I totally agree with you on this subject.  Intuit and Quickbooks just do not care about those who wish to remain on the desktop versions.

I do not trust cloud and the fact you can not work offline as well as online is a major issue which nobody has even considered.  How can you work and complete the work on time if your internet provider is down for days or weeks on end.

Surely, with the amount of confidential information that as accountants we have to hold on clients and abide by the money laundering laws, due diligence, GDPR, HMRC requirements we need the facility to store their data offline.

All I get from Quickbooks is that they can not help with these problems that will eventually arise.  Just wait till cloud gets hacked all the data stored on it becomes available worldwide to anybody.  Perhaps then they might shut the door, which will be way to late.

This is just a profiteering opportunity by the software companies with the monthly subscription fees and as you say clients will not want to pay these fees and then that leaves us trying to figure out how to make a profit whilst absosrbing these costs.

How can we cover ourselves from breach of GDPR when we are in a no win situation.  Clients saying no to cloud and HMRC saying cloud based only.  HMRC stance on this issue was just to tell the clients they have to use cloud storage regardless.  Surely that it taking away their freedom to choose under the Human Rights Act.

I am switching most of my clients to VT transactions, it is a learning curve but there is only one annual fee and the data automatically uploads into VT Accounts, which in turn can be linked to tax software I think.