Jason’s postings and stuff

I’d define small business as a company with only a handful of employees that manages payroll internally and less than $1 million in net income.

With that in mind, I have been looking for any accounting software I can find. Sadly, the contenders are all the usual suspects, offerings by Intuit, Sage, and Microsoft. Those seem to be the only options available to a small business.

• Intuit QuickBooks Pro 2009 $199.95 (seems to be on-sale today for $119.95)
• Sage Peachtree Pro Accounting 2009 $169.99 (direct from Sage)
• Acclivity MyOB Premier Accounting $299 (10% discount for completing a survey or $100 QB upgrader rebate)
• Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2009 $199.95
• Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2009 $0

Sadly that’s only a fraction of the picture. If you require in-house payroll services (where outsourcing generally costs per transaction per employee — expensive indeed) there are several additional expenses, every year.

• Intuit QuickBooks Basic Payroll is 17/mo for four or more employees to enable payroll in the application usefully.
• Sage Peachtree Simple Payroll is $249.95/yr
• Microsoft charges $14/mo for Payroll Standard
• Acclivity charges $319/yr for Tax tables and payroll forms (includes latest software every year)

As they’re all accounting packages, I’d rather get into the negatives.

Intuit has the largest industry penetration. Just about everyone uses their software. As a result, they treat you like shit. For a sample, take a look at the latest reviews for their 2009 version of QuickBooks at Amazon. Now you’re interrogated for 15 minutes before they’ll activate your accounting software. I am used to that from credit card companies (CitiGroup, I am glaring at you), but never a software vendor.

Acclivity forces you to reactive every 6 to 9 months. If it fails, you’re locked out of your accounting data. They’ve been doing that since the 2003 version at least. It’s confirmed they still do that with the latest version. And that’s even if you don’t use the payroll feature. Held. Hostage.

Peachtree automatically detects Windows network shares and will not allow you to save your data on a network unless you designate one system as your Peachtree server in an effective attempt to extract more money out of you. If you already have a dedicated file server in a closet somewhere, you’re fucked. You are now forced to adopt an additional point of failure in your network. (Or if it’s a Windows file server, I suppose you can just install a copy of Peachtree on that, but boy is that a stupid requirement.)

Microsoft Office Accounting Professional includes a stripped down copy of MS SQL Server. On my P4 based system with 1GB of RAM, it is quite slow. The whole system is quite slow with a copy of SQL server always running. Quite heavy for a single user installation. Probably not as bad on a more modern, faster system with at least 2GB of RAM.

Office Accounting Express is ad supported, so get ready to see advertisements for your (least) favorite Microsoft products flash at the bottom of the screen as you make deposits, run reports, or do payroll.

PeachTree completely violates the way we use our accounting software, so I could not seriously consider it. (A Linux server running Samba where we store our QB data files.) Microsoft’s product is simply too slow, with MS SQL Server always running, to entertain running it on our outdated systems. Productivity is nuked when you’re waiting for stuff to page back from swap all the time. (Yes, even with OA Express being completely free.)

I seriously considered MyOB, but it’s simply cost prohibitive. With QuickBooks frequently available for under $150 and upgrades only forced every three years, the total cost of ownership, including payroll, is still lower than that of MyOB. That fact saddens me, for I loathe Intuit more than words can express.

I investigated a number of Open Source ™ packages, but all came up short. First, none handle payroll. That was expected. Second, none of them can conveniently handle the simple bookkeeping we do, which amounts to administrative expenses, commission deposits tracked by job, and handling payroll liabilities. (Have to do up our own payroll liabilities report at a minimum.)

My specific list of requirements include the availability of a Windows version or a Web version, the usage of a real RDBMS, such as PostgreSQL, a community supported project, and modifiable reporting.

As such, anything using MySQL was immediately discarded. That was most of the Open Source ™ accounting software, sadly. I tended to discard projects in languages that aren’t exciting anymore. That nukes anything written in Perl (SQL Ledger and friends). I’m biased towards Ruby these days, finding Perl more difficult to read and maintain.

That essentially left me with postbooks, which is wholly unsuitable for my needs. Also some highly complicated ERP software that still didn’t do the simple things we needed. And Quasar Accounting, which I liked, but didn’t do most of the things we need.

Of course, looking for a polished Open Source ™ accounting application is clearly a moon-shot. Did I mention I loathe Intuit?