Then ask yourself why the hell you paid for it yourself in the first place. People have paid a lot more for less-valuable lessons. I bet you won’t do it again.

The example in the article highlights how complex things are in Australia, and that is probably .0001% of the rules that would be required to achieve a truely automated system. By the time you had worked through all the questions that needed to be asked to determine the tax outcome (As per your example) – it would have been cheaper to hire a bookkeeper – I bet you you earn more than them.

So I would suggest putting your focus to questioning the Tax System – the so called Simplified Tax System is a joke – sure might provide a tax benefit – but you spend more money in compliance than you would save. So direct your anger to the Tax Office.

Also remember MYOB and QuickBooks are more than Accounting – they provide Business Management – and if you are running a good business – you will use them to help Manage your Business (Sales, Purchases, Receivables, Payables, Payroll etc) – if you want to run your business with a Shoebox of Receipts or Excel – no problems – just don’t expect to get any business management value out of it unless you build an Business Management system in Excel and then sell an Accounting system – of course that would not be SQL so based on other comments would suck – but of course if you are a small business with no need to have heaps of users – who gives a %^$$# about SQL

Once the bugs were ironed out (and it should never have been released with so many bugs) QuickBooks i series is AWESOME.

I was a vocally very critical of this product when it first laucnhed but with the latest version it is stable and very intuitive (and beeing based on SQL very usable)

My wife does the accounting for our two businesses on Quit Books Premier 2008 and she is not an accountant and this product rocks.

I HATE MYOB but for small businesses that turn over staff regularly it is the industry standard unfortunatly. Their SQL version is due for release in late 2009 so after 17 years it may suddenly also be more usable. Watch this space!

However, I was somewhat shocked to find that MYOB are basically still selling a Windows 3.1-era program with just some updated tax tables. Both myself and many of my clients have issues with the text size not scaling correctly to larger resolutions. Maybe when this software was first built everyone was running 640×480, but nowadays when the default resolution of most PC’s is up around 1280×1024, MYOB looks ridiculous.

And let’s not forget MYOB Premier – a great idea with a piss-poor implementation. Have the developers at MYOB not heard of SQL????

2 tips to getting Quickbooks running in Vista, particularly to get around the access violation error when it starts up. If you’re reading this then you will already know that the error dialogue it spits out is particularly uninformative. Get used to it – the rest of Quickbooks is pretty-much the same.

1. It depends on Internet Exploder. They don’t tell you this because they are hackers and their program is a pile of steaming shit. Moving right along … Open Internet Explorer, Click … Tools > Internet Options > Security tab > Internet zone > Custom Level > Medium-High (Default) > Reset

2. Disable UAC for Quickbooks. Google that one cos I’ve suddenly lost interest in hacking around Quickbooks.

I have had it running on Windows Server 2008 too. It also seems to play ok with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2

If anyone knows of something infinitely more usable that encompasses GST/VAT (particularly in Australia) and isn’t MYOB then I’d love to hear about it. It needs invoicing, doesn’t need inventory or payroll.

Good luck