"It is a fast-growing product," CEO Brad Smith said during the webcast. While the sale of desktop units fell from last year's first quarter, desktop QB revenue grew by 27.9 percent because of QBES.

The company will continue to make what Smith called "appropriate" investments in QBES, which he said is "35-percent cheaper than anything else in our market."

Intuit plans to take a product in the QBES space to the cloud. But that will not happen soon. "We hope to have an alternative to QuickBooks Enterprise in the online version," he said, but noted, "That is going to take some time."

Meanwhile, Intuit is beefing up QB Online, including last month's purchase of sales and use tax company Exactor. "Sales-and-use tax is a key feature you need in an enterprise-level product," Smith said. "That is one example of what we are doing to build out that functionality in QuickBooks Online."

For the most recently ended period, there were 120,000 QB desktop units sold, down 34.4 percent from 183,000 a year earlier. QB desktop subscribers totaled 359,000, an 8.1 percent from 332,000.