On Tue, 25 May 2010, Kris wrote: > I ran a company on sql-ledger for 5 years before we finally broke down and > migrated to Quickbooks last Fall. Mainly we were fighting accountants who > wouldn't learn the system, extended training for bookkeepers, weird bugs, > and lack of help for those who aren't accountants (me!).
My accountant runs Windows only because that's the only platform on which her tax software runs. She uses Quackbooks, as do almost all of her clients, and she hates it. It's inflexible and forces users to do things its way, not their way. My accountant doesn't know SL, and doesn't care to. I send her the reports she needs for quarterly and annual filings (as .pdf files) and she works from those. There are many consultants who can train bookkeepers on SL; that's their business. Bugs have been common in SL because Dieter's coding is rather sloppy; the folks doing Ledger123 and LedgerSMB are fixing bugs as soon as they are identified and located. They're also adding enhancements. The mail list has been a powerful community for help, both the original one set up by Dieter and the current one run by Armaghan. I remember answering questions about double-entry bookkeeping and similar issues, and I'm not an accountant, either. The accounting questions (in which journal/ledger do I post this transaction?) are best answered by the accountants. The bookkeeping questions (how to I do this in SL?) are readily answered by mail list subscribers. I recall a tee-shirt printing company in Texas who got help from the list, and several companies who figured out how to do POS and manufacturing assembly accounting with the help of the mail list community. > Sql-ledger always required odd workarounds for some things. The > accounting firms also rejoiced our decision, and we no longer had to pay > twice the time for them to muck around sql-ledger. Your experience is quite different from that of most of us. > As for payroll and invoicing AR, forget Quickbooks. We used PayCycle > (which after two years of happy service, they sold out to Intuit), and for > billing used Harvest, a SaaS[1] (getharvest.com). If I had payroll I'd pay my accountant to do it; she's up on all the laws and requirements. A/R and A/P are simple with SL. And, unlike commercial, shrink-wrapped applications, you can tune it to suit your specific business and the way you run it. > We fought hard for sql-ledger, as our business model depended heavily on > FOSS; I > myself have been using Debian since you had to write your own X modelines! In > the end we admitted defeat. It was hurting our ability to manage the business, > and manage cash flow. That's not the fault of the application. Don't blame it. Rich _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
