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An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

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21–30 of 218 posts

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#21
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banking integration

That's a helpful new feature, but they've held the market by the throat far longer than that was an offering.

They are on the backend too.

IIRC, some features of the customer-facing interface to my credit union appear to be from Intuit.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#22
post #18
post #2

I can't help but feel compelled to pause my current tasks and contribute wholeheartedly to this. My frustration with Intuit has reached its tipping point, especially after they acquired a Brazilian financial management software called Zeropaper, which my company heavily relied upon. Intuit then proceeded to discontinue the product and withdraw from the Brazilian market without offering any viable alternatives, leavin…

> I can't help but feel compelled to pause my current tasks and contribute wholeheartedly to this. That is interesting to me, because I had the complete opposite take after less than a minute on the website. I actively avoid QuickBooks because I despise Intuit. But there is no way I would take a project like this seriously when the 'support' link is a link to Discord. Competing with QuickBooks means competing for bus…

The last time I looked for quickbooks documentation, I just found some YouTube videos.

Support has been useless too.

As much as I don’t use discord at all, having a 50% chance of getting someone that understands internet banking to help troubleshoot internet banking would be compelling.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#23
post #7

For people who use QuickBooks, what's the main barrier to a viable open-source competitor? Does QuickBooks offer a ton of necessary integrations or something?

beig able to quickly either upload a QBO file which would have all your transactions, or direct bank integration with Plaid...after that, being able to quickly create rules to categorize different transactions based on string comparisons and then finally generate the Profit and Loss statement which is what the CPA wants to see. I used to have a bookkeeper who would manually type in all the transactions into the Check Register, but the past few years you can do all this in a few hours by just importing the QBO files and changing the categories and generating the P&L.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#24
post #22
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't help but feel compelled to pause my current tasks and contribute wholeheartedly to this. That is interesting to me, because I had the complete opposite take after less than a minute on the website. I actively avoid QuickBooks because I despise Intuit. But there is no way I would take a project like this seriously when the 'support' link is a link to Discord. Competing with QuickBooks means competing for bus…

The last time I looked for quickbooks documentation, I just found some YouTube videos. Support has been useless too. As much as I don’t use discord at all, having a 50% chance of getting someone that understands internet banking to help troubleshoot internet banking would be compelling.

I support QuickBooks for smaller companies by calling tech support for them, YMMV.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#25
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day bank feeds were horrific to develop but these days I think there are aggregate feed services. Seems like you could just implement support for one of those?

Are there any feed services that would sell an individual (person or business) license? It seems like they all strive to be a backend for a SAAS.

Fintable offers the service but it only interfaces with Airtable. You can easily download a csv from there, or use the Airtable API. It's not for those who don't want their data in the cloud, but I've found the service to be pretty good.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#26
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any feed services that would sell an individual (person or business) license? It seems like they all strive to be a backend for a SAAS.

I haven't used it, but the team (person?) that makes Buckets ( https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com ) makes SimpleFIN ( https://www.simplefin.org ), which seems like it exposes exactly what you want: simple transaction data from arbitrary banks. Plaid offers transactions APIs ( https://plaid.com/products/transactions/ ), but I guess to your point these APIs are geared towards fintech companies, not personal use. EDIT: I…

Plaid works great, but their API access is too pricey for an individual/small business.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#27
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any feed services that would sell an individual (person or business) license? It seems like they all strive to be a backend for a SAAS.

I haven't used it, but the team (person?) that makes Buckets ( https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com ) makes SimpleFIN ( https://www.simplefin.org ), which seems like it exposes exactly what you want: simple transaction data from arbitrary banks. Plaid offers transactions APIs ( https://plaid.com/products/transactions/ ), but I guess to your point these APIs are geared towards fintech companies, not personal use. EDIT: I…

This SimpleFIN blog looks dead - last article is from 2016. Not exactly encouraging.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#28
post #18
post #2

I can't help but feel compelled to pause my current tasks and contribute wholeheartedly to this. My frustration with Intuit has reached its tipping point, especially after they acquired a Brazilian financial management software called Zeropaper, which my company heavily relied upon. Intuit then proceeded to discontinue the product and withdraw from the Brazilian market without offering any viable alternatives, leavin…

> I can't help but feel compelled to pause my current tasks and contribute wholeheartedly to this. That is interesting to me, because I had the complete opposite take after less than a minute on the website. I actively avoid QuickBooks because I despise Intuit. But there is no way I would take a project like this seriously when the 'support' link is a link to Discord. Competing with QuickBooks means competing for bus…

For better or worse OSS communities organize on Discord now, having an active server where the core contributors participate is the sign of a healthy project. Honestly looks better than a public Slack imho and it's where they'll get the most engagement from devs.

Discord is a serious thing now, I've seen enterprise products add support for Discord before Slack.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#29
There's also Plain Text Accounting[1]. The biggest problem of all open source solutions, accountants' experience aside, is the lack of banking and taxes integration, especially outside of US, e.g. for Asian, South American, or African businesses. The most promising FOSS solution for SME I was able to find is Akaunting[2][3].

[1] https://plaintextaccounting.org/

[2] https://akaunting.com/

[3] https://github.com/akaunting/akaunting

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#30
Good luck.

Many layers of the financial system for small and medium businesses are used to working with QB. It's a means of communication. You can hire people who know it. It integrates with every bank and every, well, everything you might need. You accountant --internal or external-- knows it and has a process to work with it. Etc.

While FOSS is great, it isn't always better. I think FOSS works well when you have a deeply committed, enthusiastic and dedicated community around a pain point or a need. There are great examples of this, GIMP, KiCAD, Krita and various 3D printer tools being examples of this.

Accounting software? I'll believe it when, one day, I walk into my CPA's office and he enthusiastically tells me how he is asking the firm's hundreds of customers to switch to a FOSS solution.

In case it was missed, that was sarcasm. I cannot possibly imagine an accounting firm with hundreds of clients both engaging in turning their entire practice upside-down and having their clients endure untold pain just to save a few hundred bucks on software that just happens to work just fine today and has for decades.

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