[I know this post will interest almost no one who regularly reads my blog, but it may help someone out there experiencing a similar problem]
One of my clients moved from PC to Mac back in December, and installed Parallels so that they could continue to use QuickBooks Pro 2005 to do process their payroll direct deposit. [When will Intuit bring feature parity to the Mac version???] Everything worked fine for several pay periods, but at the end of January it broke: the session would start, it would get 10% done, then
fail. The initial call to Intuit resulted in them claiming at first not to support QuickBooks under Parallels (contradicting what they had told the client before the switch), then trying lots of different approaches, culminating in Intuit resetting the payroll account on their end, which got things working. Two weeks later, though, the same thing happened.
More woe and final redemption after the jump.
We went ahead and upgraded to QuickBooks Pro 2008…still no luck. The next call to Intuit (this time not free) took almost 6 hours, despite telling the representatives of the previous fix; finally did what we had been telling them, and it worked again…until the next time. This game of call and reset went on through the first pay period of May, when even this fix didn’t work. I was going to migrate the Parallels image to Boot Camp and have them boot directly into Windows every other week, but that is not as simple as going in the opposite direction. We were going to set up a PC to handle the payroll, but I tried one more thing: changing the Network Adapter settings in Parallels Virtual Machine from Shared Networking to Bridged Ethernet, which makes the virtual machine appear as a separate PC on the network. This did the trick! The payroll test session that I called in to Intuit went through, and this week’s actual payroll went off without a hitch.
