My suggestion. Copy down all of your general ledgers, your financial statements, client and vendor lists from each year. Instead of trying to put all the detail back into a desktop program, start with this year and just move forward. Desktop can only handle so much data before you have to condense it. I actually never did move my business into QBO because they have no backup and I never felt right about someone else having my data without me having equal access. You can't back it up. For me, that lack is huge. The ease of having a system in the cloud that I cannot back up and keep for years or etc is not an even trade. There are too many ways to access the desktop version for me to desire to give up access to my own company without feeling like I'm held at ransom. If you close your business, I found out recently that they delete the account after a year. it is critical to print out every detail that you might need for any audit. Print all of the payroll data too. When I say print, PDF is what I really mean. Save it to PDF or better yet, for like the general ledger and etc, save those to excel. I am not currently sure what the best option is for clients that desire to take on another system entirely, but I do feel sure if there isn't a great option, there will be. I plan to investigate this and see what is out there. I think Intuit may well plan to get rid of the desktop version at some point, but I am not sure they will actually. I think rather they might try to take that the way they have taken enterprise, which is more of a yearly subscription. I don't love that idea either. One thing about it though, if you have a copy of a desktop version now, that is not going to go away. You may not get their "fixes" or added features after a time via update, but that version will still be there if you need to load your books back up.
