I agree that view only access is a priority for our company.

I am very glad for this forum, because it has now saved me quite a bit of money and aggravation that moving to Quickbooks online would have inflicted.

I use the desktop version and will now stay right where I am.  I am a light user — Quickbooks is sort of overkill for us, but it makes it easier to work with our accountant.  I am definitely never going to be a candidate for the Enterprise version.  

I was really hoping that moving to the online version would enable me to allow my business partners to view our status without the risk of messing anything up.  

We actually want the opposite of what selected permissions currently do.  We would want everyone to be able to view balances and reports, but we would not want any of the others to be able to create a transaction — not even one transaction by mistake.