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file formats

file formats

Posted Jan 13, 2009 20:37 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
In reply to: file formats by corbet
Parent article: The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update

hmm, I'm a bit surprised at this. I would have thought that that software would be able to read the quicken files (if nothing else), and if it's been reverse engineered enough to read the files it should be able to create suitable files as well.

besides being a good idea for compatibility, it would also be a good idea in terms of avoiding product lock-in (since almost everything can import your data from quicken, being able to export to quicken would let you migrate your data from one package to another)

if nothing else, this would let you use the open software for your day-to-day activities and then export to quickbooks for the tax stuff (yes you end up dealing with the proprietary software, but you are able to avoid it's limitations most of the time)


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file formats

Posted Jan 15, 2009 22:35 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I would have thought that that software would be able to read the quicken files

Quicken files such as you would use to import bank account information from your bank to Quicken do not carry the same kind of information that your accountant needs to determine how much tax your business owes. So I don't think this format has any bearing on the difficulty in substituting another bookkeeping program for Quickbooks.

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