"Reach out to the administrator" is not a solution here.  If you've got 50+ PC's with multiple versions of QB installed on each, this is not feasible.  What Intuit should be doing, and is standard practice for any competent software vendor, is to provide msi's for these updates the same way they provide exe's.  That way IT depts could simply deploy these updates to all PC's silently when they are released and be done with it.

I reached out to Intuit about this and had my ticket escalated.  I've been told this is "by design" and Intuit has no plans of doing anything about it.  The only options to date that I am aware of are to either have your domain admin constantly have to log in to users PC's to elevate permissions, or have your users set as local admins which is a big security threat.