Kevin Dietz's Blog - QuickBooks

Why I Might Get an iPad

Your DisplayName here! — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:02:57 GMT

As you might have gleaned from my last post, I'm torn on the new Apple iPad. Like so many naysayers that have come out over the last week, I'm disappointed in all the things lacking from the first generation iPad: multitasking, a camera, Flash support, Microsoft Exchange support (Apple is unclear about this, but excludes it from the list of supported e-mail providers on its web site), blah, blah, blah. Of course I'd love it if the iPad had all of these things, didn't run any slower because of them, and didn't cost any more either. We always want more. But it is what it is. I can't change Apple's engineering decisions. I can only decide whether the device is something worth buying or not.

So I've put my thinking cap on over the last week to try to imagine how I might use such a thing.

The first thing I imagine is an accessorized iPad, not a stock iPad. I've heard people complain about how the iPad has a slight curvature on the back that will make it difficult to put it on your lap and type on the virtual keyboard. Forget about that. We're going to put the iPad inside of a nice portfolio of some kind that will remove this objection. I want something to protect it a little bit if I handle it less than gently. Apple already has a nice looking iPad portfolio on their web site, and I imagine that there will be plenty of other third-party options just like there are zillions of cases for the iPhone. Imagine a nice portfolio case for the iPad. A place for a pen, maybe a stylus, a little pad of real paper, and a holder to stuff in a few business cards. The photos of the Apple portfolio doesn't show good enough photos of the inside of it, so I can't tell if it will have those features or not. But surely, there will be some really nice cases for it. The case will provide a nice typing surface for lap typing. I'm not worried about that objection.

Next, I imagine somebody is going to make a nice stylus that I can use with the iPad, and there will be some way of using the stylus to create hand-written notes. And I'm not talking about some little plastic stick, I mean a nice stylus, with the same quality and feel of a good Waterman pen. Such things already exist for other PDA's and smartphones, so surely there will be some kind of solution for the iPad. I'm not going to get too wrapped around the axle about the lack of note-taking capabilities, because surely this is going to be addressed some how, some way.

Those two accessories will give me a nice, portable platform for transporting the iPad with me. Would I meet my friend at Starbucks for tea and take something like that with me? Yeah, I might. If I didn't need my laptop, but still wanted to have a business-oriented meeting that might require opening a document or a web site, this wouldn't be a bad option. My 17 inch MacBook Pro, nice as it is, is still pretty big and heavy. I really don't want to take that to Starbucks unless I know for sure I really need it. Now to be sure, there would be plenty of times when I wouldn't take *either* the laptop or the iPad, I would just take my iPhone, but I can imagine there would be times where the larger screen of the iPad would come in really handy at Starbucks.

I'm also imagining, however, that I would use the iPad around the house much more frequently than I would take it to Starbucks.

My home is laid out in a long and narrow footprint. At one end is my office, and clear at the other end of the house is the master bedroom. In the evenings, my wife is usually laying in bed watching TV, perhaps using her 13 inch Macbook Pro to do a little work between commercials. I'm all the way at the other end of the house in my office, usually surfing the web or organizing my e-mail. That sucks. It would be nice to spend some time with her together. Now, me being a dude, my original solution to this dilemma was far different than getting a netbook, Macbook Air, or a tablet PC. My suggestion was to get a second Mac Pro, a second 30 inch monitor, install a heavy-duty wall-mounted monitor arm, and a wall-mounted sliding keyboard tray. Then, not only could I surf and check e-mail, I could do real work, like actual programming. My wife was so impressed with this idea that she said "no freakin' way."

Given where I'm at now, the obvious solution would be to simply take my 17 inch MacBook Pro into the bedroom. I've done it. It works. It's not a bad solution. It's a little bit bulkier and clumsier that I would like, however. If I'm typing a long e-mail response, the laptop keyboard is nice to have. But most of the time, I'm not doing much typing. It would be nice to have a smaller, lighter device that I could switch between landscape and portrait mode. The iPad does have some potential here.

I am disappointed that Apple hasn't specifically mentioned support for Microsoft Exchange. I use a hosted Exchange server to get my e-mail. One thing that would be nice to do laying in bed is to go through my Inbox and organize my e-mails. I can do this on my iPhone, but there's certain things I can't do. For example, if I want to create a new folder to move the e-mail into it, I can't do that on the iPhone. Or if I want to save off a PDF receipt onto my QuickBooks server, I can't do that. Typing anything more than one-line responses to an e-mail is too tedious on the iPhone. So the iPad could give me a better platform for doing that, and it would be a lot easier to flop around in bed with the iPad than the 17 inch laptop. Let's assume the iPad has no support for Exchange. That sucks, but I imagine that a future software update will solve that. In the meantime, I could use the web-based Outlook Web Access (OWA) from the iPad's browser and do it that way. Such a solution would be unthinkable on the iPhone, but with the larger screen of the iPad, it might be a good-enough transition solution that it could hold me over until there was native Exchange support. I don't really like the OWA interface, however, so I really hope that Exchange support is coming in the not-too-distant future.

Another thing I like to do a lot is type notes into my wiki. If I'm searching the web for a topic, and I find some good links, I typically copy-and-paste them into my wiki along with some contextual notes. I can access my wiki from Safari, and it doesn't use any Flash plug-ins, so I could see myself sitting on the couch or laying in bed, watching Celebrity Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew on TV, and typing away on my wiki with my iPad. I really do use my wiki a lot, as a journal, a to-do list, a software architecture platform, and lots of other things, so it would be kind of nice to have a light-weight device with good battery life that I could use to update my wiki when I'm not sitting at my desk. Ditto for writing blog entries as I'm doing now.

Lastly, and this may be the sleeper app that nobody has thought much about yet, the iPad might make a really great platform for remote desktop-ing into other computers around the house. In addition to my primary desktop and laptop, I've got a couple secondary desktop computers, 5 rack-mounted servers down in the basement, and numerous virtual machines for various applications. Being able to hit any of those from my iPad would be really cool. There are already several remote desktop apps available for the iPhone, but the iPhone's screen is really too small for serious work. I have to assume that the remote desktop vendors will update their apps to take advantage of the native screen resolution of the iPad.

One frequent use of remote desktop is accessing my QuickBooks installation. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I decided to set up a dedicated virtual machine specifically for running QuickBooks and storing finance-related documents (bank statements, receipts, etc.). That way I can access QuickBooks from either my desktop or my laptop, or any other computer for that matter. It's not the fastest solution in the world, but it's worked out fairly well. Like a lot of small business owners, I hate doing the books, and I procrastinate doing it for as long as possible. But if I could sit on the couch with my iPad, remote desk into the QuickBooks VM, enter a few invoices, pay a few bills, and reconcile a few bank statements, I might be more motivated to keep my financials up-to-date. People are complaining about the lack of multitasking, but with remote desktop, problem solved. Who knows, maybe remote desktop will turn out to be the killer app for the iPad.

Speaking of multitasking, I hear people complaining that they won't be able to run an app and listen to music at the same time. I don't know, but for my money, I'm probably not going to play music on the iPad. Photos, maybe. Watching a movie on an airplane, definitely. But if I want to run an app and listen to music at the same time, I'll just play the music on my iPhone or iPod Nano. I mean, I'm always going to carry my iPhone with me, iPad or no iPad, and an iPod Nano or Shuffle is so small that I could take one of those with me too if I really thought I needed it. Who cares if the iPad can't play music and run an app at the same time. Now, multitasking would be really nice, don't get me wrong ... I hope they add that in iPhone OS 4.0, but I think I could still do useful work on the iPad even without multitasking.

So that's how I could see myself using the iPad ... sitting on the couch surfing the web, updating my wiki, writing a blog, organizing my e-mail (please, please, please give me Exchange support), and catching up on QuickBooks via remote desktop. Let's see how close reality comes to that.

How I Do My Accounting - Part 1

Your DisplayName here! — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:17:49 GMT

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.