My client has 13 separate small businesses, each with its own QuickBooks company file. There are six users in the office, and I require my client to maintain an extra license on the server so I can manage all the licensing and password stuff without constantly being unable to get in because the users are all logged onto their computers. So, including the admin, there are 91 passwords.
We have intentionally stayed on QB 2016 R5, the last update that did not require all the insane new password nonsense. Intuit moderators: if you can actually read, please pay attention to this: do not post anything here about "we did this for your protection". That is a lie: the truth is that you did this so that nobody could ever blame you for a loss of private information when they do something stupid like leaving a copy of a company file on a pubic drive. You do not fool any of us by posting the same old "for your protection nonsense". We here in the community are tired of hearing it and getting closer and closer to just dropping QuickBooks entirely. We need a separate topic in the community for "best QuickBooks alternatives that allow single password across multiple company files and do not require periodic password changes".
At any rate, we now need to add another user, and that, of course, means upgrading everyone to QB 2022. That makes 91 passwords (13 company files X 7 users) I would have to change immediately after upgrading! That is horrible enough in itself, but what really scares me is this: is the 90-day password change requirement. Is that still in effect? It was when I first tried an upgrade beyond QB 2016 R5 and had to revert to that version to avoid all of this.
There is exactly a 0% chance that my users would remember or have time to change their passwords in all 13 files when prompted to change it in one of them. And that just means that I would have to spend all my time fielding calls to change passwords for users. There is also a high probability that someone who knows the admin password would change it in five files but not the other eight, then have no idea which are which. So the only option I can see is for me to proactively schedule password changes and do all 91 at once, every 90 days.
So my question is this: does Intuit still have the requirement that passwords be changed every 90 days? Keep in mind that I have no idea how much "private" information the users keep in any of these files. I am not privy to whether they keep credit cards, EINs, etc. So do not ask me to answer any question about that. Just give me the worst case scenario, and if it involves changing 91 passwords every 90 days, there is no way we can do this upgrade. Like many small companies, this client uses less than half the functionality of QuickBooks, and with Intuit's longstanding unwillingness to consider cross-company single-password synchronization and lack of any actual care for their customer base, QuickBooks is becoming less and less usable. And while I could never hope to duplicate the rich feature set QuickBooks offers, I could spend a hundred hours programming and come up with something that absolutely meets my clients' needs for basic COA, customer/vendor management, bank recon, invoicing, bill payment, financial reports, and check printing.
All over a stupid password requirement:(
