[biz.misc] looking for pc/at accounting software

jburnes@crash.cts.com (Jim Burnes) (11/20/90)

Anyone:

Does anyone know of a good accounting/small business system that runs on
IBM AT's?  I would want payroll and inventory to start with and then move on
to accounts receivable/payable/general ledger.  It is necessary for the
system to run on a lan and also support remote terminals.  This is for
a 15 employee fabrication shop.  It will have to support three to four
workstations: one central server, one backup server/workstation and 1 to 2
remote terminals for shop floor access.  It's possible that the backup work-
station could be a terminal and that remote dialup access might be needed.

Also ... this system is an accounting system for a relative's shop.  How many
hours would be a good estimate to set this thing up (on the order of)?  Is
this the kind of thing that you can set up and walk away from with the
bookeeper taking care of it for the most part?

As far as operating systems are concerned I would consider MSDOS or QNX, but
not OS/2 or UNIX.  Reason: MSDOS has cheap and plentiful software but as
an OS it sucks.  QNX is relatively expensive for OS and software, but it
lets you do a lot of things like multiuser/networking/distributed db's and
the ability to emulate MSDOS for those who need it.  OS/2 was written by IBM/
microsoft and thats one mark against it.  I don't like its architecture and
it hogs the machine.  UNIX really hogs the machine but it has plentiful
software.

Two ideas:

  Cougar mountain software looks like a good bargain under msdos.
  If it would run multiple stations under lantastic, i would be interested.

  QNX and some relatively unknown accounting system with an MSDOS emulator
  running for utility programs and the like.

What do you think?  I'm doing this for a relative at little to no profit.
Has anybody done a setup remotely like this and could they spare a few words
of wisdom.  I am mostly a software engineer doing hardware level programming
on various platforms, but my exposure to accounting is limited to an install-
ation I did about 7 years ago.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Jim Burnes