My arm's been twisted. I have to buy a Mini.

[politicat]

I got a job doing payroll for a company that has it semi-outsourced. The software won't run on a Mac at all (which makes NO sense - the company is a Mac shop...But this is not the first time I've run into WTF? with this company.). They have a single Win98 box for doing payroll and nothing else.

But they don't have a secure location for me to do it in, so I need to do it at home, where I can keep the data secure. And we don't have a Win box anywhere in the house - the one I thought I wanted I returned within a week - it drove me crazy. It's kind of sad, really, that Mac uses Intel and can run XP now. Very sad. Sort of tragic, in fact. Dangit.

So I have to buy a mini. Oh darn. I really should look more sad about this. I really shouldn't be so gleeful. Someone will think I actually want a new piece of hardware.

[reprobate]

1. Sad, yes. But you'll be stronger for it in the end.

[realisticphish]

2. woe is you

you have to buy one of the newest, most advanced macs on the market. Alas, alack :P

[politicat]

3. I know. This is painful it's so sad...

Like I wasn't looking for an excuse anyway... but... oh... ow. ow. ow!

It does have a downside - I've been on a laptop for just about ever, so going back to a desk top is going to be strange.

[realisticphish]

5. i want a laptop

but I haven't finished paying for my current desktop (iMac G5). I borrowed money from my parents, and have been lax in paying them back

[htuttle]

4. There aren't any mid-sized accounting/payroll programs for Macs

There are smaller ones, like Peachtree, etc...But you wouldn't want to try to run a company with more than 20 employees (or a lot of sales) with them. I know. We tried. Dreadful lack of data retention and analysis with most of them.

Unless you write something custom (or have it written), you end up having to run Windows to use one of the bog-standard accounting/payroll programs like MAS90.

But at least we can run them on Apple hardware now. Once Leopard comes out, you won't even need to reboot out of OSX to run Windows programs.

[politicat]

6. MYOB

This company does several million in sales each month and has 22 employees. I do some of their data processing as well ( they just keep offering me more work, so I keep accepting!) MYOB is working really well. It's the payroll system (they use an online system so they can do direct deposit) that's Win only, though it sort of works under Firefox.

[htuttle]

7. We tried that one

And while we also do about 4-5 million per year gross, we make it in $5 and $10 dollar increments, and have about 175 employees paid three or four different ways (commission, hourly, salary & commission with a minimum hourly rate). Most people have several pay rates, depending on what they are doing.

The biggest problem we found with most of them was that they didn't keep detail records for previous years, just the summaries. With scores of A/P vendors and about 30 GL categories, it just didn't keep enough information. We're a cooperative, so state law says we have to get a full audit every year. Unfortunately, most of the Mac-based systems (MYOB and Peachtree) made it difficult to hang onto previous years' transaction details while a new current year was open.

Plus, our bookkeeper hated MYOB (which is what really made the decision in the end).

As it is, I had to write our A/R and payroll calculation system custom from scratch in Java, and we only use MAS90 for GL and A/P. Not even MAS90 could handle our fairly convoluted billing and pay systems, so maybe it was inevitable that they had to be custom-written.

:shrug: