Quick books for linux

[Carl Parrish]

jon wrote:

> You might want to check out the online edition:
>
> http://oe.quickbooks.com/home.shtml?sc=QBC-V51-HME-HMEPGE
>
>     -- jon
>
> Michael Sammartano wrote:
>
>> Is there an app out there that will do what Quick books will do for 
>> Linux? I need something like it for a small business.
>>
>> Mike
>
>
For personal data I recommend checkbook tracker (free) or moneydance 
(java) they are both nice simple tools that run great in Linux. 
Moneydance has better reporting tools though. For *really* small 
businesses gnucash works, it needs to be updated to gnome 2.x pretty bad 
and getting it to work with multiple users is a PITA but I ran my 
consulting company off of it for years. Today I use quickbooks online 
edition. Currently you need to run IE to use it (though they have hinted 
that they will soon have it working with firefox - please all firefox 
users check out the forums and ask about it so that the managers etc... 
will know there is a market for it). What I do now is run IE though 
crossover office.  It works fine (though its a resource hog) only weird 
thing (and maybe this is the same on Widows) is that if you're in a 
field and type on the backspace key it erases the entire field not just 
the last charter. I've pretty much learned to live with that however.  I 
can't *stand* working in IE though so I'm currently working on getting 
wine to allow me to run activeX through Mozilla (should work in firefox 
as well) I've already checked and if I have firefox spoff as IE on 
Windows the application will let me login the only problems so far is 
when I run into activeX.

Netsuite is another great online tool that works great with Linux I ran 
that for a year and it was awesome. Reasons I switched to Quickbooks are 
1) my accountant was more familiar with quickbooks 2) my wife and my 
admin liked the GUI for quickbooks better 3) Quickbooks allows you to 
pick and choose which tools you need. If you pick all the tools that 
Netsuite has then Quickbooks ends up being more expensive. For us we 
didn't need all the tools (we have our own E-comm package and prefer 
SugarCRM to their CRM package). Netsuite makes you pay for the entire 
package. 4) Quickbooks allows you to pay per month.  Netsuite you had to 
pay the entire year upfront, if you do the same with Quickbooks QBOE 
ends up being cheaper (they give you a 10% discount).  Negatives are 
that Intuit *really* tries to make you use *only* their products. 
Currently there is no way to backup your data to your own computer. They 
control all the backups (we've found a work around for this if you want 
it). I've already mentioned the IE only aspect (yuck). Quickbooks 
*easily* wins for 1) cost / cash flow 2) documentation 3) certified 
accountants - I was never able to find someone certified w/ Netsuite and 
though my accountant used it he complained all the way.

it should be mentioned that there are several open source tools that run 
on the web they just didn't work out for us. 1) Most are written in perl 
or python, we're now a php only shop and want a php tool to work with. 
2) None of them work with mysql, it seems the designers all believe 
mysql isn't up to running financial programs 3) My admin and my wife 
worked each other up (and I had to listen) on how ugly the open source 
ones were. So while I have hope of finding / witting  a open source tool 
to work with SugarCRM and eProject (we're in testing now). For now going 
with quickbooks online was just easier / cheaper.

-- 
Carl Parrish
------------
Developer
PCL Design & Consulting Inc.
http://www.pcl-consulting.com