The short answer: your Desktop file chooses the plan, not the feature list. Before you price anything, pull three counts from QuickBooks Desktop: active accounts in the chart of accounts, active classes plus the locations you plan to track, and the number of people who post transactions. Intuit’s published usage limits cap QuickBooks Online Plus at 250 accounts, 40 combined classes and locations and 5 billable users; Advanced is unlimited on the first two and allows 25 billable users. If any one of your three counts is over the Plus line, the plan is Advanced and the conversation is finished. If all three are under it, Plus is the default and Advanced has to earn its place on features. Everything below is checked against Intuit’s usage-limits article (updated August 5, 2026) and its Desktop-to-Online transfer guide (updated August 2, 2026), re-read on September 5, 2026.
Every count below is an active count, because Intuit states that only active or invited users, accounts, classes, locations and custom fields count toward a usage limit. Inactive items are free.
1. Accounts. Press F2 (or Ctrl+1) in Desktop to open the Product Information window and read the List Information block; Intuit points to this window for list sizes. That figure includes inactive accounts, so cross-check it in Lists > Chart of Accounts with Include inactive unticked. The active number is what QuickBooks Online will measure against 250. Sub-accounts count individually; Desktop allows 10,000 accounts on Pro and Premier and 100,000 on Enterprise, so a file that has been growing since 2009 can be well past 250 without anyone noticing.
2. Classes plus locations. Lists > Class List, again with inactive items hidden. Then add the number of locations you intend to create in Online, because Plus counts them together: 40 combined. Desktop has no location list, so this second number is a design decision, and it is where many files tip over. Twelve departments as classes plus thirty branch offices as locations is 42, and 42 is Advanced.
3. Billable users. Company > Set Up Users and Passwords > Set Up Users lists everyone with a login. Subtract the people who only run reports or only enter time; on Plus and Advanced those roles are unlimited and do not count. Subtract your outside accountant too, because Plus includes 2 accountant firm seats and Advanced 3. What remains is the billable count against 5 or 25. Note that Desktop users do not carry over; Intuit’s transfer guide says every user must be invited again from Online.
| Count in your Desktop file | QuickBooks Online Plus | QuickBooks Online Advanced | What to do before converting |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active accounts | Maximum 250 | Unlimited | Make dead accounts inactive in Desktop; merge duplicates |
| Classes + locations combined | 40 | Unlimited | Retire classes with no activity in the last two years |
| Billable users | 5 | 25 | Reclassify read-only staff as reports-only users |
| Accountant firm users | 2 | 3 | Nothing; these are on top of billable users |
| Custom fields per transaction | 4 | 12 | List the Desktop custom fields you actually filter reports by |
| Reports-only and time-only users | Unlimited | Unlimited | Use them; they are the cheapest seat there is |
Limits from Intuit’s usage-limits help article, updated August 5, 2026. Re-check the article on the day you convert; these caps have changed before.
The Desktop-to-Online transfer is not neutral, and three of its documented behaviours change the numbers you just pulled.
Inactive names can wake up. Intuit’s guide says inactive accounts, customers and vendors move across, and that a customer with an open balance becomes active after the move; a name with no balance stays inactive. So the account count you measured in Desktop holds, but if you were relying on inactive customers to stay out of the way, clear their balances first. This is one of the items on our Desktop to Online conversion checklist.
Jobs become projects or sub-customers. Leaf jobs (jobs with no child jobs) migrate as projects and every other job becomes a sub-customer. Neither consumes a class or a location, so a contractor who tracked 300 jobs in Desktop does not need 300 classes in Online. If you would rather keep jobs as sub-customers, Intuit’s note is to convert into Essentials first and upgrade afterwards; that is a scoping-call decision, not a default.
Accounts receive a detail type and one default A/R. Online adds a detail type to every account, and it sets the last-used A/R and A/P accounts as the only defaults, because Online allows one of each. Files with several A/R accounts (common after an old merger) need those balances consolidated before conversion, which usually reduces the account count rather than increasing it.
Intuit’s transfer guide maps four Desktop features specifically to Advanced: Fixed Asset Items, custom reports, batch invoices (as batch transactions) and the To Do list (as Tasks). If your month-end depends on any of them, Plus will feel like a demotion. Advanced also carries custom roles, which Intuit documents as the way to restrict what a user sees, and the 12 custom fields above; a Desktop file that filters sales reports by rep, territory and contract number needs more than four. Advanced’s revenue-recognition templates and automated workflows are covered in our Enterprise vs Online Advanced comparison; they matter to subscription businesses and to almost no one else.
Things that do not require Advanced: inventory (Plus tracks it, imported at FIFO with a start date you choose), multi-currency (Plus and Advanced, and it cannot be switched off once on), projects and job costing (Plus), recurring transactions (memorized transactions convert to them, though memorized transaction groups do not migrate) and budgets. A five-person contractor with 180 accounts and 25 classes is a Plus file, full stop.
The 2011 Premier file with 412 accounts. Two hundred of them are inactive or have not been used since the previous owner. Made inactive, the active count is 190; classes are 9; users are 3. Plus. The cleanup takes an afternoon and saves the difference between the two tiers every month for as long as the subscription runs; the arithmetic is in the 24-month section of our Desktop vs Online comparison.
The property manager with 14 classes and 36 buildings. Every count is comfortable until locations enter the picture: 14 plus 36 is 50, over the Plus cap. The alternatives are to track buildings as sub-customers instead of locations, which keeps the file on Plus but changes how the P&L by building is produced, or to accept Advanced. We model both before recommending either.
The wholesaler with 7 people posting transactions. Accounts 160, classes 6, but 7 billable users against a cap of 5. Two of them only look at reports, so they become reports-only users and the file lands on Plus with 5 billable seats. If all seven genuinely post, it is Advanced regardless of how small the chart is.
Intuit’s list prices for both tiers are on its pricing page and change without much notice, which is why none are printed here. The gap between Plus and Advanced is real and it compounds monthly, so the cleanup that keeps a file on Plus is usually the best-paid hour in the whole project. Our conversion fee is one fixed price, quoted free after we see the file’s size, target count, years of history and payroll and inventory use, and it is the same whichever tier receives the file. If the file is past Intuit’s migration ceiling or badly damaged, we say so before you spend anything; our outgrown-your-software guide covers the case where the answer is Enterprise rather than either Online tier.
Count three things in the Desktop file first: active accounts in the chart of accounts, active classes plus the locations you intend to track, and the people who need to enter transactions. Intuit's usage limits put Plus at 250 accounts, 40 combined classes and locations and 5 billable users; Advanced is unlimited on the first two and allows 25 billable users. If any count exceeds the Plus cap, the plan is Advanced.
No. Intuit states that only active or invited users, accounts, classes, locations and custom fields count toward the limit in each category. Making an account inactive reduces usage. The migration itself brings inactive accounts, customers and vendors across, but a customer with an open balance becomes active.
No. On Plus and Advanced, reports-only and time-tracking-only users are unlimited and do not count as billable users. Plus also includes 2 accountant firm users and Advanced 3. Only people who need to create or edit transactions consume one of the 5 or 25 billable seats.
Yes, an upgrade is available at any time from Subscriptions and billing, and Intuit's migration notes even describe converting into a lower tier first when you want Desktop jobs to remain sub-customers. Going the other direction is harder: to downgrade you must first bring usage under the lower tier's caps by deleting users and making accounts, classes and locations inactive.
When the three counts are in hand, the QuickBooks Desktop to Online conversion page explains what transfers, what needs a manual hand, and how the fixed-price engagement is scoped.
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Founder of Numerawise Solutions, established MMXXIV in Atlanta. Intuit ProAdvisor Gold tier. Former Intuit Technical Support engineer. Has personally led two hundred accounting software conversions for US small businesses since founding the practice. Reachable directly at [email protected].