Well, it's tax season again, which means its time to get caught up on my financing backlog.  The number of transactions that I need to manage for my business is still small enough that it doesn't make much economic sense to hire a person to run the financing department, or even to bring in a part-time bookkeeper, so that means I get to do it myself.  What fun!  I think it's pretty much universally accepted that the thing small business owners hate doing the most is their books.  If anything should be delegated, it's that, right?  Maybe so, but I've found it informative to do it myself, at least right now.  When I do eventually hire someone, I'll hopefully be handing off something that's reasonably well organized rather than a shoebox full of receipts.

I use QuickBooks for my accounting system.  One of the big problems I have in my life right now is that I don't just have one computer.  I've got my primary desktop (a Mac Pro tower that I upgraded to last year), a laptop, several old secondary desktops, the OS/X partition on my Mac Pro, the BootCamp partition, several desktop-based virtual machines, a few physical servers, and some virtual machines that I've installed on the servers.  So a non-trivial question that comes up when using QuickBooks is "On which computer should I install QuickBooks?"

Up until this year I've been running QuickBooks 2003, and I've had it installed on an old AMD-based desktop system running Windows XP 64-bit.  I built this system myself about three years ago, but since I upgraded to the Mac Pro last year, the AMD machine got disconnected and pushed into the corner.  Except I never reinstalled QB 2003 on the Windows Vista 64 system that I run on the BootCamp partition of my Mac Pro.  Whew!!  So that means that just the simple act of logging into QuickBooks meant I either had to re-install QB on my BootCamp, or I had to dig out the AMD machine, hook it back up, and remote desktop into it.  I opted for the latter approach, since I couldn't find the QB 2003 disk and serial number, and even if I could have, I'm not sure I could have reactivated the software considering that it is such an old version.  Considering that I had to call Intuit for help three years ago when I installed QB on the AMD machine, I wasn't very hopefully that I could get it reinstalled this time.  I really hate software activation.

So I got the AMD machine running, remote desktoped, and got back into QuickBooks.  Fine.  But then I started thinking, well, maybe I should upgrade to QB 2009.  It's newer and nicer in some ways, it's got some features that I'd like to use more, such as better support for online banking and more third-party support, etc.  But I knew right away I didn't want a repeat of the "Which machine is it on?" fiasco that I just went through, so I came up with a new plan.  Now I know that QuickBooks has a hosted service that I could use instead of the desktop software, but I've always been nervous about putting such intimate financial details out on the Internet, and I didn't want to pay the monthly fee, so I decided to stick with the desktop software route.

I decided to go with the virtual appliance concept.  A software appliance is where you use dedicated software on a dedicated machine for a single, specific purpose.  Just like you use your refrigerator to keep food cold and your oven to bake stuff, you can create an information appliance to manage your finances.  A virtual appliance is the same thing, except that you run it on a virtual machine insteal of a physical machine.  So I created a virtual machine named VM-FINANCE that would function as an appliance for all financial-related activities, including not just the QuickBooks software and data file itself, but scanned receipts, etc.  I would also install the tax software on there as well.  I access the virtual machine by remote desktoping into it.

This means I won't install QuickBooks directly on my Mac Pro BootCamp, so if I upgrade to something else in a year, I can still access my financial appliance.  If I upgrade the server to a faster server, I can just migrate the virtual machine over to the new server (although I might run into some reactivation issues doing that).  Also, if I can get into it from my laptop, as long as I'm in the office.  I have to be connected to the business network.  I won't be able to access it on the road.  But for me, that's okay.  QuickBooks is not something I need to be able to get into while I'm on the road, and if I really had to, I could VPN into the home office and do it that way.  As long as I can remote desktop into the finance machine, I'm okay.

So far, this has proved to be a good approach.  The software does run a bit slower than I would like it to, owing to both the remote desktop software and the virtual machine emulation, but it's good enough for how often I use QuickBooks.  Hopefully now that I don't have to dig out the AMD machine each time, I will be more inclined to keep my finances up-to-date this year.