Your data portability - a rant

I received an email from Intuit/QuickBooks. The cost of the software subscription has increased again, and if you don’t renew it, they lock the desktop program. As an independent consultant, my accounting needs have not grown to require the increasingly complex and costly upgraded software.

There is simpler software. Intuit used to own it, Quicken. Its annual cost is 10% of QuickBooks’s. It now does what I need (invoicing, receivables tracking, checks, etc.). Unfortunately, these features were not available when I started my consulting practice, so I opted for QuickBooks.

My Quicken data could be ported into Quickbooks; however, they have decided not to make my data portable in the other direction.

Calls to tech support for each company have each company pointing a finger at the other, saying the other is responsible for making the data accessible. Someone has decided not to allow the data to be portable. That is not a customer-focused decision; that is a purely keep-the-customer-trapped decision.

If one of my customers decides to move to another consultant, I will release their data back to them.

Fortunately, it is the start of the year, which makes an accounting transition easier. I had already saved a non-resident PDF copy of every invoice, and I have downloaded all the transaction data into spreadsheets and PDFs, so I have it preserved.

My walkaway lesson is to ask about data portability before going with a program. If you put it in, can you get it back out in a usable format?

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This is incredibly important. In my opinion, the data format and portability of the application matter more than if the program itself is open source.

Can you export the data in a plain text format from Quickbooks? If so there might be a way to manipulate it back to something that Quicken can import.

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The closest I can get is a CSV file from QB then try to convert it to a quicken format but the mapping fails on critical fields (e.g. Amount). QB has failed on field managment in the past - “Payee” entered in a transaction register is not recognized as “Payee” entered in the check - Found this out the hard way moving into and later out of QB Online and finding the Payee data was missing. If a text field is missing, and it is pointed out to their engineers, and months later it is not fixed, does not provide a lot of confidence in data in the other fields. Data consistentacy has to be rock solid especially if it is accounting software.

A Google search of: quickbooks alternatives

may yield some ideas about how to proceed. Here’s one recent article.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/best/small-business/quickbooks-online-alternatives

Thanks for the suggestions - I have all my personal data in Quicken so I will also need to see if that migrates.

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If this relates to Personal Data, it would be unlawful under GDPR as any data provided by the “Customer” must be made available to them in a usable format.

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Our needs at our church is simple. We had an accountant who used Quickbooks. He moved out of state last year. The church reset its books using Quicken Home & Business. Since, qualified volunteers do the books we wanted something more simple to learn and maintain.

Ninety-nine percent this. The remaining percent I wonder how I feel about big vendor data formats. Namely Apple Notes. Not sure how well I can export from Apple Notes when I choose something else. But for me notes are more transient in nature and I would not be devastated if they would disappear (albeit hugely annoyed).

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+1

It is the only important thing to me. LOG4J taught me that open source can be less secure than a program from an established vendor.

For those that are interested the US Library of Congress maintains a list of recommended data formats.

That has been the subject of several threads. Just search for: export Apple Notes. I gave up on it long ago.

I am aware of a few of them, but thanks. I consciously chose not to worry about AN data export since I do not expect Apple to charge me for AN. I will cross that bridge when I get to it and curse my former self.

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I’ve been doing bookkeeping for many years for my partner’s consulting business (roughly 50 transactions per month). Previously it was handled by Quickbooks as a friend insisted that was the best and, what I realized quickly, it was “the best” because that’s what that person used at work daily for her employer…I advised my wife to avoid it as it was expensive and overkill for what she needed. She ignored me. A couple of years later she regretted that decision due to the mounting cost. I transitioned her over to Moneydance and it’s been rock solid ever since. It’s not as pretty in terms of UI, but it is cross-platform. It’s NOT open source, so if that is important to you then I would take a serious look at GnuCash, whcih I thought was surprisingly good. But I can 100% recommend Moneydance. I’ve been using it for ~10 years, with that much data still in it, and I’ve maybe had to pay an upgrade fee twice during that time? Maybe only once? Updates every year.

I just about guarantee Apple won’t ever charge for Notes. But data exports are for more things than futureproofing against price hikes. Especially given the occasional semi-random data loss reports from people, how are you backing up/protecting the data?

Does Moneydance give nice end-of-year reports that are suitable for business accounting?

Currently, I’m not using any of this. I’m posting just to say that Intuit has a long history of being customer unfriendly and expensive.

Well, for now, I do Time Machine to back it up :sweat_smile:. I also do risk mitigation by keeping things like software keys elsewhere. However, with most backups I wonder how to know when data is missing? I keep thinking of writing a few scripts for files for monitoring data loss but never got around to it.

Because they take space in iCloud, if you want sync you will finally end up upgrading your iCloud storage. Apple does not need to charge for Notes, just wait.

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