[PLUG-TALK] Quickbooks - online, virtual, emulator ...

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Wed Jan 23 21:27:11 UTC 2019


My wife has been using Quickbooks for her medical business
for more than a decade, because her accountant does.  We
run it inside a 64 bit Windows 7 guest in a VirtualBox
host on a 5 year old Centos-clone Linux box.

I haven't paid much attention to the Win7 guest, but it
has sprung a leak; something (presumably malware) is
eating about 100 megabytes of virtual disk per hour, and
it doesn't show in any user directories.  I compressed
the NTFS and created some breathing room in the 80 GB
partition, but the extra space erodes fast, unless we
leave the virtual machine turned off.

Imagined alternatives: 
 - Upgrade treadmill for Windoze and Quickbooks.
 - Container app for Quickbooks (not Wine compatible)
 - 99.9% data compatible Linux accounting software.
 - Quickbooks online from Intuit

I do not like "online apps", our data held hostage by the
application vendor, and shared with friends at Fort Meade.
But that might be the most practical way to run Quickbooks.
On Intuit's hardware.  It does get all the Windows crapola
out of the house and off my backups, for $200 per year. 
My wife will close the business sooner or later.

I presume there is some way to copy Quickbooks data files
from the Intuit cloud to a local LINUX file, or to a
thumb drive, via a web browser running on Linux.

Ideas?  Sympathy?  Snarky humiliation?

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com



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