Thanks for the reply. Please note that I have been using QBs for almost 20 years and am fully equipped to manage company files, back it up and do recoveries all by myself. (Not sure what kind of desktop user does not have that capability or skill -- enterprise or multi user, sure, but us stand alone users are pretty good at these things.)
I understand that there is a marketing change or some kind of software direction that is changing, but why screw up software that I purchased in 2019? When I purchased it, logging in was not required. I feel that this is a breach of contract based on the conditions of purchase. I would not mind updating. but I know that I cannot be truly stand alone if I do.
The email was screwed up in 2020 with an update... so I had to create a work around for that.
I used to accept payments through the Intuit Payment network, but now that is screwed up as well because of this new direction. That means, as a stand alone desktop user, as of jan 2022 I cannot process e checks or credit cards using 2019 Pro... and I cannot move on to 2021 because of the online requirements. I'm literally stuck... and Intuit lost my merchant account business.
I guess my $500k a year merchant account is not important enough to maintain the functionality. That's okay - Bank of America set up merchant account quickly as these features were becoming unsupported in Quickbooks. The last question for me is when do I just let go of Quickbooks desktop because I cannot use what I have and I cannot use the new version.
If you find a work around for logging in or always being connected to a server, I would be glad to stay with Quickbooks... but even if you did, how would I know about the option? You would have to tell me somehow... I'm sure it would be difficult to find that option on my own, even if it were released in an update. Really sad.
(Note: Cricut tried to do something similar and got a lot of angry users. Cricut users are tight, though, and have lots of user groups and thus were able to unite in their displeasure with the decision to be only subscription based. Cricut listened to their users and decided to allow any user before 2020 to continue on without a subscription or logging in to use their software. Seems like the most fair solution, since that was the terms at time of purchase... and Cricut got more loyal users because of it.)
