Thanks for the replies. Through this blog, I am aware of some desktop solutions and the one I’m leaning toward is Personable’s SourceLink. It seems to be a nicely designed solution. I’d still prefer Intuit’s 100% integrated DM, but am not willing to have my PRIMARY storage on their servers.

I have off site backup of my local data through a nightly backup service, so I have that covered.

However, since it appears the reason Intuit offered Document Management was simply to collect monthly fees for data storage, I was pointing out to Intuit again that (despite already paying for backup elsewhere) I’d use their DM and be willing to give them a few bucks a month to needlessly backup my documents — IF they would allow me to primarily scan and store my documents locally.

Online access needs the net, no doubt about it, but that is a connection issue the way I see it, not a data or application issue as I understand cloud computing to be.

On a different note, did you see that there is a bill in congress to give the white house an internet off switch? If approved the white house will be able to shut down all out side access to the net, and in theory the US net itself if a wide spread cyber attack is thought to be happening.

Local desktop management programs don’t have to work with proprietary data formats. Some store just links to the documents and move the documents to a special folder. Some, like PaperSave Plus, store the data in a SQL Server database that you can access with other tools, I believe. And, using a DMS product doesn’t mean that you have to file the only copy in that system, you can also keep a parallel copy of the document in a special folder. DMS systems shine in retrieval – if you call up a customer in QB you can easily find the documents associated with that customer, rather than having to search on multiple individual’s computers scattered about, or in a very full central filing server. Again, the point is to not blindly rely on the product. Have an alternate plan in place so that if the DMS product goes away for some reason, you still have access to your data. It takes a bit of planning.

Chris – if you have a web site that is hosted off your property, just back up to that web site, you are already paying for the storage anyway. There are open source ftp/backup programs that will do it for you on a schedule at night or whenever.

And desktop document management programs have one inherent problem in my opinion, they rely on proprietary file/dba systems. That basically means if you don’t have that management program running then you can’t access the documents. I scan and save to pdf, every computer reads pdf. And it means that during an audit I control what documents are provided rather than opening the whole dba document system to the auditor.

Chris, there are desktop/LAN oriented document management solutions available. See my article on one of them at http://qbblog.ccrsoftware.info/2009/08/review-papersave-plus-documentation-management-for-quickbooks/

INTUIT: I’d still be willing to pay an appropriate monthly fee for a required “backup” service that you may require in order to activate locally hosted document management! Then we all win — you get a fee for backing up my valuable data, plus I get to store data locally while knowing it is backed up securely at a remote location.

The Intuit team continues to monitor our systems closely. We are still looking into these outages to fully understand the root cause and what we can do to get better. Thank you for your patience.

Rich Walker, CPA
Intuit Inc.