New customers continue to dominate the QBO subscriber base and for a long time Intuit emphasized selling to those who did not use its products rather than trying to convert desktop QuickBooks users. The company says more than 80 percent of QBO subscribers are new customers. Intuit says more than 600,000 online subscribers are linked to accountants and more than 100,000 accountant customers have at least three QBO clients.

QBO and Intuit products in general are sold largely in the United States and Canada, although the company has been working to penetrate other countries over the last few years. In releasing the figures, Sasan Goodarzi, EVP of Intuit's Small Business Group, said in a prepared statement "We look forward to continuing to build on our success as we grow the QuickBooks ecosystem around the world."

In a presentation earlier this summer, Intuit admitted having to back track on some efforts to enter new countries because of localization problems. "We launched with not completely compliant solutions," EVP Dan Wernikoff said, said at the time, although not listing the countries involved.

In contrast, subscribers for rival Xero are located primarily outside the United States. In the last published report, Xero said it had 717,000 subscribers worldwide on March 31. The cloud accounting software company said 62,000 of those were in the United States and Canada.

Xero hit 717,000 when the company ended its fiscal year on March 31.