Forced and expensive subscription
After being a Quickbooks desktop customer for more than 20 years, we are not happy about the forced and very expensive subscription service. We were doing just fine with our Desktop 2017 version which, by the way was WA-A-A-A-Y more than we needed for our small farming operation. Since we do not have any employees, we do not need or do payroll, invoices, budgets. or tax forms through Quickbooks.
Our Quickbooks use was mainly a very fancy checkbook register for several different bank accounts and loans, and to keep track of specific expenses such as out-of-pocket health, and farming supplies costs. Although we do have a very extensive chart of accounts, it's mostly for personal purposes, and is a very basic accounting system. We also DO NOT WANT TO GO TO THE ONLINE VERSION!
Since we were more or less in a no-win situation with upgrading to the 2024 version, we paid the more than $600 for the Quickbooks Desktop Pro 2024. In all of the years we've used Quickbooks, we have rarely called support , and only did so in April 2024 because we were having "sudden" logging in problems. Incidentally, the specific logging in problem did not improve even after paying for the 2024 Desktop Pro version. It still, for no apparent reason, logs us out even if we used it the day before. Then other times, it loads just fine. If we would have known that, we would have stayed with the 2017 version for the rest of our lives. We could care less whether we have the most updated version with all of the security features, and fancy bells and whistles, and actually prefer not to have all of that. We have a very extensive Norton Lifelock Internet Security and Antivirus system on our desktop computer - which incidentally costs a lot less per year than Quickbooks now does, and we get a lot more bang for our Norton LifeLock buck.
What this comes down to is, now that we have that fancy smancy, very expensive 2024 desktop version, if we still have to pay anything more than $100 PER YEAR for an annual subscription -- WE WILL SACRIFICE our past 20 years of company data and will move to Quicken, or some other less expensive accounting or checkbook register program -- even if it means starting from scratch!
Do you have any suggestions or advice on how we can downgrade to a less expensive Quickbooks plan (but without going to the online version) or better-yet continue with our very expensive and unnecessary 2024 Desktop Pro version without worrying about subscriptions, updates and all of the other excuses Intuit uses for reasons as to why they need us to do things their way? Apparently, Intuit Quickbooks cares more about their bottom-line than the bottom line of their long-time customers. We can not afford to continue at the current subscription rate!