You can do a few at a time to help ease the transition. Next – and this is really important – realize that you don’t have to convert all of your clients at once. When you sign up for QuickBooks Online Accountant (free for accounting professionals), you get a free QuickBooks Online Plus subscription for you to use for your firm’s books.

This will help you gain confidence and familiarity with the process. How do you start converting desktop clients to QuickBooks Online? First, start by converting your own firm.

Intuit ® invests a lot to help accounting professionals enhance our knowledge and skills so that we can confidently support our clients and help them move to QuickBooks Online. Plus, there are other training resources provided by Intuit’s Accountant University to help accounting professionals learn more about QuickBooks Online, converting and more. The training and certification is included (all free) and you can do it all online. Next, I really encourage you to become a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor for QuickBooks Online. If you haven’t checked out QuickBooks Online within the last year or so, you really need to do it! Start by joining the QuickBooks ProAdvisor ® Program that has a free membership level for QuickBooks Online. The wasted time sending files back and forth, worrying about compatibility between versions of QuickBooks, data file problems and more are all a thing of the past if you use QuickBooks Online. In fact, now the thought of working with desktop clients seems painful. However, after learning more about QuickBooks Online, navigating tips and more, I now love and prefer QuickBooks Online over desktop. I was apprehensive about QuickBooks Online, initially. In fact, I started teaching QuickBooks seminars in 1999, written books, presented numerous training courses and co-authored the Advanced Certification. I’m a long-time QuickBooks Desktop user, and I knew it inside and out. This is the first in a series of articles to help you create an action plan for moving your clients to QuickBooks Online this one focuses on identifying which clients to convert first. The move to the cloud is in full swing! Many accounting professionals and small businesses are moving to QuickBooks ® Online.

Quickbooks desktop app center