Looking for help please!

First off a big hi to everybody as I'm a new member to this forum

The reason I'm posting here (and the reason I joined to be honest) is that I'm trying to help out my mum with a problem she has. She runs her own business and up until now has used a Windows XP netbook with Quickbook Simple Start Free Edition accounting software. However she has just bought a new 11inch Macbook Air to replace this and loves it, apart from the fact that there is no such free version of Quickbooks available for OS X.

She does not want to change accounting software really as Quickbooks does everything she needs to but is not too complex that she can't figure it out (as a lot of other accounting software is) so really the ideal solution would be someway of running the Free Edition of Quickbooks on her mac somehow.

Now I am familiar with bootcamp as I have a dual booting MBP myself but with the 60GB SSD in her MBA I'm not sure this is a viable option with the amount of space it will take up, plus the added inconvenience of having to reboot just to use one application.

I don't have any experience with Parallels or Fusion but she is reluctant to fork out yet more money having just spent so much on the machine itself added to the fact that business is not exactly rife at the min. Any one have any thoughts on these programs?

I also understand that there are emulation apps available to run Windows programs in OS X such as Crossover or Q-emulator but I really don't know much about these at all. Does anyone have any experience with this or know if Quickbooks is even compatible with these programs?

Any help or ideas at all with this would be greatly appreciated by both her and myself.

Many thanks in advance for any replies,

Dan

Don't know of a good solution given your mother's limited SSD space. You could run Virtual Box (free) with Windows. Your best bet may be to find a different software package. Don't know if Mint has any of the features you need, but should easily import your old data.

EDIT: Added link to Mint
https://www.mint.com/

EDIT2: I found this which may help, QuickBooks Simple Start for Mac costs $45 USD. Looking at Mint, I doubt it would do what you need.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005HZLS4K/?tag=macforums0e4-20

Thanks very much for your quick reply razor. Don't think mint is going to do all that she requires but thank you for the suggestion anyway. Virtual Box sounds like something we would definitely look at (especially as it's free anyway) and i think we have a windows xp install disc somewhere. I'll post back once we've tried it out.

Many thanks for taking time to help,

Dan

Just a quick caution on using Virtualbox, you may have some issues running it as Virtualisation is required to allocate higher amounts of processing power to the VPC. If you are only using it for one application you shouldn't have a problem but it's just a friendly caution

Good luck

The Rabbit