies I work with, this is the moment they have been holding out for.
I’ve worked with QuickBooks Desktop for decades. In fact, some of our clients are still following workflows I helped them build twenty years ago.
That’s exactly why I think Desktop businesses need to be careful about how they evaluate IES.
The wrong question is:
“Can I do every single thing exactly the way I did it in Desktop?”
Sometimes the answer is 'no.'
But then I ask another question:
“Why are you still doing it that way?”
I’ve watched companies spend hours exporting data, manipulating spreadsheets, importing transactions and
checking everything afterward because that was simply how the work had to be done.
Today, some of that work takes a few clicks. Some of it disappears entirely.
So when we migrate a company, I don’t want to recreate twenty years of workarounds in a newer piece of
software. I want to find out which of those workarounds we no longer need.
That has become one of the biggest lessons for me in this whole IES journey.
Outside of inventory, every major Desktop feature now has a home online, but some smaller features work
differently. Sometimes that’s something Intuit still needs to fix. Sometimes QuickBooks Online simply works a different way. Either way, if you take one thing from this article, take this:
1. Set up your company in QuickBooks Online first.
2. Run your real workflows and confirm they work.
3. Identify where they don’t, and decide whether that needs a fix or a change in how you work.
There is plenty of noise around AI right now, so I’m less interested in whether a product can say it “has AI”
and more interested in whether it saves my team or my client real time.
With large company files, it does. Bulk work that used to become a project of its own—export, spreadsheet, cleanup, re-import, check, fix, repeat—is becoming dramatically easier.
That changes how I look at the feature comparison between Desktop and Online.
A client might point to one small thing Desktop does differently. Fair enough. But if the new environment saves ten hours somewhere else, I have to look at the whole picture.
That’s the calculation businesses should be making.
This part hasn’t changed since January. I don’t sell software. I solve problems.
IES is not automatically the right answer because it has gotten better. For some businesses, QuickBooks
Online Advanced is enough. For others, IES is becoming an extremely strong fit. And there are still businesses where I’ll tell them to wait.
What has changed is the number of times I have to say, “You can’t move yet.”
That number keeps getting smaller. And once the next inventory releases arrive, it gets smaller again.
Multi-entity groups that need consolidated reporting
Businesses that track performance by project, location, or product line through dimensions
Construction companies that need multi-entity reporting
Clients who have outgrown QuickBooks Online Advanced but don’t want NetSuite or Sage Intacct
When QBO Advanced is enough: with construction features now in Advanced too, a single-entity contractor
may not need IES at all. That’s why every engagement starts with matching the client to the right product.
The biggest surprise over these nine months hasn’t actually been a feature. It’s been the speed.
We hosted Accelerate this year, and Intuit came in and sat with bookkeepers, accountants and CFOs who
actually work inside these businesses every day. People complained. They asked for things. They pointed out what didn’t work.
And then we started seeing those things show up in the product.
As someone implementing the software in the real world, that matters to me. I don’t expect a new platform to be perfect. I do expect the company building it to listen, respond and keep moving.
That is what I’ve seen.
Nine months ago, I said I believed IES was the future for businesses that need multi-entity management,
consolidated reporting, dimensions and a scalable cloud platform.
I still believe that.
The difference is that nine months ago I was talking largely about where I thought the product was going.
Today, I have a lot more evidence.