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The end of the accounting search

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Re: The end of the accounting search

#91

Post by jimnotgym »

bombcar wrote: post #11
axiomdata316 wrote: post #5

I'm a QuickBooks ProAdvisor and have been one for over 20 years and the last few years has convinced me that Intuit is determined to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by: 1) Forcing all their customers to migrate to the online version of their program. Many of the clients I've spoken to were happy with and preferred the Desktop version. The Desktop version is faster and can do more than the online version. 2)…

The thing that pisses off the accounting people where I work is how often everything changes. They’re one step from just using excel because it won’t change on them.

I tend to work with ERP a lot.

I once offered to fix the tab order on an input form, so the cursor started in the right box. The manager of that team got very excited and asked me not to change anything, the team had got used to the keystrokes!

Re: The end of the accounting search

#92

Post by jimnotgym »

jonah-archive wrote: post #88
bombcar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that pisses off the accounting people where I work is how often everything changes. They’re one step from just using excel because it won’t change on them.

A favorite HN comment of mine from a few years back ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21590482 ): > Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new pencil that had to be gripped differently for no reason, they'd throw it in the trash. > > But in software, we tolerate buggy tools that change all the time for…

The converse story is all the people that complain about $enterprise_software saying things like, it hasn't had an update since 1996!

Re: The end of the accounting search

#93

Post by saiya-jin »

Frondo wrote: post #72
pharmakom wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: do you find there is creativity and the satisfaction of creating something from nothing in accounting work? It has always seemed so dull from the outside looking in (cue the joes about accountants) but is this the reality? Many people don’t see software engineering as creative but it certainly can be!

My sister is an accountant and she genuinely enjoys working with the numbers. She finds it, not exactly fun, but kind of fun? She describes it like every situation is a puzzle she gets to solve, and then maintain. She also likes working with her customers and enjoys those interactions, like she gets a good feeling from helping her customers out. That's enough for her. Not the vocation for me but it's very interesting…

Sounds like some hardcore deep backend software dev jobs (I have similar for more than a decade), but actual creativity is scaled down to few %.

Accountants are extremely limited by rigid tools they use and laws they have to adgere to. Then comes given company's 'way we do things here' limit.

Take any modern programming language, you start with unique big problem/task, have to crack hundreds little and big problems, often with use of stackoverflow and other webs, but ie hard alghoritmic problems I solve mostly on my own since nobody faced those in exact mix of technologies, data and other constraints. There are sone further limits but my alghoritms are my solid creations, nobody ever questioned them nor made me refactor them for any reason.

To outsiders it may look exactly same weird nerd stuff of course. To me, accounting has very little room for creativity, its there but almost microscopic. And the joy you describe is also present, thats there in many jobs that actually create stuff, digital or not

Re: The end of the accounting search

#94

Post by jimnotgym »

bobse wrote: post #79
tialaramex wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just using excel because it won’t change on them. Are your accounting people quite young? Excel moves and changes stuff, though not on quite such an aggressive timeline. Modern Office is not like 1990s Office where you buy it and then it doesn't change unless you decide to change it. This is fine, the universe's one constant is change, if we fight it we'll lose, but it's worth calling out that there will be change,…

I use LibreOffice bacause you know what Microsoft.

Are you a professional accountant?

Re: The end of the accounting search

#95

Post by eitland »

SoftTalker wrote: post #41
tialaramex wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just using excel because it won’t change on them. Are your accounting people quite young? Excel moves and changes stuff, though not on quite such an aggressive timeline. Modern Office is not like 1990s Office where you buy it and then it doesn't change unless you decide to change it. This is fine, the universe's one constant is change, if we fight it we'll lose, but it's worth calling out that there will be change,…

I'm older. I still haven't gotten over the "ribbon" interface. It drove me to LibreOffice despite all its faults.

It is already many years ago since that I started to do certain jobs in Libre Office (back then it was still OpenOffice.org) even if I had MS Office. I mean, it was better at certain tasks and costed nothing.

In all fairness, back them I also had to use MS Office for certain other tasks, but luckily I don't need that anymore.

Now there is Confluence instead however to mangle our docs and waste our time.

Re: The end of the accounting search

#96

Post by Nevermark »

jimnotgym wrote: post #90

This article has some real problems. Here is one. > Such systems are unwieldy to work with and difficult to get started with. In truth, many of them appear to have been developed as platforms for consulting businesses, though surely nobody would deliberately make their software complex and tricky just to motivate clients to purchase their services. Or perhaps some businesses have complications to deal with that go be…

> Or perhaps some businesses have complications to deal with that go beyond what a newsletter website needs?

So ... perhaps there should be a version of Quickbooks that serves the simpler needs of smaller customers better?

Like: Simple. Desktop. Requires no upgrades as long as its functionality at-time-of-purchase continues to serve well. No forcing of upgrades via dropping of old formats, etc.

I also have given up on Quickbooks.

Re: The end of the accounting search

#97

Post by jimnotgym »

pharmakom wrote: post #63
axiomdata316 wrote: post #5

I'm a QuickBooks ProAdvisor and have been one for over 20 years and the last few years has convinced me that Intuit is determined to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by: 1) Forcing all their customers to migrate to the online version of their program. Many of the clients I've spoken to were happy with and preferred the Desktop version. The Desktop version is faster and can do more than the online version. 2)…

Genuine question: do you find there is creativity and the satisfaction of creating something from nothing in accounting work? It has always seemed so dull from the outside looking in (cue the joes about accountants) but is this the reality? Many people don’t see software engineering as creative but it certainly can be!

I think it is the naive idea that bookkeeping is accounting.

I am an accountant, I never do any bookkeeping.

Last week a few things I did were

1) worked on a way to get sales rebates to correctly reflect in the product cost. This is half accounting knowledge and half ERP.

2) presented accounts at a meeting where I was trying to use the numbers to make the business take a different strategic direction.

3) reviewed and questioned the commercial sense in other people's plans

4) worked out how to run a new process through the ERP so the accounts flowed through correctly

In other weeks I may be forecasting cash needs, doing an investment appraisal, building business plans, getting funding, writing sql to get data, building a BI system...

I like the creativity and the amazing variety of what I get to do in accounts.

Re: The end of the accounting search

#98

Post by cschmatzler »

jmainguy wrote: post #80
the_only_law wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From quickbooks to TurboTax, Intuit software has been some of the most god awful both to use and to develop against in my experience.

Argocd is pretty nice

My team’s product is mainly built on Argo Workflows, and while the idea of the tool is great, we have learned to massively distrust it. It doesn’t always do what you tell it to, or, worse, it tells you it’ll do something and then does something else.

Re: The end of the accounting search

#99

Post by ricardonunez »

axiomdata316 wrote: post #5

I'm a QuickBooks ProAdvisor and have been one for over 20 years and the last few years has convinced me that Intuit is determined to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by: 1) Forcing all their customers to migrate to the online version of their program. Many of the clients I've spoken to were happy with and preferred the Desktop version. The Desktop version is faster and can do more than the online version. 2)…

I canceled my subscription a month ago and moved to wave. What an awful piece of software and company. Slow, ads and promos and every interaction, slow, not very intuitive, did I mention slow? The only reason I signed up was because of a deal I got but it was not worth the gray hairs that I got.

Edit: intuit and quickbooks

Re: The end of the accounting search

#100

Post by no_wizard »

axiomdata316 wrote: post #5

I'm a QuickBooks ProAdvisor and have been one for over 20 years and the last few years has convinced me that Intuit is determined to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by: 1) Forcing all their customers to migrate to the online version of their program. Many of the clients I've spoken to were happy with and preferred the Desktop version. The Desktop version is faster and can do more than the online version. 2)…

One thing they are going to start pushing via their online platform is likely things line AR and payments via Melio (their a big investor in the company) and likely push out other vendors in that space as a result. My grapevine understanding is this is less possible with the desktop version because you’d need everyone to upgrade.

That’s what I think this is all about

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