If you run QuickBooks Desktop, you have a deadline. This article is the short version of what it means, what your options are, and — the part most articles about this leave out — where SalesImporter is not the right answer.
The dates
- 30 September 2024 — Intuit stopped selling Pro Plus, Premier Plus and Mac Plus to new US subscribers. Existing subscribers could renew, but nobody new could buy.
- 31 May 2026 — QuickBooks Desktop 2023 reached end of support. That date has passed. If you are still on the 2023 release, you are already running unsupported software.
- 30 September 2027 — QuickBooks Desktop 2024 reaches end of support. There is no 2025, 2026 or 2027 release. 2024 is the final version of Pro, Premier and Mac.
QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise is the exception. Intuit still sells and supports it, and if you are on Enterprise none of the above is urgent for you yet.
What "end of support" actually breaks
The software does not stop opening. What stops is everything around it:
- Payroll calculates the wrong tax. The tax tables freeze at their last update. This is worse than payroll simply switching off, because the numbers keep coming out — they are just wrong, and wrong payroll tax is your liability, not Intuit's.
- Bank feeds disconnect. Downloaded transactions stop arriving.
- Security patches stop. You are holding bank details, customer records and payroll data in software that will never be patched again.
- Live support ends.
The security one is the reason not to sit on this until 2027. Financial system databases are specifically what attackers look for, and "unsupported accounting software" is a description of a target.
The part worth knowing before you move to QuickBooks Online
Intuit's own migration path is Desktop to QuickBooks Online, and it is a reasonable path for many businesses. But it is not a copy — a meaningful amount of your file does not come across:
- The audit trail — the record of who changed what
- Budgets, memorized transactions, sales orders
- Attachments — receipts and documents linked to transactions
- Reconciliation reports, custom reports, and invoice and report templates
- Some payroll detail, and your bank and credit card connections
There is also a size limit. QuickBooks measures a file in "targets" (roughly, transaction lines). QuickBooks Online Plus accepts about 40,000, Advanced about 350,000. A larger file has to be condensed first — and condensing means summarizing older detail away permanently, then importing the summary.
If you have been on Desktop for a decade, read that twice. The recommended route out asks you to throw away your history to fit through the door.
Where SalesImporter fits
We built our QuickBooks Desktop importer because we had the same problem. Our own file was 14 years and 169,615 journal entries, and it came across whole — accounts, customers, vendors, items, purchase orders, opening balances and every journal entry, with the balances checked against QuickBooks' own totals rather than assumed correct. There is no condensing step, because there is no target limit to condense for.
That is the honest strength: you keep the detail.
Where SalesImporter is the wrong answer
This matters more than the paragraph above, and most vendors writing about the Desktop sunset will not tell you.
We do not do payroll. Not "coming soon" — there is no payroll in SalesImporter. If you run payroll out of QuickBooks Desktop today, we cannot replace it, and you will need a payroll provider regardless of where your ledger lives.
We are built for sellers, not for every business. If you are a contractor doing job costing, a manufacturer needing full inventory assemblies, or a business whose accounting has nothing to do with online sales, QuickBooks Online, Xero or Sage will serve you better than we will. We would rather say so now than have you find out in week three.
Check your marketplace is connected. eBay is live today and Amazon is on the way — if you sell primarily on Amazon, the import will work but the channel sync will not be there yet.
Where we are genuinely the better choice is narrower and specific: you sell on marketplaces, you have years of Desktop history you do not want summarized away, and the reason your books are painful is that a payout is not a sale. If a single deposit is really gross sales minus fees minus shipping minus refunds, and reconciling that is what eats your month-end, that is the exact problem this product was built for. See why your payout doesn't match your sales.
What to do now
- Find out which version you are on. In QuickBooks Desktop, press
F2. The product line at the top says the year. If it says 2023 or earlier, you are already unsupported. - Print your key reports before you do anything — Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss and Trial Balance, as of the same date. Whatever you migrate to, these are how you prove the move was correct. Keep the PDFs.
- Do not wait for September 2027. A migration done calmly in a quiet month is a different experience from one done because payroll broke. Anyone still on Desktop in mid-2027 will be queueing behind everybody else who waited, for the same accountants' time.
- Try the import. If you want to see whether your file comes across intact, our importer runs against a copy — read clean up QuickBooks before you import first, since it also lists the things people waste an afternoon fixing that the import already handles.
If you are not sure whether this is the right home for your books, ask us before you migrate rather than after. We would rather lose a signup than take on a business we are the wrong fit for.