Bazaar does the same, or at least can.

I've been involved in the bookkeeping end of several small businesses. My suggestions .... as to payroll, do not do this in house. Its a PITA, and you will wind up either making mistakes you will come to regret, or spend more time on it that you might be able to use more wisely somewhere else. Keeping up with local tax districts, who lives where, when the govt(s) (assuming you are US) decide to make some subtle change to tax regulations. Penny wise, pound foolish to do this in house for most small businesses. As to basic accounting and booking, I am not aware of anything that does the sheer number of things that QuickBooks can do, or as well. But I haven't tried everything. This sounds to me like the kind of thing that is hard for free / open source projects to compete with. Maybe your needs are very simple? I would suggest some of the SaS products like FreshBooks. These may not meet your critieria of open source projects per se, but many of these have open API's which is a step in the right direction. Also, these are likely built with open source projects, eg Apache, Ruby, PHP, MySQL, Python and so on, so there is some second hand support of open source that way. They also free you from the local installation situation, and can be accessed via mobile or remote locations (ie work from home), with zero hassle. I have used FreshBooks for accts receivable situations, and found it very nice. Compared to QuickBooks, I would opt for FreshBooks for billing and invoicing easily. I have not looked at with acct payables or general ledger in mind though.

The guy that said they are "actually pretty awesome" browsers now. I am pretty sure he is suggesting that people should be using them now.

Ah, OK, now I got it. So we are supposed to support them now not so much for doing "good work" but because they are no longer purposefully doing bad work?

Which begs the question why was the world's largest and wealthiest software company not able to do a "really good work" with previous versions? They didn't know how? Couldn't be bothered? Enjoy causing mischief?

How helpful have they been to you?

Unless you are very sure you will continue to have an amicable relationship, I would suggest some kind of internal code audit in addition to having all passwords changed. My little personal hell went something like this in a small business situation (many years ago) ... I am abruptly terminated due to change in ownership and a brief transition period. 10 days later the main server crashed, and all the kings men could not put it back together again (due to really, really poor choices of who was hired). The company went several months without any of the company data (sales, etc). An insurance claim was filed that claimed I left behind a "bomb" that was mysteriously remotely triggered and physically destroyed hardware on one system, deleting all data irrecoverably, and destroyed all the backups (even though externally stored on removable media). In essence the entire system was inoperable and because it contained custom, in house code, could not be rebuilt. The insurance company took this hooey, paid the claim. Then sued me. Some time shortly after this, they replaced all the systems in the business (this was part of the claim I was sued for), and destroyed the original systems thus removing any evidence that might exonerate me. Clever stuff. It was not difficult to prove my innocence to all this utter nonsense, but it took several years and > $10K to get out from under it. Fun stuff.

*snicker* .... wishing me had mod points.

Amen. The greedier these bastards get, and their elected lackeys tow the line, the more civil disobedience becomes a moral duty. And we should encourage friends and family to follow our lead.

It only seems that way to the miserably uninformed. Relax. Smoke something.

Great advice for novices or amateurs. I do work in a web shop, and all the designers here have access to Dreamweaver licenses if they want it. I can't remember the last time any of them actually used it. They all have Creative Suite Web premium or whatever it is, photoshop, etc. They are more productive without Dreamweaver. You want to see what your code looks like in browser? Then look at it in a browser. Editors are for editing, and browsers are for .... browsing. Works great.

Lmao. You forgot the smiley!

Bollocks. Look at Netcraft's top 20. Only 2 run IIS, and those are MS owned domains. Everybody else is Linux + something else. The web is not so friendly to MS.

Most of the big names in that league (Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc), are running Linux. So, yes that's quite true.

Yes, significantly so. Its just an apt-get upgrade every now and then. I'd say pretty close to hassle free.