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The program had immediate possibilities for my family, which always seems to have at least one small business operating and sometimes several at a time. Quasar has a serviceable GUI and intuitive menu options. It is perfect for small business owners because it doesn't require the user to have a deep understanding of ledger-based accounting. Just enter your inventory items, tweak the accounts, enter everyone in your Rolodex and mark their function (vendor, customer, salesperson, employee).

When it's time to create a customer quote, pull up the screen, click in each form box to activate drop-down menus that list all your accounts, inventory, customers, and salespeople, depending on which part of the quote you're in.

Quasar also connects every transaction, so that, for example, after you create a quote and save it, you can tell the program to make an invoice from it and register it in the ledger.

Keeping track of payments is easy, too. Click on "purchases," then "vendor invoices" and select a vendor. Click "refresh," and a list of all outstanding invoices appears. Double click on a list item and that invoice comes up for editing. From there, you can click on "payment" and then "Quick Cheque" to pay just one or two invoices, or all outstanding items.

Printing out checks is completely automated and you can use standard check paper, just like you'd use with QuickBooks. Reports appear with one click. Trial balance, profit & loss, and balance sheet are default, but you can also print account listings, to-do lists, tax listings and transactions, just to name a few. A couple of things I'd like to see here would be the option to email reports, and the ability to enlarge or select different fonts and customize the layout. The default font is almost too small to read on screen.

Other features of the base package include:

* vendor claims
* mailing labels
* bank reconciliation
* multiple taxes
* backup and restore
* on-line help
* multiple companies

The base package of Quasar is a no-brainer, so easy to use that if you decided to go into business for yourself tomorrow, never having done before, you'd be able to make sense of this application in less than an hour, even if you're coming straight from Windows.

Quasar is free for a single user, but if you want a license for "concurrent" users on a network, Linux Canada charges USD $29 per user. The company also sells some useful modules, the coolest being the point-of-sale plugin, with a real-time interface, barcode scanning, and everything you'd want to be able to do at a computerized cash register.

Other modules include the Open Source Firebird database, which comes as a free add-on, the Sybase commercial database, server and client software, inventory control, shelf management, and multi-store connectors.

A full-blown setup configured for one user with the Firebird database costs less than USD $400. For more users, multiply accordingly -- there doesn't appear to be a quantity discount. Many small business owners will only need the free base package to start with, and can add modules as they grow. The inventory control plugin is $49 and might be a good one to start with depending on the business.

The base package is also available for Windows, and Linux Canada will customize your accounting package, on Linux or Windows, for $100 per hour.

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