If you’re planning on teaching a QuickBooks course next year, we have news to share — and we’d like to hear from you in a survey.

Intuit recently announced that educational site licensing (Lab Packs) and 140-day QuickBooks student trial software will not be available for QuickBooks Pro
2016. If you upgrade every year, or you had planned to upgrade to the 2016 edition, this may leave you in a bind.

We have learned that Intuit will be making available, for the first time, educational site licensing and 140-day student trial licensing for QuickBooks Online, Intuit’s cloud-based version of QuickBooks. We also learned that educational site licensing and student trial software will still be available for QuickBooks 2015.

What am I going to do now? This is a question that many of the educators we have spoken to have asked themselves. I know many start offering the newest version of QuickBooks in summer classes, and the rest all switch to a new version in Fall (if they were planning to switch.)

I’m sure the last thing you need is yet another decision to make, so let me help with a few scenarios for you to consider:

• You buy retail QuickBooks 2016 licenses, one for each computer in your lab (and expect students to purchase this also if they want to work from home), or you teach only-online classes, and expect the students to purchase the software themselves. Estimated retail cost is $199.95.
• You feel that this is a push to try QuickBooks Online, and you’re up for it. You’ll write new curriculum that teaches only the QuickBooks Online features (which may have features different from QuickBooks Pro) and find exercises that work within the QuickBooks Online environment.
• You’ll stay with QuickBooks 2015, or upgrade to this if you were on a previous version, and see what Intuit does next year for 2017. You also explore QuickBooks Online, from both a feature standpoint as well as the publisher materials for curriculum.

Any way you look at it, you have to make a change. And most educators we spoke to had no idea that this was happening, and now don’t know quite what to do.

We want to ensure that Labyrinth Learning’s plans for QuickBooks materials align with the plans you have for your courses. We invite you take a brief survey about your QuickBooks course plans. Your input will help us make publishing decisions in this subject area.