Quickbooks

[White8]

The business that I bought several months ago uses Quickbooks, and to be honest, I've not particularly fond of the way it does some things having come from a business that used a much more powerful industry specific piece of software. I've been tossing the idea of an open source knock off of Quickbooks (much as OpenOffice is to MS Office) around with a software developer and he seems to think that it would be quite possible.

Opinions?

 

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[CactusWren]

From your message I am not sure I understand if this is a business idea or a business decision. Maybe it can be both!

I use QB regularly and find it easy and friendly. There are a couple of things that I would like it to have, but I understand some other types might. By types, I am referring to "contractor" versus "retail" versus just "pro" which I use. Obviously, there are also price differences...

An open source program would likely to be a huge hit!

 

[TC2]

I personally use both Quickbook and open source GnuCash from Free Accounting Software | GnuCash.

There is no comparison. CnuCash need more commercial support to make it a better product.

I treat buying QuickBook as a part of my investment. Dealing with the troubles open source software give me will cost me more time and $ for long run.

 

[LightHouse]

I agree with Terence in the business word i want the piece of mind to know if something gets screwed up, i have the support in place to call and get something fixed. Not just post on an open forum and hope to get an answer. I think developing a OS piece of an accounting software that is comparable would be quite pricey, how would you monetize it and make that investment back?

 

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[hatterasguy]

I just bought Pro and its pretty good, I still need to really learn how to use it.

But right now I can make invoices for each house so I can atleast track my costs. I havn't figured out the general ledger 100% yet.

However I'm kind of regreting I didn't pay the extra $200 for the contractor version. I'd love to be able to create work orders, or something like that to keep track of the houses.

 

[White8]

From your message I am not sure I understand if this is a business idea or a business decision. Maybe it can be both!

I use QB regularly and find it easy and friendly. There are a couple of things that I would like it to have, but I understand some other types might. By types, I am referring to "contractor" versus "retail" versus just "pro" which I use. Obviously, there are also price differences...

An open source program would likely to be a huge hit!

I was thinking a little of both.

Terence mentioned support and I've been very disappointed with the Quickbooks tech support after by office manager spent several hours with flow chart readers trying to create progress billings. As luck would have it, in the Quickbooks world if you create progress billings for example of 33%, Quickbooks updates your inventory with 1/3 of a widget.

As far as monetizing, there is the support aspect as well as continued subscriptions for tax tables. There is also the possibility of a buy out by a large company which often seems to happen to OS software which provides the proving ground for commercial versions.