Choosing an edition
QuickBooks Desktop for retail and wholesale
If stock is the business, the inventory features are not a nice-to-have — they are the reason to choose one edition over another.
Retail and wholesale is where the difference between the QuickBooks Desktop editions stops being academic. Everything else — invoicing, bills, reports — is much the same across them. Inventory is not.
The question is whether your stock is simple enough for the basic handling, or whether it needs the advanced tooling. Getting this wrong is expensive in a way that a seat count is not.
What you are likely to need
Stock in more than one place
A shop and a stockroom, or several warehouses. Knowing what is where, rather than one aggregate number that is right on average and wrong everywhere.
Serial and lot tracking
Traceability per unit or per batch — which matters for warranties, recalls, and anything with an expiry date.
Pricing that varies
Advanced pricing rules: trade customers on different terms from retail, quantity breaks, promotional periods.
Control over who does what
Role-based permissions, so a counter assistant and a bookkeeper do not have the same reach into the file.
What we would sell you
Recommended
QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise Solutions 2024
Advanced inventory and advanced pricing are Enterprise features and are not in Pro Plus. If any of the four needs above describes your stock, this is the edition — the decision is made for you by inventory rather than by headcount.
How many seats
Enterprise runs from one to five simultaneous users. Count who needs the file open at the same moment on a busy trading day, not everyone with a login. How to count yours
Before you order
If your stock is genuinely simple — a short list of items, one location, one price each — Pro Plus will handle it, and costs a little less up to three seats. A smaller, simpler program is the other thing you gain, and for some people that is the point.
Whichever edition you take, the license never expires — but Intuit ends the connected services for the 2024 release, payroll and bank feeds included, on 31 May 2027. What that means