"It is a fast-growing product," CEO Brad Smith said during the webcast. While the sale of desktop units fell from last year's first quarter, desktop QB revenue grew by 27.9 percent because of QBES.

The company will continue to make what Smith called "appropriate" investments in QBES, which he said is "35-percent cheaper than anything else in our market."

Intuit plans to take a product in the QBES space to the cloud. But that will not happen soon. "We hope to have an alternative to QuickBooks Enterprise in the online version," he said, but noted, "That is going to take some time."

Meanwhile, Intuit is beefing up QB Online, including last month's purchase of sales and use tax company Exactor. "Sales-and-use tax is a key feature you need in an enterprise-level product," Smith said. "That is one example of what we are doing to build out that functionality in QuickBooks Online."

For the most recently ended period, there were 120,000 QB desktop units sold, down 34.4 percent from 183,000 a year earlier. QB desktop subscribers totaled 359,000, an 8.1 percent from 332,000.

Bob Scott

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Bob Scott has provided information to the tax and accounting community since 1991, first as technology editor of Accounting Today, and from 1997 through 2009 as editor of its sister publication, Accounting Technology. He is known throughout the industry for his depth of knowledge and for his high journalistic standards.  Scott has made frequent appearances as a speaker, moderator and panelist and events serving tax and accounting professionals. He  has a strong background in computer journalism as an editor with two former trade publications, Computer+Software News and MIS Week and spent several years with weekly and daily newspapers in Morris County New Jersey prior to that.  A graduate of Indiana University with a degree in journalism, Bob is a native of Madison, Ind