Another thing that bugs me about online software is that now "everybody" is touting their ability to attach images of receipts and invoices to transactions. Even though some desktop products have supported that for a while, the rosy idea of being able to take a snapshot of a receipt with your phone and immediately attach it to a transaction that you've also accessed with your phone is portrayed as something that ought to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

With QB desktop, and other desktop apps, if you wanted to look up a document from 2 years ago, you could do that--because you were in control of your own data and had certainty of always having access to it. 

With online software, this whole idea may appeal to a clueless 20-year-old but no longer invokes anything warm and fuzzy for me. Why? Because the day you decide to stop paying your online subscription--maybe you decide to switch to a different accounting product--you suddenly are locked out of all of those document images you stored with transactions. All that effort is down the drain, gone forever.

[I should apologize to 20-year-olds who might read this, but I find that too many of you are overly trusting of all things related to technology that's sold to you by emphasizing lots of glitz and glamour...like Alexa, and phones that always know where you are, and "wolf in sheep's clothing" software features.]

Online accounting software is sold based on the same marketing plan as cocaine and heroin. The goal is to make it easy and cheap to get started--like so many companies selling your their software for half price or less for the first 6 months. Then once you are hooked--once you have a significant investment in learning time and record entry--start raising the price (Need that extra feature? You can have it if you're willing to pay another $35 per month). Oh, and make it very painful to stop: not only would you lose access to all the transactions you've entered, you'd also lose access to all those historic document images that you thought you could access "forever" as part of the panacea of the much-lauded "paperless office".