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Show HN: Bigcapital - A open-source alternative to QuickBooks

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Re: Show HN: Bigcapital - A open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#31

Post by daft_pink »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #4
candiddevmike wrote: post #3

I tried to evaluate Bigcapital but it's kind of a mess to deploy via self hosting. The docker-compose setup is really hard to break apart, the stack is bizarre (mongo, multiple myql databases, and redis), and the way you do upgrades and migrations left me feeling very uneasy. Additionally, my accountant wouldn't use anything this thing exports from what I can tell. For now I'm sticking with GnuCash, but I have my eye…

What's the most important features in an accounting system in your opinion? Are they of a kind, or are there some killer features on expensive commercial tools that the free fare can't match?

A big problem is the differences between each countries needs. Securely connecting to your banking and payroll and also the difference needs between different countries tax systems. Europe needs lots of currencies and vat tracking vs USA needs doesn’t usually want all that.

I would say that many businesses just want a desktop based system and web based has security and maintenance requirements they just aren’t interested in.

Re: Show HN: Bigcapital - A open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#32

Post by mikeshi42 »

badrequest wrote: post #7
candiddevmike wrote: post #3

I tried to evaluate Bigcapital but it's kind of a mess to deploy via self hosting. The docker-compose setup is really hard to break apart, the stack is bizarre (mongo, multiple myql databases, and redis), and the way you do upgrades and migrations left me feeling very uneasy. Additionally, my accountant wouldn't use anything this thing exports from what I can tell. For now I'm sticking with GnuCash, but I have my eye…

Anecdotally, we've seen a number of larger "open-source alternative to X" projects posted on HN of late that are technically self-deployable, but require so much up-front knowledge that it's not actually accessible to those who might truly be liberated by such software. I mean no slander or disrespect to anyone involved, but there was a DataDog alternative posted sometime in the last few weeks that had a docker-compo…

> I mean no slander or disrespect to anyone involved, but there was a DataDog alternative posted sometime in the last few weeks that had a docker-compose with like 15 containers in it.

If this was us [1] (an OSS Datadog alternative posted last week :D ), we do have quite a bit (11, 2 are optional) but we're working on bringing it down.

We currently split our ingestion pipeline into 3 independently scalable bits, but we can probably bring it down into 1 for any small-scale deployment. Otherwise we do have the standard need for a cache (redis), db (mongo), main storage (clickhouse), and then the standard API server + frontend, and a separate task to run alerts.

There's likely a few more things we can merge together, but it comes at the expense of making it unscalable to workloads typical to a company and divergence in the code base, which overall doesn't seem like the right tradeoff.

Imo the real concern as someone that personally owns too many tiny VM instances is resource footprint - which can be tuned down to ~1GB of memory for us (depending on server load).

Feel free to open an issue too if you think there's something we can adjust there as well.

[1] https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx

Re: Show HN: Bigcapital - A open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#33

Post by Tokumei-no-hito »

RagnarD wrote: post #22

It may be in there somewhere but I don't see a mechanism for talking to banks using standard protocols to at least retrieve bank transactions. Without that, an accounting system is an unusable toy.

I’ve seen some tools with plaid integration. Idk how plaid cornered the market but it seems to be the only option available for oauth with banks.

Re: Show HN: Bigcapital - A open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#34

Post by yebyen »

KronisLV wrote: post #12
badrequest wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, we've seen a number of larger "open-source alternative to X" projects posted on HN of late that are technically self-deployable, but require so much up-front knowledge that it's not actually accessible to those who might truly be liberated by such software. I mean no slander or disrespect to anyone involved, but there was a DataDog alternative posted sometime in the last few weeks that had a docker-compo…

> I mean no slander or disrespect to anyone involved, but there was a DataDog alternative posted sometime in the last few weeks that had a docker-compose with like 15 containers in it. Reminds me of Sentry: https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/ This is their example docker-compose for self-hosting: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-... It has: - exim4 (smtp) - memcached - Redis - PostgreSQ…

You know what skywalking doesn't have though, apparently, is Ruby support!

I would love to understand a bit better why this one gets left off the list so often. "There's just nobody interested in putting those two things together" I guess, it's surprising to me though, because Ruby is pretty popular AFAIK.

Re: Show HN: Bigcapital - A open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#35

Post by woleium »

Tokumei-no-hito wrote: post #33
RagnarD wrote: post #22

It may be in there somewhere but I don't see a mechanism for talking to banks using standard protocols to at least retrieve bank transactions. Without that, an accounting system is an unusable toy.

I’ve seen some tools with plaid integration. Idk how plaid cornered the market but it seems to be the only option available for oauth with banks.

There is also yodlee

https://www.yodlee.com/open-banking

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