What foss financial software seems to be missing: All of the following is based my limited understanding, and my opinions. Please correct me if I am wrong about any of this. * Cost advantage: QuickBooks simple start is free. Or I can buy the full version of QuickBooks about $160. Seems to me that any cost advantage of using a foss alternative is negligible. * Ease of use: Somewhat debatable. But some people site this as a primary reason for Intuit's amazing success with QuickBooks - supposedly 80% of small businesses use QuickBooks. Although, I have to wonder how the number of foss users can be accurately counted? * Integration with online banking: my understanding is that only Intuit or Microsoft products can fully integrate with online banking. Not absolutely sure about that. * Payroll: very regional, and changes often, therefore not well suited for foss. * Taxes: somewhat regional, and changes often, therefore not well suited for foss. * Wide acceptance: I think most businesses are much more comfortable using products that are accepted standards. * Available add-ons: Intuit has a very active community of 3rd party developers. You can buy practically any kind of an add-on you can imagine. These add-ons cost money, but at least they are available. * Major company: I think a lot of businesses are not comfortable with a product unless there is a major company behind that product. I have to admit, even I am not comfortable with software products that are essentially one man operations. * Support: I can always hire somebody who knows quickbooks, or find a "ProAdvisor" consultant, or I can get support from the company, and there are hundreds - if not thousands - of developers who specialize in developing for quickbooks. I can not see where that is true for any project. * Training availability and costs: I can hire people who already know quickbooks. If I hire somebody to work on some foss alternative, then there will be a significant training expense. Of course, there is also the issue of training availability. * Documentation: If I had to pick one thing that kills the usefulness of more foss projects than anything else, this would win in a slam-dunk. Of course, this varies among projects, some foss projects have great documentation. But, I can always find plenty of books, or other documentation for popular proprietary financial apps. * Wide acceptance by accountants: maybe as many as 200,000 accountants, use QB and recommend it to their clients. Some accountants will charge much more for files that are not in QB format. * Widespread 3rd party integration: QB has much better 3rd party integration. For example, ecommerce packages like oscommerce, and magento, work with quickbooks, not foss alternatives. Msft accounting works with ebay. I can not find that sort of integration with foss software. »