A question often asked on this thread is whether there is an alternative to Quickbooks. As far as I can tell there are alternatives, but only if one is willing to go to a cloud based alternative. In fact the reason that Intuit snuck in the onerous "log into Intuit" in the desktop apps is to force users to upgrade to their cloud based subscription service. It's not hard to understand given that many of us paid once for the desktop version and can use it forever at no additional cost. In the past my approach was to only upgrade my desktop version every 3 years. I did that primarily to be sure that the new version could import the files created in the old version. The principals of accounting haven't changed for a hundred years so the only reason to do annual updates, and thus providing Intuit with a continued revenue stream was if one was using the payroll function and needed to have that latest tax tables. The format for 1099's also changed from time to time but unless one had a large number of those there was little reason to upgrade QB just for that. 

Fortunately I'm soon to be preparing the final files for my several companies and retiring so I don't really care much what Intuit does. But, for those looking for a replacement, albiet one that is cloud based, I came across Freshbooks which seems to be a decent replacement and in the same cost range as a QB cloud subscription. Not a stand alone, but the momentum is shifting to subscription based systems anyway.

Just a semi-final thought. Good luck to all!