Crossover 4.2 Runs Quickbooks on Linux

Memorize writes "What's keeping you from switching your desktop to Linux? Linux has been able to run MS Office under Wine for a while now, but Codeweavers just announced Crossover 4.2 with support for Intuit Quicken and Quickbooks. I know that lack of a good bookkeeping app (other than Gnucash) has been keeping a lot of people from switching. It supports iTunes, too. What else do you need?"

Comments

I need...

[DeathPenguin]

>>What else do you need?

Games. Though I suppose a lot of people are content with Cedega. Still, that's an awful lot of versions of Wine to have just for compatibility.

Mainly just painless installation

[anthony_dipierro]

Probably the main thing stopping me from switching is the same thing stopping me from trying out XP. I don't want to format my hard drive, and I've only got one partition, which is NTFS. In theory I should still be able to install linux into a file in the NTFS filesystem, but I haven't had the time to bother with this.

Re:Mainly just painless installation

[MarkRose]

It shouldn't be difficult to restore your needed documents from backup. You do make backups of everything you care about, don't you?

If you run a finance app under wine, you're a fool

[Julian Morrison]

A finacial app is no use if you can't trust it 100%. Since they tested it on Windows, run it on Windows. Anything else is asking for trouble.

Your game glitches under Wine, it's a hassle. Your finance app glitches, it could get expensive.

Re:If you run a finance app under wine, you're a f

[anthony_dipierro]

What finance app can you trust 100%? The answer, of course, is none. One of the reasons they have these things called backups, you know.

Re:If you run a finance app under wine, you're a f

[k4rm4_p0l7c3]

Yeah, lord knows those tricky floating point values are hard to get right when you translate them

(give me a break..)

Not a huge need for Quicken..

[SocialEngineer]

My mother uses MoneyDance to do her accounting schtuff. She loves it. Plus, it's available for Linux, OSX, and Windows. She switched to it from Quicken's software a while back.

Re:Not a huge need for Quicken..

[ManxStef]

I'll second that - been using it on Mac OS X for a good few months now and I'm very happy with it. Sean and the dev team are very helpful - you can mail them via support, or bring something up in the mailing list, and you'll get a direct response: bit of a difference to Quicken's attitude! (They've completely withdrawn from the UK.) It's targeted at personal finance management and not really suitable for business accounts, though, for that I'd suggest GNUCash (via Fink if you're on OS X - compile from source, don't use the binary as it's old and somewhat buggy. Yes, the dependencies are huge unfortunately!)

There are some good finance apps for Linux as far as I'm aware, check out this (dated) review:
http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=8217/ur0305l /ur0305l.html

MSMoney and Quicken are popular for a reason, though: they're actually fairly good, so don't be surprised if some of the features you're accustomed to don't behave the same or even aren't there at all. (For instance, MoneyDance doesn't do the equivalent of Quicken's Classes yet, though it will do very soon as it's near the top of the feature requests list.) Still, I think it's worth the short-term pain of switching to know that your software won't suddenly magically "expire", and that you're not locked into a platform because your accounts software only works on Windows. (Speaking of which, I'd *love* to see someone overcome GNUCash's evil dependencies and port it to Windows, it'd massively increase it's uptake & increase people's exposure to alternatives to the Big 2.)

GNUCashToQIF may come in handy for some (such as those testing out MoneyDance):
http://gnucashtoqif.sourceforge.net/

And there's a pretty comprehensive thread on Mac finance apps here:
http://www.timandkathy.co.uk/journal/2005/02/05/lo oking-for-mac-os-x-personal-finance-software/

As well as a decent comparative review of Mac apps here (with a good overview of MoneyDance, so as to not be too off-topic!):
http://www.theappleblog.com/2005/03/19/moneydance- get-your-groove-on/

Appgen Mybooks reads Quickbooks files

[tzanger]

And it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux natively. None of this WINE nonsense. Clicky.

Not affiliated with them by any means, just a happy customer. I'm planning on eliminating AccPAC and MiSYS at my office for their Appgen Custom Suite since it too is multiplatform, modular and you can get a developer license without the hassles that AccPAC has.

Quasar

[GRW]

For business accounting on Linux there is Quasar, which is a "full function, stand-alone business accounting package." It has both a GPL and commercial licenses.

Re:Quasar

[gregmac]

For business accounting on Linux there is Quasar, which is a "full function, stand-alone business accounting package." It has both a GPL and commercial licenses.

Which is probably great, if you're a new busines, and are running Linux.

For existing businesses, this poses many many problems (and I say this out of experience, being in the process of switching from SimplyAccounting and much paper-based stuff to a fully-computerized system based on QuickBooks and ESC). Let me tell you, this is an incredibly huge project. We're a fairly small company (15 people, I'm the IT department, among other things), and to be honest I don't know if it would be better or worse if we were bigger.

We have Windows desktops. Three biggest things holding us back: SimplyAccounting/Quickbooks, WordPerfect (though having played with OO.org 2 beta, it looks like we will finally be able to dump WP), and training.

To switch to Quasar, we'd have to install linux on at least all desktops using it. Somehow, we need to migrate everything from QB to Quasar (this does NOT happen overnight), so this would probably mean running dual desktops for acccounting people (which means spending more on hardware or vmware). At the same time, I have to deal with supporting another desktop platform, and people have to not only learn a new accounting system, but do it in a new, unfamiliar desktop environment.

We also somehow have to evaluate Quasar to be sure it'll even work for us, so there would have to be two systems for a while, which requires signifigantly more work than evaluating an accounting system that runs on our existing platform (install the software, decide if it works). Again, this means buying hardware or Vmware, and if we decide Quasar won't work, we've still spent this money.

Don't get me wrong here, I'd love to get rid of Windows. Our network has been running on OpenLDAP and Samba for over a year, and on other FOSS software like Apache and BIND9 for even longer than that (which greatly helped when we finally did switch to samba/linux). Over the last couple years, I've been concentrating on getting cross-platform or web-based software, but it's a slow process. Everyone here uses Thunderbird for email, and Firefox as a browser. All the custom apps I've written for us are web-based.

So switching to Quasar on linux? "Easier said than done". A good example of a reason cross-platform software is a good thing (I know there people who frown on making Windows ports because they thing it discourages people from moving to linux). If Quasar ran on Windows, it would at least be possible to evaluate it, and there would be a much better chance of using it. Eventually, once we were entirely running cross-platform applications, switching the actual OS wouldn't be a huge deal.

As it stands, we'll probably have to switch to Linux first (which we're a step closer to be able to doing with Crossover), then possibly switch to Quasar. I have to say though, since we only just went to QB, there would have to be a pretty huge incentive for me to switch away at this point.

Exactly

[Julian Morrison]

Not just incorrect calculations, but incorrect saves, incorrect loads, parially implemented system functions that don't do what the coders expected, harmless dangling pointers in Windows that bite you in Wine, etc etc. Not that I know of any such, but you can't safely assume they don't exist.

This is a generalization of: if you run a tested app on an untested configuration, it's no longer properly tested! That's just common sense.

Do your finance in OO.o spreadsheet or in GnuCash, or boot across to Windows. Doing it under emulation (a known-incomplete emulation, even!) is just stupid.

As a someone that has programed under Windows.

[LWATCDR]

" Not just incorrect calculations, but incorrect saves, incorrect loads, partially implemented system functions that don't do what the coders expected, harmless dangling pointers in Windows that bite you in Wine, etc etc. Not that I know of any such, but you can't safely assume they don't exist."
And you would bet your life that none of those errors exists under Windows? I would not. Frankly the windows API in known to be incomplete as well:) MFC has many known issues and goodness knows how many unknown issues.
A proper accounting system will have many checks that will also work under wine. While I would probably agree with you if we where talking about running a "life critical" system but for a simple accounting system like quick books or quicken? I wouldn't worry about it much more than I would worry about running it under Windows. BTW would you freak about running quickbooks under Longhorn when it is released? or a version that ran under 98 on 2000 or XP?

What else I need

[masterOfTheObivous]

What else do you need?

I'll tell you what else I need- support for Macromedia and Adobe's license authentication "features" present in Adobe Creative Suite and Macromedia Studio MX 2004. I have to resort to using VMWare in order to use these apps; I would love nothing more than to cut the tie with Windows completely. If CrossOver could do this, I'd buy a couple hundred copies for my company.

Do you hear me, Codeweavers? The instant you get this, people will be shouting praise from the rooftops. Bravo on getting Quickbooks to work, but now's the time to focus on Adobe and Macromedia's products as well.

I've been waiting for this

[doodleboy]

My work computer is an nt4 server box which serves as the office PDC and which I also use to do Quickbooks related stuff. The PDC stuff is no problem thanks to Samba, but some of the other people I work with only know Quickbooks and are otherwise totally computer illiterate. There is no possibility of switching to some alternate accounting package.

Also, Microsoft has killed support for nt server a couple of months ago to drive sales of new licenses. We're behind a firewall, I have every service turned off that I don't need, I never use IE or OE, but at some point I'm going to have to move off nt while still running Quickbooks. Normally that would mean a new version of windows, but by the time you factor in a license for w2k3 server plus client licenses and new hardware to run it on, it's expensive as hell.

In addition to the high cost I just don't trust Windows' stability or security. I've used unix/linux for 15 years or so, so I can tweak it if something isn't working like I want. It's not perfect but I believe it's more stable and secure than windows.

Quickbooks is a huge app in the small business sector, and right now thousands of small businesses are trying to figure out how to deal with the end of support for nt. Now that it supports Quickbooks, Crossover Office will probably enable a lot of migrations off nt for shops with access to linux expertise. Not to mention generate sales for the folks at Codeweavers. A smart move if you ask me.

Crossover does NOT support all of Office.

[Omni Magnus]

Crossover office does not support Office 2003 or Access XP. This could be holding some people back.

Use Moneydance, not Quicken/Quickbooks

[dananderson]

I run Moneydance. Its written in Java and runs on multiple platforms. I run it from Linux, MS Windows XP, and Solaris with 1 license (accessing the same data files). It costs money, but I like the platform independence and Quicken/Quickbooks-free proprietary formats. No, I never worked for Moneydance--just a happy customer.

GnuCash is free, but does not run on MS Windows. It also uses the more-complex double entry system bookkeepers use. This may be ok for you though.

The problem with Quicken (and perhaps Quickbooks) is Quicken charges a "tax" on banks for each transaction (check) written in Quicken and uploaded to the bank. They also discontinued support for the open QIF exchange format most banks use.