The small business Q*ckB*cks lock-in [LWN.net]

The small business QckBcks lock-in

Posted May 11, 2007 14:39 UTC (Fri) by ken_i_m (guest, #4938)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's next project

As a consultant specializing in FOSS I often talk to small business owners and Q*!(&B@@&$ is the number one reason they will not even consider switching. It is what drives their whole computer acquisition. When those "forced upgrades" come along the bookkeeper(s) gets a new computer and the old one gets handed down to the next in line. That person's computer then gets passed on and so on, like "hand me down clothes". In the meantime, they are plagued with all the trojans, viruses, and other malware that goes hand in hand with the dependent operating system platform.

I do occasional work for a consultanting group that is moving into the SAP Business One space. Their primary targets are businesses that are out-growing Q*!(&B@@&$ and need to scale upward. If the FOSS community can come up with a good replacement for that evil app then they will more likely continue to look to FOSS for their future needs.

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The small business Q*ckB*cks lock-in

Posted Jun 4, 2007 21:08 UTC (Mon) by einhverfr (guest, #44407) [Link]

The latest versions of Quickbooks are not as difficult to migrate from as previous versions. So there is less lock-in from a data perspective. We, on the LedgerSMB project are working on solutions for that.

However, the larger issue at the moment, is that a lot of people are tied to Quickbooks' payroll services. I believe that the market is ripe for an open source US payroll solution, but I haven't seen any that I would trust (I don't use MySQL for financial applications).

Interestingly, Quickbooks inadequate inventory handling and rigidity regarding payroll is a major reason why customers of mine ask when we can migrate them (and the answer is sadly, maybe six months away).