Running my Accounting Systems under VMware
A company lives and dies by its ability to sustain its existance. Nothing is more important than knowing where you are in order to make prudent decisions.
My XP laptop (an IBM X30) died last month. As the data was backed up this was not catastrophic disaster in itself.
I’d been running my accounting system(QuickBooks) under Windows 98 in VMware Player, reasoning that I needed isolation (no other software could interfere with it). I stored the data on what looked like a network drive, mapped through a virtual network drive to a regular directory on my laptop.
I’m in the process of shifting to light-as-possible on the road (I just bought a 4G solid state drive Asus EEEPC 401) coupled with a beefy server (quad core) at home running CentOS hosting the free VMware Server plus a Synology Cubestation 407 Network Attached Storage device with mirrored disks. Made possible by ubiquitous network connectivity. Many of my clients use VMware environments now, so both increasing my own competency and having the facility to host their environments in intrinsically important to me.
My company, Blended Perspectives Inc is relatively young. In itself I don’t have to use QuickBooks. Indeed, Wikipedia shows a tremendous range of packages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_accounting_software
Further, as http://www.hostingforum.ca/2017288-post15.html puts it:
Forget about it, once you are in Quickbooks its nearly impossible to move
to anything else. The export from Quickbooks leaves lots of things out.
I’ve been using Quickbooks for 15 years so I’m stuck, I run it in VMware
and I grit my teeth and pay the subscription fees. For someone who is
just starting a business I’d recommend that you look at alternatives but
it you have been using it for a while there are no good options for
switching to anything else.
I don’t much like Quickbooks. I find it outdated, confusing and the interface somewhat clumsy. Yet, book-keeping is not my strongest competency, for that I rely on my accountants, Bass Murphy. While I need to enter data, my needs become somewhat subservient to whatever os needed to keep my company firmly on course and compliant with regulation. So I defer, to the preferences of my accountants. I’m assuming they want Quickbooks. (Writing this prompted me to email then to check today, as I realised that I’d never actually asked them about alternatives!)
Nevertheless I suspect there is currently no decent, free, solid, alternative. I suspect it’s still a time off before something will have the features, the fiddly region-specific tax table updates, and the support from accounting professionals.
Further, although there are Open Source personal solutions, such as an interesting http://www.thezeal.com/software/index.php?Money_Manager_Ex, I rather agree with the opinion from the same thread:
Any one of these things that says “personal money manager” will not make the grade for any business, large or small.
One has to have inventory control, purchase orders, billing, asset accounting, and payroll.
Further, I use Neat Receipts about which I have many opinions, both good and bad. That is targeting Quickbooks as its center of gravity for integration. I’d wager it’ll be a very long time before they support anything open source.
So my current plan is to continue to submit defeat to the almighty Quickbooks:
Virtualization is a great solution. I run a Win2K VM on top of Fedora. Win2K has the advantage of
not having the Activation requirements of XP, it’s also faster. As a
Linux user I don’t give a damn about any of the OS improvements that they
made in XP, none of that matters to me. All I need is for Quickbooks to
work, which it does. I’m also not interested in any of the fancier
Windows networking features, all I care about is that the VM be able to
see a SAMBA share, which works fine in 2K. However if you don’t own a
copy of 2K then XP works fine on VMware.
Further, Neat Receipts works under VMware too:
I’m running VMWare Fusion so that I can use Windows XP when I need to, for example, I have a Neat Receipt scanner for my scanning my expense receipts. It won’t work on OS/X but absolutely works nicely on Windows, without a hitch. VMWare is working nicely and again I can thank Richard for his recommendations as I would have probably gone with ether Basecamp or Parallels. Glad to be using VMWare.
Not only will I be able to use this setup from home, but from the road. And not just me, but so too will my accountant. (If I use Win2K I’ll install Terminal Services). Time to sharpen my firewall.
