Saint Angeles
April 22nd, 2008, 07:04 AM
I'm the manager of a local music store. We use Intuit's Quickbooks Point of Sale program on our main register so I'm forced to use Windows XP. We have an older version (4.0) but it does everything we need it to do. We recently acquired about 1000 or more music books from another music store that closed down in our area and we now have the daunting task of adding them to our database.
I tried to install a client version of POS on a laptop we have so that we'd have two computers adding books simultaneously. Heres where the fun begins...
After installing it on the laptop, everything worked fine (it picked up the register as the server) so I was happy and thought everything was good... until a nag screen popped up demanding we buy another "user license" to use the software. So I called Intuit expecting to pay maybe a couple hundred at the most for this stupid user license. They politely informed me that they don't sell user licenses for the old version anymore (even though offical support ends next month). I asked them what the upgrade cost would be and it was $699.95. Then they told me I would have to pay $1080 or so for another user license.
WOW
I know this isn't much for many bigger businesses but we are a struggling music store stuck in the middle of a bunch of Guitar Centers and Sam Ashs. I was totally not expecting to be screwed this hard by Intuit.
I need to know if there are any linux alternatives to Quickbooks POS. If not, I would like to work the rest of my life learning everything I can to help create a Small Business POS suite for linux. I think theres a large market for something like this and I think we could totally help a LOT of people out.
We could convert so many businesses to linux and help them fight against monopolizing coorporations.
Has anybody else thought of this?
Is this a good idea?
Its been on my mind for a while but this latest issue with Intuit was the last straw for me. What do you think?
I tried to install a client version of POS on a laptop we have so that we'd have two computers adding books simultaneously. Heres where the fun begins...
After installing it on the laptop, everything worked fine (it picked up the register as the server) so I was happy and thought everything was good... until a nag screen popped up demanding we buy another "user license" to use the software. So I called Intuit expecting to pay maybe a couple hundred at the most for this stupid user license. They politely informed me that they don't sell user licenses for the old version anymore (even though offical support ends next month). I asked them what the upgrade cost would be and it was $699.95. Then they told me I would have to pay $1080 or so for another user license.
WOW
I know this isn't much for many bigger businesses but we are a struggling music store stuck in the middle of a bunch of Guitar Centers and Sam Ashs. I was totally not expecting to be screwed this hard by Intuit.
I need to know if there are any linux alternatives to Quickbooks POS. If not, I would like to work the rest of my life learning everything I can to help create a Small Business POS suite for linux. I think theres a large market for something like this and I think we could totally help a LOT of people out.
We could convert so many businesses to linux and help them fight against monopolizing coorporations.
Has anybody else thought of this?
Is this a good idea?
Its been on my mind for a while but this latest issue with Intuit was the last straw for me. What do you think?