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Ask Soylent: Payroll Software on Linux

posted by janrinok on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:34AM   
from the give-me-the-money dept.

Gravis writes:

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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Original Submission

• SaaS? (Score: 4, Informative) by MrGuy on Wednesday July 08 2015, @01:27PM

  by MrGuy (1007) on Wednesday July 08 2015, @01:27PM (#206447)

  This is precisely the problem SaaS is targeted at - small companies who don't want to host a server to run their software on themselves, but still need the product.

  Intuit has precisely this in QuickBooksOnline. It seems on the face like an ideal solution to your customers' problem - same familiar tool, straightforward upgrade path from their current tool, accessible from anything with a web browser. I know one person who uses the online version for a very small business, and they're reasonably happy with it.

  In your original submission, you brush off that possibility with "the web version of their app is unusable." That seems surprising - it's a fairly widely publicized consumer product. I don't doubt you if you've assessed it and determined it's unsuitable, but in what way is that true? Won't work on chosen browser? Missing a key feature? Is the problem addressable? It feels like making the online version from a major vendor work (if you can) might be preferable to porting the whole solution to a new provider, especially when you don't have any knowledge of a suitable replacement. If it's unrecoverable, it's unrecoverable, I guess.

  * Disclaimer: I do not and never have worked for Intuit, but I have used a few of their products.

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