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?
(Score: 3, Informative) by ledow on Wednesday July 08 2015, @10:52AM
Install VMWare.
Put Windows on it.
Run whatever accounting package on it.
Give them an icon for the seamless-desktop mode of it.
That way, whatever he does, he can't really mess up the VM with his Quickbooks.
And both his computer, his server, or his accounting VM can be whatever OS you damn well want.
And snapshotted.
And rollback-enabled.
And remote-access if you want that.
And safe from malware.
But, to be honest, you'll say that's too much hassle / cost. Which tells you precisely the cost of the system you need to use. Which invariably means "tough luck" in terms of getting a properly locked-down desktop for him.