mouldy.org

I'm an obsessive record keeper. With the addition of contract invoices, parts acquisition, BAS, GST and sales to my repertoire of financial operations, I decided it was time to evaluate some accounting packages and see if any of them could do anything useful for me.

Excel

So far, my records are kept in Excel. It works well enough. I have some macros that will produce reports that I'm interested in. It's not pretty, it's not organised, but the information is there.

gnucash

This is a Linux-only app. And when they say Linux-only, they mean Linux-only. You can't run it on cygwin. I tried a few emulation environments and found them to be either slow, or more trouble than they're worth (for example, sucking up a quarter gig of physical RAM whether you're using it or not). I tried X forwarding to my server at home, but because it's using GTK, that's horribly slow. LBX helped somewhat, and I guess I could tolerate it if I had to. It runs OK over my home LAN (but notably, not great). I don't have a Linux box at home that has a keyboard and mouse attached, and I'm not getting one just for accounting.

Otherwise, it seems to be flexible enough to do what I want. It's US-centric, but the Australian tax laws aren't stupidly complicated and I could probably handle that on my own. It does nothing for inventory tracking, but then, not much does.

It appears to work well enough.

MYOB

You mean people pay for this piece of software? I mean, really. I set up a VMWare session for safety, fired it up with the sample account - and marvelled at how I'd gone back in time.

It uses UI conventions that were common in Windows 3.1. You can resize windows - and the contents stay the same size! Not only does it not use the native UI widgets - but it uses bitmaps of the Windows 3.1 widgets. I chose to evaluate this because a) it handles Australian laws, and b) there was a big billboard near my apartment advertising it. UI-wise, this is a steaming pile of shit.

I eventually figured out how to enter sales and purchases, and yeah, it appears to do that. I'm dismissing it simply because the UI is so damn awful. You have to enter a menu just to enter a transaction. There's no simple way to 'zoom out' and see an overview of your finances. In short, it wasn't worth the 50 megs of bandwidth that I exhausted to download the demo.

Quickbooks

I'm impressed. Excellent UI. Straightforward operation. Definitely knows about Australian law. Good reporting. This justifies further testing.

I'm not so enamoured with the pricetag, but it's not that huge in the scheme of things. It's something that would (hopefully) be lost in the noise once sales start. It may be worthwhile even just for contract tracking.