Can I Still Buy QuickBooks Premier as a One-Time Purchase? (And Why You Should Be Careful With One-Time Purchases)

Ask the Accountant…

Question: I have been looking everywhere to purchase QuickBooks Premier 2021 to buy outright so I don’t have to go into a subscription. Where can I find it?

Answer: January 31, 2022 was the last day that Intuit permitted one-time purchase of QB Desktop products. All future sales of QB Premier will be by subscription only.

Be careful if you find something you think is a one-time purchase. I had a client who bought what he thought was one-time purchase of QB Premier 2021 on eBay. It is clearly a subscription, and I suspect he is going to have to also purchase the subscription for Premier 2022 to make it work—just a hunch.  If you have a subscription and stop paying, you will no longer have access to the file or be able to make entries.

You can get a good first-year subscription rate from softwarediscountcenter.com. I am not affiliated with them, but my clients have had a good experience with them. They are a wholesale reseller of QB products. You can get a discounted rate for the first year through them, but my understanding is that future years will be at the rate set by QB.

If you have an existing QB Pro or Premier and it is still working, and you are not using QB Payroll or QB Payment system, you should be fine continuing to work in your QB Pro or Premier. I would not update to Windows 11, however.

QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise can be modified to better serve ad specialty distributors. Harriet Gatter is a QuickBooks ProAdvisor, a former accounting professor and a former ad specialty distributor. She advises ad specialty distributors to use QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise, often in conjunction with other industry-specific software, to manage the complexities of the ad specialty business, with the results being time saved, errors eliminated and an overall accurate accounting of your business. Contact her at hgatter@accountingsupportllc.com.