Each year, in the Fall, Intuit releases a new version of QuickBooks for their Pro, Premier and Enterprise line-ups. We’re now onto QuickBooks 2011. Should you upgrade to the 2011 version and when?

In 2009, Intuit had a total revenue of $3.2 Billion. The sales of the QuickBooks software represented only 12% of that, but an enormous portion of Intuit’s other revenue is dependent on the health of their QuickBooks franchise: add-on applications, payroll, services for accountants, etc… QuickBooks is Intuit’s foundation and they put massive resources behind it to keep the brand “fresh”. Accordingly, there is quite a bit of innovation that gets into each new version of QuickBooks. However, QuickBooks is a mature product and there are only so many features that you can add to QuickBooks without running the risk of making it too complicated. QuickBooks’ core value proposition is that it is easy to use. Intuit doesn’t want to put this at risk. So it is fair to say that the rate of improvement from one version to another has dramatically decreased over the past few years. The improvements are on the margin and most new features are relevant only to the advanced users.

In other words, if you are using only half of QuickBooks’ features, you are very unlikely to need the new features of each new release. Don’t bother upgrading every year.