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A client of mine does the payroll for his small business and has thus far used various versions of Intuit's Quickbooks. While he can manage to muddle around with programs and do things, computers are still very much magic boxes to him and he had the malware to prove it. I'm doing everything remotely, so I would like to switch him to a simple Linux desktop but the problem is Quickbooks doesn't have a Linux client and the web version of their app is unusable. I've looked into Linux financial software (e.g. gnucash) but I can't seem to find anything that does payroll and accounts for U.S. state and federal payroll taxes. Does anyone use payroll software for Linux that they can recommend?
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Ask Soylent: Payroll Software on Linux
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by vux984 on Wednesday July 08 2015, @08:17AM
He's better off on quickbooks than any thing available for linux. Any accountant or bookeeper, or part time assistant who assists with his taxes, does an audit, or anything else ever will know how to use it. Don't move him to something else.
As for Quickbooks on linux? Sure it can be done, but I wouldn't bother. They won't support it all. And its mission critical to his business. Would you really choose to run mission critical software for your business on a completely unsupported platform you hacked together to make mostly work?? Of course not.
Virtualization is probably fine, but running windows on top of linux is still running windows; and if he's going to spend most of his time in the windows vm, your not really doing him any favors; nor really accomplishing anything. My advice? Do a client/server install; and keep his data safe on a server that gets backup properly and isn't vulnerable to cryptolocker hitting his desktop.
If you have to repave his desktop every few months, so be it. Although, a few ad blockers, antivirus, malware bytes, etc can go a long way; and take away his admin rights if that's feasible; that'll keep most walware in his user profile, where its easier to deal with.
Maybe have a look at Quickbooks for Mac. Malware situation there is growing but still less.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Thursday July 09 2015, @03:09AM
Maybe have a look at Quickbooks for Mac.
This was a long time ago, so I don't know if it still applies.
I worked for a small company that used Quickbooks running on an ancient Windows machine. They wanted to get a newer computer (bear in mind, this was the sole computer in the whole place, not counting the cash register), and I convinced them to get a Mac. Well, imagine my surprise when I found out that the Mac and Windows versions of Quickbooks use completely incompatible file formats, and there's no way to convert between the two, so they'd have no access to their existing records. In other words, the chimps at Quickbooks did something so breathtakingly stupid that I didn't even think to check for it, and I was the one who wound up looking like a schmuck. So don't let it happen to you.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Thursday July 09 2015, @06:55AM
Yeah, I know it once was too, but not sure if that's still the case, especially with the quickbooks online offering. But even if it is still completely incompatible and it is a big one time conversion... switching to mac may still make sense... for some people; if they jsut can't keep their PC clean. Mac's aren't immune... but a lot of crud still isn't targeting them.