QBO Multi-Company Discounts – We Need Them

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Do you ever have larger companies that would be just right for QuickBooks Online with one exception, and no, I'm not talking about inventory? I'm talking about those larger companies made up of smaller subsidiaries, each with their own tax-ID.

You know, the ones that are C-corps, but have five or six, or maybe even 10 smaller LLCs that they own and control. 

I'm confident many of you, my fellow ProAdvisors, have similar companies in your client lists. The fact that these bigger companies all have these smaller companies, many of which are not even based at the same location as their parent, make them especially ripe for going to the cloud with QuickBooks Online. 

There is just one problem. And that problem is the cost of migrating all those company files to QuickBooks Online and paying a monthly subscription for each of those companies. They have been use to buying the number of QuickBooks licenses they needed, and then supporting all of those companies under the umbrella of those desktop licenses.

In order to attract them to Intuit's Cloud-based QuickBooks Online, a lot of our clients need  multi-company discounts to help offset the cost of all those monthly subscriptions.

This is a real issue, and often comes up in picking the right solution in terms of QuickBooks Online monthly subscription fees versus the cost of monthly hosting of a QuickBooks Desktop product.  

Just recently, one of my clients with five QuickBooks Desktop Company files opted into having their QuickBooks desktop hosted by a third-party hosting company, rather than migrating to QuickBooks Online due to the monthly price per company subscription for QBO. For this client, a QuickBooks host will be cheaper for them, even with the Intuit surcharge and additional fees for Microsoft Office within the hosted environment.

I also understand that the other side of the argument could be, "What about the wholesale discount," but for our firm, not every client is a good fit for wholesale billing for variety of reasons.

Obviously, your own situation could be different.

Currently, one of our clients has 12 QuickBooks companies, but only eight are running in QuickBooks Online. He's understandably unwilling to migrate the last four companies into QuickBooks Online due to the QBO subscription fees per month.

The big downside is that we can’t see or have normal access to the companies that make our firm's work more difficult.

A couple years ago, Intuit offered a 50 percent multi-company discount. I'd love to see the return of this discount, because it could mean that more companies of size would go ahead a migrate to QBO.

If you remember, the previous QBO subscription discounts had a few requirements:

  1. A minimum of at least two QBO subscriptions
  2. If one of the companies was a more expensive subscription (like Plus), the less expensive subscriptions would receive a 50 percent discount
  3. Each QBO file would need to have the same master administrators and be linked to the same email address

Unfortunately, when this discount was discontinued one of our own clients canceled all but his main QuickBooks Online subscription.

So, here are my thoughts, and I need your help with this idea: 

  1. I'd personally (and I hope you would too) be thrilled if there was a QuickBooks Online multi-company discount we could offer our clients.
  2. I hope there are enough of you who share my thought that a multi-company discount is needed.
  3. I look forward to your sharing your thoughts concerning your own clients, both on Desktop as well as on QBO that would benefit from multi-company discounts when they have more than one QuickBooks Online subscription either for their current setup or to help them migrate to the cloud.

Let's put the power of our ProAdvisor memberships to work by letting Intuit know what we think. They need to hear from their ProAdvisor community that multi-company discounts are essential to offering QBO to bigger, more complex companies looking to go cloud.

So, post your comments below, and Insightful Accountant will share the results with Intuit in the near future.

PS – I also will be posting this on Monday, Feb. 13, in the Woodard Network forum as one of those fancy new Yammer polling questions, so be sure to tune in there to cast your poll opinion, too.