Hiya.
GST returns. If she is one of these people then she would be better served financially by learning these skills via some course because if she doesn't she will be paying through the nose in Accountancy costs.
Hence the "I don't know".
There is a tendency among geeks to take everything at face value. Her request was vague, and my knowledge of this area is extremely limited. I assumed people here will know more, so I asked! :)
I agree with your suggestion though, and will suggest this to her.
From my experience running a small business you should not be paying anymore than around $1000 a year in accountancy costs.
Because she, like many of those adopting F/OSS software for the first time, admires the ideology, but is not quite ready to leap in and run !Windows just yet. She will cope with Linux if it's single use, but her family are dependant on the windows box, and so she thought it would be nice if it also ran on Windows. I'm not sure what you mean by "undeserved"?
Under-served. Typo.
If that is the best answer, she'll probably just buy the non-free stuff and run it on Windows, as $DEITY intended! ;) She's not a F/OSS Zealot, merely enquiring about alternatives, and would like to do the F/OSS thing if possible.
There are commercial Linux solutions too. Probably the best I've seen is Quasar by LinuxCanada.com. OOOH.... **Quasar Accounting 1.4.7 Available in Open Source* <http://www.linuxcanada.com/license.shtml> * I spoke to these guys ages ago about OpenSourcing Quasar and they said "we're thinking about it". Looks like "thinking" become "doing". I think Canada has VAT so this could work well for GST etc. Quasar is a QT app with Firebird as the backend DB.
In my experience (supporting lots of accountants) they LOVE to run the same software that their clients do, so they can just grab the data and work directly on it. Some of them value this ability so much that they will have a dedicated machine running heaps of different accounting packages just so they can do this. So there's a different view for you. :)
My accountant was oldskool and did everything in Excel/Word. Regards