If you run your firm on QuickBooks Online Accountant, something is changing. It doesn't matter if you click "yes" or not. Intuit is retiring the QBOA you know. It's rebuilding it as Intuit Accountant Suite. The switch isn't optional forever. It just starts out optional.
Here's the short version. Every firm on QBOA must finish the move by December 31, 2026. Starting in June 2026, Intuit begins moving firms over in scheduled waves. Say your firm hasn't switched manually by the time its cohort comes up. Then you get auto-migrated to the free tier. There's no client disruption and no data loss. But a new interface and a new pricing menu wait on the other side.
QBOA has been the daily home base for a large share of independent bookkeeping and tax practices. It has held that spot for more than a decade. A platform change this big deserves the real dates and dollar figures, not just the announcement's summary. This piece covers the timeline, the two pricing tiers, and the new per-client add-on that changes firm economics at scale. It also covers the partner program overhaul, and what all of it means for how much of your practice sits inside one vendor's roadmap.
Is QuickBooks Online Accountant being discontinued?
Yes, in its current form. Intuit is replacing QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA) with Intuit Accountant Suite, an AI-first practice platform. All firms must complete the switch by December 31, 2026. Intuit starts moving firms over in cohorts beginning June 2026. Any firm that hasn't switched manually gets auto-migrated to the free Core tier once its cohort comes up. Your clients, their data, and your access stay the same either way. Core costs nothing. The paid tier, Accelerate, is $149/month at full price. It drops to $74.50/month for the first 12 months starting July 1, 2026. You can still switch back to classic QBOA through November 2026 if you want more time.
One clarification before the timeline. This change is about the accountant-side admin platform, QBOA itself. It's not about your clients' individual QuickBooks Online subscriptions. Client-facing QBO stays QBO. What's changing is the console your firm uses to access and manage those client files. The pricing tiers and partner program wrapped around it change too.
The rollout happens in stages over about 8 months. Some of it you act on. Some of it happens automatically if you don't.
Date | What happens |
|---|---|
June 2026 | Intuit begins moving firms to Intuit Accountant Suite in scheduled cohorts. |
July 1, 2026 | Accelerate's promotional pricing starts: $74.50/month for the first 12 months (50% off the $149 list price). |
Through November 2026 | Firms that have already switched can still move back to classic QBOA. |
December 31, 2026 | Deadline. Intuit's own language is direct: firms "must complete their switch by December 31, 2026." |
January 20, 2027 | Books Close billing begins: $8/client (50 clients or fewer) or $6/client (over 50) per month. |
Early 2027 | The ProAdvisor Program is retired and replaced by Intuit ProPartner Accountants. |
These dates come from Intuit's own product-update announcement on Firm of the Future.
The mechanics of the cohort rollout matter more than the headline date. Intuit isn't flipping a switch on every account at once. It's moving firms over in waves between June and December 2026. If your firm's wave arrives before you've made a decision, Intuit makes the decision for you. That decision is auto-enrollment in the free Core tier. Your clients keep the same data and the same access. You just wake up to a different admin console and a different pricing menu. You also lose the chance to choose on your own schedule.
There's a real difference between switching manually and being auto-migrated. A manual switch lets you pick Core or Accelerate outright. You choose the date, and you can brief your team ahead of time. Auto-migration only ever lands you on Core. That's the default path Intuit built for firms that don't act. Say your firm already wants Accelerate for the staff-management tools. Waiting for auto-migration won't get you there. You'll still have to go in and upgrade manually, just later, with less time to train your team.
That's the practical reason to read the rest of this now instead of in November. Maybe you already know you want Accelerate. Or maybe you'd rather sit on Core and skip the add-ons entirely. Deciding early means you switch on your own terms, not a default tier you didn't choose. It also means your team hears about the change from you, on a date you picked. Nobody discovers a new login screen on a random morning.
There's also a one-month gap worth noticing between the two deadlines. Firms that switch early keep the option to reverse course through November 2026, if Intuit Accountant Suite doesn't fit how they work. Firms that wait until December don't get much of that reversal window. The mandatory deadline and the switch-back cutoff land only weeks apart. Early movers get to test and reverse. Last-minute movers get one shot.
Depending on where your firm sits today, the useful next step looks different:
Your situation | What to do before December 31, 2026 |
|---|---|
Already comfortable staying on Core | Switch manually before your cohort's date so you choose the timing. Or let auto-migration handle it, since it lands on Core either way |
Want Accelerate for staff or client-insight tools | Switch manually and activate Accelerate before your cohort's date. That way billing and training start on your schedule, not a default one |
Running multiple QBOA consoles | Decide on Console Consolidation as its own choice, separate from the platform switch. Consolidating isn't required to complete the move |
Considering leaving QuickBooks entirely | Use the window through November 2026 to pilot alternatives. You won't lose the option to switch back if you change your mind |
Is your firm also planning to move any clients off QuickBooks Desktop this year? The timing overlaps. It's worth reading alongside moving clients off QuickBooks Desktop. That way you're not managing two migrations on two different clocks with two different admin teams.
For the automation tools that make a platform switch like this easier to manage day to day, see QuickBooks automation for firms.
Every firm gets Core. Whether you pay for Accelerate depends on whether you'll actually use what it adds.
Feature | Core (free) | Accelerate ($149/mo full price, $74.50/mo promo through mid-2027) |
|---|---|---|
Clients, data, and access | Unchanged from today | Unchanged from today |
Client Insights (AI client overview with benchmarks) | Not included | Included |
User groups (bulk role-based access assignment) | Not included | Included |
Client portfolio comparisons | Not included | Coming soon |
Core is the free floor. Nothing about your existing clients, their books, or your login changes. Is your firm small, with just a handful of staff, and no need for bulk permission management? Core is a reasonable place to stay for the long run. No expiration has been announced for the free tier anywhere in Intuit's published timeline, and no forced upgrade is built into the schedule above. As far as the public rollout plan goes, Core is free, with no announced expiration. It isn't a trial.
Accelerate is aimed at firms with more staff and more clients to manage at once. Client Insights is described as an AI client overview with benchmarks. That means it gives you a starting snapshot of a client's numbers, set against comparable businesses, instead of making you build that comparison from scratch. Whether that's genuinely useful depends on how much benchmarking work your firm already does for advisory clients. If you're building comparison decks by hand today, it's worth testing. If your advisory work doesn't lean on peer benchmarks, the feature won't change much for you.
User groups solve a different problem. They let you assign roles to a whole group of staff at once, instead of setting permissions one login at a time. That matters more as headcount grows. A two-person firm barely notices the difference. A firm managing a dozen staff across different client segments will feel it every time someone joins or leaves the team.
Client portfolio comparisons is listed as coming soon. That means it's a roadmap item, not something you can test today. Don't pay for Accelerate on the strength of a feature that hasn't shipped. Decide based on what's live right now: Client Insights and User groups.
A rough way to think about it by firm size:
At $74.50/month for the first year, Accelerate is a real discount: half off the list price. After the promotional period ends, pricing reverts to $149/month at full price, unless Intuit announces an extension. No extension has happened as of this writing. (See Intuit's accountants pricing page for the current published rates.) Model both the promo-year number and the full-price number before committing. The second year is where the real cost shows up.
Are you weighing Accelerate against other tools already in your stack? It's worth comparing against the wider multi-client firm bookkeeping software landscape, instead of deciding on this one line item alone.
Books Close is the add-on most likely to change what your practice actually costs to run. It's priced per client, not per firm.
Books Close is a separate, opt-in add-on. It layers on top of whichever tier your firm is on, Core or Accelerate. You don't need Accelerate to use Books Close. Staying on Core doesn't block access to it either. The tier decision and the Books Close decision are two separate calls, and a firm can make them on two different timelines.
Right now, Books Close is free while it's in beta. That changes on January 20, 2027. Intuit then starts billing $8 per onboarded client per month for firms with 50 clients or fewer. Firms with more than 50 clients pay $6 per onboarded client per month. This isn't a flat firm-wide fee. It scales directly with how many clients you run through it. That means the economics look very different depending on firm size. Think of the free beta period as a runway to build the habit before the meter starts.
Do the math at a few sizes and the pattern is clear:
Onboarded clients | Rate tier | Monthly cost | Annual cost |
|---|---|---|---|
25 | $8/client (50 or fewer) | $200 | $2,400 |
40 | $8/client (50 or fewer) | $320 | $3,840 |
50 | $8/client (50 or fewer) | $400 | $4,800 |
60 | $6/client (over 50) | $360 | $4,320 |
100 | $6/client (over 50) | $600 | $7,200 |
A few things stand out. First, the per-client rate drops once a firm crosses 50 clients. That's a meaningful break for growing practices. But the discount applies to the whole client count once you're over the line, not just to the clients above 50. Second, this creates a real dip. A firm sitting right at 50 clients pays $400 a month. A firm with 51 to 66 clients actually pays less than that, because the lower $6 rate now applies to every client, not just the new ones. The total doesn't climb back above $400 until a firm reaches about 67 clients (67 x $6 = $402/month). If your firm is hovering near the 50-client line, it's worth knowing this. Crossing 50 is good news for your total bill, not bad news, at least until you pass roughly 67 clients.
Third, and this is the part that actually changes firm economics: Books Close isn't overhead you can ignore if you use it across your whole book. A 40-client firm, paying nothing during the beta, will owe $3,840 a year once billing starts. A 60-client firm owes $4,320 a year. Neither number is alarming on its own. But if Books Close becomes your default close workflow, it's a new recurring line item that didn't exist before. Build it into your 2027 budget now, instead of discovering it in January.
There's also a decision buried in the word "onboarded." The fee applies per client you've actively set up in Books Close, not per client in your firm overall. That means a firm can control its cost. Be deliberate about which clients actually need per-client close automation. Don't onboard the entire book by default just because the feature was free during the beta window. A firm running 80 clients doesn't have to pay for all 80, if only 30 of them benefit from the automated close workflow.
A few ways firms are likely to manage this cost once billing starts:
None of this makes Books Close a bad tool. Per-client close automation at $6 to $8 a month is inexpensive, relative to the hours it can save on a routine monthly close. The point is to model it at your actual, deliberate client count before you're billed automatically. Don't wait for the January 2027 invoice to arrive as a surprise.
One timing detail worth flagging separately: January 20, 2027 lands square in the middle of individual tax season, for firms that handle both bookkeeping and tax prep. That's exactly when staff attention is thinnest. Reviewing a new per-client billing line item carefully takes a few minutes when things are quiet. It gets skipped when things aren't quiet. Firms that also prepare returns may want to review their Books Close client list and cost projection in December, before the calendar gets busy. Don't wait to see the first invoice.
Console Consolidation is an optional feature for firms running more than one QBOA console. That happens when a firm has multiple entities, multiple offices, or a history of mergers that left separate logins in place over the years. Consolidation merges those consoles into one. Each consolidated console can manage up to 1,000 users and 10,000 clients.
The part worth slowing down for: consolidation is irreversible. Once you've merged consoles, you cannot split them back apart, even if you later switch back to classic QBOA. Say your firm ever needs to separate a book of business again, whether from a future sale, a partner split, or an entity restructure. That option closes the moment you consolidate.
That irreversibility sits in contrast to the platform switch itself, which stays reversible through November 2026. Switching to Intuit Accountant Suite, and switching back, are both built to be undone. Console Consolidation isn't. Firms should treat the two decisions on entirely different risk timelines. Experiment freely with the platform switch inside its reversible window. Slow down considerably before touching consolidation.
Before consolidating, it's worth asking a short list of questions as a firm, not just as an admin clicking a button:
Consider a firm that grew by combining two smaller practices, each with its own QBOA console and its own set of clients. Consolidating gives the combined firm one login, one client list, and one place to manage staff access, instead of two. That's a real convenience. But say the two original practices might ever need to separate again, whether from a partner disagreement or a future sale of one half of the business. Consolidating first closes that door permanently.
This is a genuinely useful feature for firms that have simply accumulated logins over the years through growth, and want one clean admin view across everything. It's a riskier one for firms with any live plans to sell a book, spin off an office, or restructure ownership. Given the scale involved, up to 1,000 users and 10,000 clients per console, this decision realistically only applies to larger, multi-office practices. A small or solo firm running a single console has nothing to consolidate. It can skip this section entirely. For everyone else, treat it as a decision for a partner meeting, not a settings toggle to click on a Tuesday afternoon.
Say a firm does decide to consolidate. Staff and clients on the receiving end of the merge deserve a short heads-up beforehand, not a surprise discovery. Staff logins, saved views, and role assignments can shift as consoles combine. A client who's used to reaching a specific office or contact may notice a change in how their file looks behind the scenes, even if nothing about their actual books changes. A two-line note ahead of time costs nothing. It avoids a wave of "why does this look different" messages the week it happens.
The partner program is changing alongside the platform. Intuit ProPartner Accountants is a new global program that succeeds the ProAdvisor Program. It launches in early 2027. Until then, ProAdvisor remains the program of record, unchanged.
The new structure has five tiers, in order: Member, Partner, Preferred Partner, Premier Partner, and Elite Partner. Advancement is points-based. The points come from three sources: spend by your firm and your connected clients on Intuit software, certifications your staff complete, and other activity inside the Intuit ecosystem.
That points formula is worth reading closely. It's a real shift in how the tiers work. Under the old ProAdvisor structure, standing leaned heavily on certifications and tenure. Under ProPartner, a firm's own software spend and its clients' software spend both count toward advancement. In practice, that means a firm that actively recommends and connects Intuit products across its client base moves up the tiers faster. That's true even if another firm has the same technical expertise and certifications but doesn't push Intuit-ecosystem adoption as hard. That's a meaningful change in incentive structure. It's worth knowing before you plan your firm's tech-stack recommendations for the year.
Existing perks carry forward for subscriptions already set up before the ProPartner launch. That includes the 30% ProAdvisor Preferred Pricing discount on QBO, Workforce, and Bill Pay, and the direct-pay first-12-month discount. Current arrangements aren't wiped out. What changes is how you move up from here, and what behavior gets rewarded on the way.
For staff who've built their standing in the ProAdvisor Program through certifications, that work doesn't disappear. Certifications remain one of the three inputs to ProPartner points. But certifications alone no longer carry the same weight. They're now one leg of a three-part formula that also counts firm and client spend. Firms that have invested heavily in staff certification should expect that work to still matter. It just isn't the whole story anymore.
The neutral read: your partner tier, and the pricing perks tied to it, is now explicitly linked to how much Intuit software you and your clients buy. That's on top of your certifications or years in the program, not instead of them. It's a reasonable design choice for Intuit's own partner economics. It's also worth factoring in, if your firm's growth strategy involves recommending tools based purely on client fit rather than ecosystem alignment.
Two kinds of firms will feel this differently. A firm that already runs most of its clients on Intuit products will likely see its tier climb without changing anything. The spend that counts is already happening. A firm that mixes Intuit tools with other vendors by design, choosing each tool on its own merits, may see its tier progress more slowly. That's true even if its technical expertise is just as strong. It's simply because less of its total spend flows through Intuit. Neither position is wrong. It's just worth knowing which one describes your firm before the new program launches. That way the tier you land on doesn't come as a surprise.
The mechanics, straight from Intuit's help documentation, are simple. But the admin permissions matter. To move to Intuit Accountant Suite: go to Settings (the gear icon), then Join. Or go to Settings, then Subscriptions and billing, then Firm subscriptions, then Try Intuit Accountant Suite. Either path requires you to be a Primary Admin or Company Admin on the account. Those are the roles that can manage the firm's subscription. Confirm who on your team holds that access before you plan a switch date. Staff without one of those two roles can't initiate the switch.
Switch-back works the same way. It's available through November 2026 for firms that have already made the move and want to return to classic QBOA. Say your firm switched to Accelerate and wants to go back. Downgrade to Core first, then opt out of Intuit Accountant Suite entirely. Both steps are admin-only. Data and settings are retained through the switch and the switch-back. You're not risking client information moving either direction.
Before you click switch, a short pre-flight is worth five minutes. Confirm your firm's Core-versus-Accelerate decision ahead of time, so you're not choosing live in the moment. Confirm who holds Primary Admin or Company Admin access. Give your team a heads-up on the date, so nobody is surprised by a new login screen mid-workday. None of this is complicated. But a switch made on a whim is a worse outcome than one your firm actually planned for. That's true even when it's made by whoever happens to have admin access on a slow Friday afternoon.
For firms with more than a handful of staff, it's worth doing a short internal test before the whole team is routed through the new console cold. Have whoever holds admin access walk through the new interface once. Have them note anything that looks different from muscle memory in classic QBOA. Then give the team a two- or three-line heads-up on what to expect. A five-minute walkthrough beats a dozen confused messages on switch day.
After the switch completes, a quick verification pass is worth the ten minutes it takes. Confirm every client you expect to see is still listed. Confirm staff logins and roles look the way you left them. Confirm any saved reports or custom views carried over cleanly. Catching a gap right after the switch is a lot easier than catching it three weeks later, in the middle of a client meeting.
The practical advice here is sequencing. Decide upfront whether you're staying on Core or paying for Accelerate, before you flip the switch at all. Some settings and preferences carry forward automatically. But changing tiers after the fact means going back through the same admin menu a second time. One clean decision, made once, beats testing your way through it live on client accounts.
None of the above is a criticism of Intuit. Intuit Accountant Suite is a serious platform bet: AI-first tools, a free Core tier with no announced expiration, and a partner program that rewards deeper Intuit adoption. A free tier that keeps your clients and data intact, with no expiration announced, is a generous baseline compared to a lot of software vendors. It's worth crediting Intuit for that. There's also a real convenience case for staying inside one vendor's ecosystem: fewer logins, one support line, one integrated stack instead of three tools that occasionally disagree with each other.
But it's worth naming the pattern plainly. Intuit is moving toward AI-driven client insights. It's pricing Books Close per client instead of per firm. And it's tying partner-tier advancement to how much you and your clients spend inside its ecosystem. Individually, each of those is a normal, defensible business decision. Together, they tie a firm's book of record, and its growth path, more tightly to one vendor's roadmap and pricing calendar. They also tie it to that vendor's own definition of what counts toward partner status.
That's the actual question worth sitting with, separate from whether Intuit's move is good or bad. How much of your practice do you want to run inside a single vendor's stack, priced and gated on that vendor's schedule?
There's also an architectural distinction worth understanding. This isn't a knock on any specific tool. It's a fact about how workflow layers work. A tool that only sits on top of QuickBooks, however good its categorization or automation, still closes and reconciles inside QuickBooks. The workflow gets faster. The book of record doesn't move. That's a different kind of dependency than a firm's ledger living outside any single vendor's platform. It's a structural difference, not a feature comparison.
This is what people mean by vendor lock-in, even when nobody intends it maliciously. It isn't a single dramatic moment. It's a slow accumulation. Your clients live in one platform. Your staff training lives in one platform. Your partner-tier pricing perks depend on that platform's spend requirements. Your close workflow runs through that same platform's per-client fee. None of those individually forces a decision. Together, they make leaving expensive, in ways that are hard to reverse. It's the same one-way pattern Console Consolidation already puts firms in, at a smaller scale.
Some firms do work where numbers need to hold up under scrutiny: an audit, a lender review, or a partner asking why a number changed. For those firms, there's a separate reason to care about how a system categorizes and records transactions. A system that runs on visible rules and consistent pattern learning produces the same result on the same input every time. You can trace why a transaction landed where it did. That matters more than a marginal speed gain, when the question isn't "was this fast" but "can you show your work."
Put the three moves side by side and the shape of the shift is easier to see:
Intuit move | What it does | Why it matters for stack independence |
|---|---|---|
AI client overview (Accelerate) | Surfaces client benchmarks inside the platform | More of the analysis work happens inside Intuit's own tools, not a firm's independent process |
Books Close per-client fee | Prices the close by client count starting January 20, 2027 | Close costs now scale with firm growth, inside one vendor's fee schedule |
ProPartner points tied to spend | Ties partner-tier status partly to Intuit software spend | Growth incentives now point toward buying more Intuit products, not only certifying more staff |
None of this is a call to rip out QuickBooks tomorrow. Intuit's infrastructure has a decade of reliability behind it. A newer standalone GL hasn't had time to build that yet. The point isn't picking a side today. It's understanding, with real dates and real numbers, what staying put actually costs and what independence actually requires. That way the choice gets made on purpose, instead of by default.
Growthy exists for firms asking that stack-independence question. It runs two ways. As a workflow layer on top of QBO or Xero, it categorizes routine transactions automatically. Your team reviews and approves, instead of clicking through every line. No migration required. As a standalone AI-native GL, it's the book of record itself: the system your firm owns outright, instead of renting. Growthy runs the books. For the AI-first practice around them, TracePrep builds accounting systems from inside a working CPA firm.
The honest numbers: Growthy is 85% accurate on categorizing transactions on first import. You review the rest. It runs on rules and pattern learning, not a black box. Every categorization has a reason attached to it that you can actually see. That matters if you're ever asked to defend a number in an audit. This isn't about cutting your bookkeeper out of the loop or skipping your review process. It's about who owns the ledger your firm and your clients depend on, and on whose calendar that ledger's rules can change.
Are you evaluating the broader landscape before deciding anything? Comparing SaaS accounting software options or reading why some firms skip QuickBooks and start on an AI-native GL covers the tradeoffs in more depth than fits here. If your evaluation set already includes the bigger managed-service names, Growthy against Bench and Pilot is the direct comparison.
You have until December 31, 2026 by rule, and until your cohort's auto-migration date in practice. Here's what to do with that window.
None of these six steps requires an immediate platform change. They require a firm that's actually looked at its own numbers, on its own timeline, instead of finding out where it landed after the fact.
For firms weighing where an independent layer or standalone GL fits into that stack, Growthy's accountant overview walks through both modes in more detail than the checklist above.
Yes, as a standalone product name. QBOA is being replaced by Intuit Accountant Suite, which Intuit describes as an AI-first, unified platform. All firms must complete the switch by December 31, 2026. Your clients, data, and access carry over unchanged. What changes is the interface, the pricing tiers, and some of the underlying features, like Client Insights and Books Close.
The hard deadline is December 31, 2026. Before that, Intuit starts moving firms over in scheduled cohorts, beginning June 2026 and continuing through the rest of the year. If you don't switch manually before your cohort's date, Intuit auto-migrates your firm to the free Core tier of Intuit Accountant Suite. There's no published option to remain on classic QBOA past the December 2026 deadline.
The base tier, Core, is free, with no announced expiration. It keeps your clients, data, and access exactly as they are today, with no cost and no forced upgrade. The paid tier, Accelerate, adds Client Insights, User groups, and the upcoming Client portfolio comparisons feature. It costs $149/month, discounted to $74.50/month for the first 12 months starting July 1, 2026. Separately, the Books Close add-on is free during its current beta. That's a different decision from Core vs. Accelerate. Its own billing starts January 20, 2027, regardless of which platform tier your firm chooses.
Full price is $149/month. Intuit is running a limited-time promotion: 50% off for the first 12 months, bringing it to $74.50/month. It's available to firms that start on Accelerate from July 1, 2026 onward. After the 12-month promo period, pricing reverts to the $149/month list rate, unless Intuit announces an extension. No extension has happened as of this writing.
Books Close is Intuit's per-client close automation add-on. It's currently free while in beta. Starting January 20, 2027, Intuit begins billing $8 per onboarded client per month for firms with 50 clients or fewer. Firms with more than 50 clients pay $6 per onboarded client per month. A 40-client firm would pay $320/month ($3,840/year). A 60-client firm would pay $360/month ($4,320/year), once the lower per-client rate applies. The fee is per client actively onboarded into Books Close, not per client in your firm overall. You can control cost by choosing which clients actually use it.
Yes, through November 2026. Firms that have already moved to Intuit Accountant Suite can switch back to classic QBOA within that window. Your data and settings are retained either direction. If your firm is on Accelerate, downgrade to Core first, then opt out. Both the switch and the switch-back require Primary Admin or Company Admin access. After November 2026, this switch-back window is expected to close, since the December 31, 2026 deadline requires all firms to be fully migrated by then. Notably, Console Consolidation does not follow the same rule. If your firm has consolidated multiple consoles into one, that decision holds even if you switch back to classic QBOA. The platform switch is reversible. Consolidation is not, regardless of which platform you're on.
Your firm gets auto-migrated to Intuit Accountant Suite Core, the free tier, when your scheduled cohort comes up, sometime between June and December 2026. Your clients, their data, and your access stay the same. You won't be charged anything by default, since auto-migration lands you on Core, not Accelerate. You will, however, be on a new platform on Intuit's timeline, rather than one you chose to move to on your own, with less lead time to brief your staff. Firms that are fine with the platform decision being made for them can let auto-migration happen without harm to clients. The tradeoff is simply losing the chance to choose a tier and a switch date for yourself.
Console Consolidation lets firms running multiple QBOA consoles merge them into a single console. That single console can manage up to 1,000 users and 10,000 clients. It's useful for firms with multiple entities or offices that ended up with separate logins over time. It's also permanent. Once you consolidate, you cannot split the consoles back apart, even if you later switch back to classic QBOA. Firms with any plans to sell, split, or restructure should treat this as a one-way decision, and loop in a partner before clicking it. Firms running a single console with no plans to merge anything can skip Console Consolidation entirely. It only becomes relevant once a firm actually has more than one console to combine.
Intuit ProPartner Accountants, launching in early 2027. It replaces the ProAdvisor Program with five tiers: Member, Partner, Preferred Partner, Premier Partner, and Elite Partner. Advancement is points-based, driven by how much your firm and your connected clients spend on Intuit software, plus certifications and other ecosystem activity. Existing ProAdvisor benefits, like the 30% Preferred Pricing discount, carry forward for subscriptions set up before the ProPartner launch. Until early 2027, ProAdvisor remains the program of record, unchanged. Firm and client software spend now counts toward tier advancement alongside certifications. That's a real shift from a program that historically leaned more heavily on credentials and tenure.
Yes, eventually. But there's no specific date you have to act on yourself, if you're comfortable with auto-migration. All firms must be on Intuit Accountant Suite by December 31, 2026, one way or another. Either you switch manually on your own schedule and choose your tier, or Intuit auto-migrates you to the free Core tier when your cohort's date arrives. There's no path that keeps a firm on classic QBOA past that deadline. To be clear on scope: this requirement applies to the accountant-side admin platform your firm uses. It doesn't apply to your individual clients' QuickBooks Online subscriptions, which are unaffected by this particular change.
Whatever your firm decides about Core, Accelerate, and Books Close, the bigger question underneath all of it stays the same: how much of your book of record do you want inside one vendor's stack?
Growthy is in open alpha: an AI-native book of record built for firms that want their own stack, not a rented one. It categorizes the routine work automatically, so your team reviews and approves instead of clicking through every transaction. Get Early Access.
Free during alpha. Read-only access. You review every sync.
Bobby Huang • Partner, SDO CPA LLC / CEO, Growthy
CPA firm partner who got tired of watching bookkeepers click categorize 500 times a day. Built Growthy to fix it.
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