Business recommend exploring other opportu-nities. Where to begin? For starters, what did you like best and least about QuickBooks Desktop? Write down your answers and refer to them during your search. Here are seven of the most popular accounting software products available to veterinary clinics. 1 TECHNOLOGY Life After QuickBooks Desktop Today’s popular accounting software lives in the cloud. BY MIRA JOHNSON, CPA, CVPM, MBA QuickBooks M ost practice information management software provides excellent information about veterinary hospital revenue. However, the data paints only part of the performance picture. Looking at your PIMS, you don’t know whether your most significant expense, labor, is within budget, whether your bookkeeper paid the laboratory bill or how much you owe on the bank loan. Therefore, practice owners and managers rely on accounting software to assess their clinics’ financial health. QuickBooks is one such software used industrywide, but it’s not the only one. QuickBooks Desktop includes the Pro, Premier and Enterprise versions, each with different features and func-tionality. However, as many finance enthusiasts know, software developer Intuit discontinued QuickBooks Desktop 2020 as of May 31, 2023. Support and security patches are no longer available. Many longtime users are holding on dearly to one of the best desktop prod-ucts in the accounting world, but it’s time to let go and move the work to the cloud, whether with QuickBooks Online or a competitor. Go ahead and look for a platform you’ll love. Some users complain that Quick-Books Online isn’t as good as the desktop product. While dreamers wait for Intuit to deliver improvements, I 32 todays veterinary business.com QuickBooks is designed for small and medium-sized businesses. It offers invoicing, expense tracking, inventory management, timesheets and payroll processing. Pricing depends on the ser-vices and number of users. If you don’t want the online product, you can still purchase a desktop version that doesn’t require an internet connection. Check out current plans at bit.ly/3PzQTXr . 2 Xero Xero is well-suited for small businesses. It delivers features such as bank reconciliation, invoicing, expense tracking, bill automation via Hubdoc and inventory management. Each plan permits unlimited users. Xero integrates with more than 1,000 business apps. Explore the plans at bit.ly/3CHvPXj . 3 Wave A free accounting software option designed for small businesses and freelancers, Wave offers features such as invoicing, expense tracking and receipt scanning. Users can purchase add-ons like payroll and advisory ser-vices. For complete pricing and fea-tures, take a look at bit.ly/43ZQYb6 . 4 istockphoto.com/sorbetto FreshBooks FreshBooks is another option for small businesses and freelancers. It offers time tracking, invoicing and expense tracking. Integrations are lim-ited to about 100. Discover the plans at bit.ly/3ppjhkb .