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Summary - There may only be a few software titles for small business accounting available for Linux, but Joe Barr has ferreted -- and tried -- them out. (1,500 words)
s Linux getting mainstream? Not if you base your conclusion on the searchresults I just got at Freshmeat when I entered "accounting" as mysearch term. I got geek soup: packet accounting, multirouting trafficaccounting, ISDN monitoring, network traffic accounting meter, and, at thetop of the list, a patch for the net accounting daemon.
I had the kind of accounting in mind that many small businesspeople are going to have in mind when they begin considering running their businesses on Linux, the kind that accounts for money, not packets. We've all read the headlines over the past year or two,so we know that Linux is red hot in the server space. But not every small businessin the mainstream world is a small ISP or Web server farm where Linux's value is unquestioned.
Since I am now officially a member of the independent small business set,it's time I started looking around to locate all theaccounting tools I need in order to run my business.
The first accounting package (in the mainstream sense of the term) mysearch on Freshmeat turned up was the nineteenth package listed: QHacc.That led me to the X11/financial section of the site, where I found 22other packages for download. Unfortunately, most of those were forpersonal finances rather than business. Here is a quick look at what I did find.
QHacc
QHacc, the Q Home Accountant, is at version 0.5; it is a work in progress. It requires QT version 2.1.0-beta3in order to run. That beta version of QT is available at the Troll TechWebsite noted in the Resources section below, and elsewhere on the Internet as well. QHacc is free software, copyrighted by Ryan Bobko (who wrote it), and released under the GNU Public License.
As the name implies, QHacc is primarily for use in the home instead of by asmall business. It's UI is well designed, and with features liketransaction memorization, which allows you to repeat a transaction with a singleclick instead of entering it each time it occurs, it's obvious that ease of useis...