As near as I can tell, they are not doing away with payroll, but increasing the monthly cost per employee fee. They are trying to get everyone to move to online. This from Intuit: We are modifying our QuickBooks Desktop discount policy to encourage businesses to evaluate both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop, determining which product is the right fit based on business need. Many small businesses are choosing QuickBooks Online over QuickBooks Desktop as they realize the flexibility and mobility benefits of being on a connected, online platform. And while we continue to support QuickBooks Desktop and the customers using these products, we are accelerating our investment into QuickBooks Online platform products.
The "enhancements" they talk about for Desktop only work if you bank at certain banks, have high end IT support at the company level to be able to use their app and generally are part of a business large and robust enough that you wouldn't be using Desktop anyway. As has been noted in this thread, this is exactly the way Intuit intends it to be. The lack of a fix for Desktop crashing is intentional. As angry as it makes me, in part because it feels like gouging that disproportionately impacts smaller businesses, Intuit can do whatever they want. As long as there is limited competition, they will continue to raise prices because they can. The best thing I can think of is to create threads within the Intuit community discussing the various other options that are out there so businesses can evaluate what works for them.
