OT: Cracking Quickbooks format

[Vaughn Treude]

Joshua Zeidner wrote:
> 
>  I know someone at Intuit in Tucson and he had mentioned that there have 
> been talks at Intuit about pursuing an 'Open Format Strategy', which I 
> assume involves publishing their data formats.
> 
>   -jmz

Now there would be a 180-degree turn.
Another funny thing about QuickBooks- I got tired of paying for the tax 
table updates, when the amounts weren't changing all that much, and I'm 
the sole employee of my company anyway.  So QB warns you at first that 
the tax tables are out of date, but eventually it refuses to do any 
payroll calculations at all.  At this point I gave them the benefit of 
the doubt, because  our hyper-litigious society makes companies do some 
pretty idiotic things.  Instead of renewing, I just did a spreadsheet to 
calculate all the amounts, and plugged them in each month. (The IRS 
publishes the formulas in its Employers Tax Guide.)  A bit of a pain, 
but not so bad when you have only one paycheck to create.
Vaughn
> 
> 
> On 7/3/07, *Vaughn Treude* <vltreude at deru.com 
> <mailto:vltreude at deru.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Hello:
>     For quite some time I've been wanting to move my company books form
>     QuickBooks to GnuCash or some other Linux application.  I was having
>     difficulty finding a way to convert my existing data, but I
>     procrastinated.  Recently something happened that convinced me to do
>     it.
>       Sad story follows:
> 
>     I have a copy of QB Pro 99 I need to move to a newer Windoze computer,
>     yet when I installed it, it refused to read my data files, because they
>     were from a "newer" version.  Huh? What I believe caused that is the
>     fact that I allowed Intuit to update my QB99 online.  I've posted a
>     question to their forum.  If their answer is "buy a new version", I
>     swear I'll never give Intuit another nickel.  I did some searching and
>     discovered a product called DataBlox  (a Windows product, at
>     datablox.com <http://datablox.com>) which claims to be able to
>     extract data from all QB
>     formats.  It costs $99 and even if this is more expensive than buying a
>     new QB, at least I wouldn't be giving my money to Inuit.
> 
>     Does anyone know of any cheaper alternatives?  I'm having trouble
>     locating "quickbooks hacks" because there are at least 100 programs out
>     there to recover lost QB passwords, which causes Google to return a lot
>     of noise.
> 
>     While googling I've also found a lot of examples of Intuit's obnoxious
>     business practices.  The worst was requiring banks to pay extra to
>     support Quicken for Mac, which means that a lot of banks won't support
>     Mac users, even though THE FILE FORMAT USED IS IDENTICAL.  It is an a
>     totally artificial crippling of the product.  (BTW, the poster found a
>     workaround by configuring his copy of QB with a different bank's ID.)
>     Intuit is probably losing money doing this - unless MS is paying them
>     off to discourage the Mac - which I doubt, since MS makes most of its
>     money on Office, not the OS.
> 
>     Intuit is evil!
> 
>     Vaughn
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> 
> JOSHUA M. ZEIDNER
> IT Consultant
> 
> ( 602 ) 490 8006
> jjzeidner at gmail.com <mailto:jjzeidner at gmail.com>
> 
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