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The end of the accounting search

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111–120 of 208 posts

Re: The end of the accounting search

#111
post #7

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)…

Why would people not go to Gnucash or Fresh books?

Gnucash is hard to use.

I recently attempted to help a non profit setup Gnucash. It turned out to be cheaper to get commercial software (Xero) as they were spending too much time on upskilling in Gnucash.

They took a week to onboard to the new system and are amazing at how quickly they can do everything they need to do.

Re: The end of the accounting search

#112
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.

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!

I've found that once a behavior is released in the wild, even a bug, people will build it into their workflows and rely on its presence. Frustrating but unavoidable.

Re: The end of the accounting search

#113

> Scheme looks like Lisp but isn't really Lisp Well that’s a surprising statement, i’ve heard it touted as more lispy than common lisp.

> Scheme looks like Lisp but isn't really Lisp The Lisp world is extremely confusing. I'd wager that at this time, most people in that space can't even agree on what "being a LISP" means.

Haven't agreed in half a century, won't agree now, never will.

Re: The end of the accounting search

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you elaborate? Just started building out a new platform centered on it

Re: The end of the accounting search

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which software and company is awful? It is not clear from your comment.

Intuit, tax and quickbooks. In addition to quickbooks online not being great, Just an example: I own the gmail for my name, somebody used it by mistake on turbo tax so I get their emails. I called their support and explained it to them but I have to give personal info on the account but I don’t own the account. It was like that for years until recently they fix it, although I already had created a filter for it. Similar happened with mint.

Re: The end of the accounting search

#116
My aunt was an accountant (rip).

She had one of those "not calculators" with a built-in printer. Not sure what they are properly called.

Her "not calculator" was old, stained with cigarette smoke and coffee and she did not wish for a new one.

I got paid a bit a few times to clean it up inside and out. The thing was a tank. (If it still exists, it should still work with a bit of care and attention.)

She used some form of financial software running on a terminal. I think it was from an AS/400.

She was an expert on both.

Whatever key combinations were required to enter data on the terminal had become so ingrained that if you asked her how to do it, she would have to look at what her hands did. (weird).

The UX on the terminal was shit if you had to learn it. (Since I got paid to do some data entry, I felt the pain).

But if you got used to it, it was damn fast. No lag, no mouse pointing, and it stayed entirely consistent. A bit like VI I guess.

As far as I know the system never crashed on her. The server did need care, but it would order it on its own.

At some point they brought in Windows PCz and Lotus Symphony, I think. She hated that.

She found it all slow, inconsistent and did not like the mouse one bit.

The other way around though. When someone new was hired and we were in the age of Microsoft Windows, new people were horrified by the old terminal software.

I still sometimes see people at warehouses or stores that use terminal driven software and some of them are just as fast. It is fun to see.

The majority though hunt, scratch head, peck, hit whatever undo is, and try again.

Should we make easy to use software or software as a tool for those who go through the effort to learn?

I dont think any "windows/osx/linux/" screen UI accounting system would be as fast to use.

Re: The end of the accounting search

#117
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.

> 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,…

The chrome of Excel changes. The core product is COBOL like in its stability.

The problem with all of these enterprise web applications is that they all suck. I worked for a big government agency that transitioned from a mostly homegrown, mainframe 3270 based accounting system to PeopleSoft. The staff revolted.

We joked about the “Revenge of the Beancounters”, but looking at it, they were right. It took them 4-6 months to train a new person with the old system, but they were hyper-productive. With the new system, they actually needed to grow the staff because you couldn’t build out workflows that the business needed.

They did get some benefits, like improved payments and invoice tracking. (Which drove the business case) But the general financial operations suffered.

Re: The end of the accounting search

#118
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be like the thing at Google, where people want to get promoted and big changes or new launches are the only way up, regardless of the effect on user experience.

With M$ the bias is towards their certification and training business. They have to change enough to make training seem more important.

That’s just one leg of the stool. They used to be relentless at driving SQL Server Enterprise adoption. Now it’s shifted to M365 E5, plus accessory subscriptions. PowerBI, Viva and Copilot for whatever are the new legs.

Re: The end of the accounting search

#119

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!

Accountants are like attorneys. The shitty ones go through the motions and create problems. The great ones often solve problems before you know you have one. They get a bad rap from a stereotype perspective!

Re: The end of the accounting search

#120
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the SQLite format support concurrent users? Or would it need better conflict resolution support in the application? Checking the XML data into text-based version control is a really interesting idea. you could probably do something similar with the SQLite data, using a tool like Dolt.

SQLite itself doesn’t support concurrent users.

The FAQ disagrees with you: https://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q5
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