Breaking News & Updates

What Happened to Accounting Software in 2024? (And Why We’re Winding Our Prices Back to Then)

2024 feels like a long time ago in the accounting software world. It was the year the AI wave properly arrived, the year subscription prices marched upward yet again, and — looking back from mid-2026 — the year that set up everything that’s happened since. So let’s take a stroll down memory lane, because there’s a good reason we’re feeling nostalgic: we’ve brought back 2024 pricing on our courses.

2024: The Year AI Stopped Being a Gimmick

If you were reading the tech press in 2024, every second headline was about AI — but in accounting software it was the year the promises started becoming products. Xero was rolling machine learning deeper into bank reconciliation, predicting account codes and contact names for your transactions before you’d even clicked. Intuit pushed its AI assistant across QuickBooks. Microsoft spent the year embedding Copilot throughout Word, Excel and Outlook, changing what “basic Office skills” would come to mean.

At the time, plenty of bookkeepers wondered whether AI was coming for their jobs. Two years on, we know how that played out: the AI does more of the data entry, and the humans who understand what the numbers mean are more valuable than ever. But 2024 was the year that shift genuinely began.

2024: The Year of the Price Rise

Ask any small business owner what they remember about their accounting software in 2024 and there’s a fair chance they’ll say: the bill went up. Again.

Xero introduced a completely new plan line-up in Australia during 2024, retiring its old familiar plans and moving everyone across to new tiers — a change that came with price adjustments that had social media buzzing. And it wasn’t a one-off: as we’ve noted on this blog before, Xero has now delivered four straight years of price increases, and the sentiment on LinkedIn and Facebook each time tells you exactly how customers feel about it.

MYOB and QuickBooks weren’t sitting still either — subscription prices across the entire category crept upward through 2024 and beyond, as every provider invested heavily in the AI arms race and passed the cost along.

The lesson for students and bookkeepers? Businesses are paying more than ever for their accounting software, which means they expect more than ever from the people operating it. Knowing your way around these programs confidently isn’t optional — it’s the whole point of the subscription.

2024: The Year the Old Ways Started Disappearing

2024 was also a year of goodbyes. Xero pressed ahead with retiring its much-loved classic invoicing in favour of the new invoicing experience — a change that generated more passionate feedback than almost anything else Xero has done. QuickBooks users continued the long farewell to desktop software as Intuit steered everyone toward the cloud. Even Microsoft began nudging users from the classic Outlook toward its new version.

Change like this is exactly why ongoing training matters. The software you learned three years ago has been redesigned under your feet — menus move, features get renamed, workflows change. It’s also why EzyLearn students get course updates and new content added during their access period, so when the software changes, your training keeps up.

And Now the Good News: 2024 Prices Are Back

Here’s where the nostalgia gets practical. While the software companies have spent 2024, 2025 and 2026 putting their prices up, we’re doing the opposite — we’re winding our course prices back to 2024 levels.

That means you can enrol in our MYOB, Xero, QuickBooks and Microsoft Office training courses at the prices we charged before the last two years of increases everywhere else. Same up-to-date course content — reflecting all those 2024-and-beyond software changes we’ve just described — at yesterday’s prices.

Micro courses in Office Admin and Bookkeeping are now back at 2024 prices: https://bookkeepercourse.com.au/product-category/short-courses/

Why This Matters Right Now

We’re at the start of a new financial year. Tax time is in full swing, catch-up bookkeeping season is here, and job ads for accounts and office admin roles pick up as businesses reset their budgets for the year ahead.

If 2024 was the year the industry changed, 2026 is the year to make sure your skills have kept up. The software is smarter, the subscriptions are dearer, and the demand for people who genuinely know how to use these programs — MYOB, Xero, QuickBooks and Microsoft Office — keeps growing.

Getting trained at 2024 prices while everyone else’s prices go up? That’s the kind of bargain Jerry Lame would definitely approve of.

-- Did you like what you read? Want to receive these posts via email when they are published? Subscribe below.