Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

bigcapital.ly

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 218 posts

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#91

Post by realusername »

robomartin wrote: post #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…

> Many layers of the financial system for small and medium businesses are used to working with QB

This is more US-based, I'm working for a QB competitor in France and let me tell you that they are going to be crushed at very high speed either by us or another similar modern competitor. They are going to lose the whole market within 5 years and TV ads won't help them. They are moving way too slowly for the market.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#92

Post by epgui »

theK wrote: post #69
epgui wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This goes strongly against the spirit of self-hosting where you know what you're running and you see the steps and all the integrations that are needed, including any reliance on third-party services that may come back to bite you. Dockerized apps are typically just as transparent, so that's a bit of a non-argument IMO. Their main advantages are portability, reproducibility, and security.

This depends on whether the Dockerfile is available somewhere right?

I don't think so, and (honest question) isn't a dockerfile always available somehow from somewhere?

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#93

Post by lelanthran »

nulbyte wrote: post #18
bratao wrote: 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…

> But there is no way I would take a project like this seriously when the 'support' link is a link to Discord

I always felt that projects used discord-only as a way to signal that they don't want to deal with users.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#94

Post by coolestguy »

suddenclarity wrote: post #63
coolestguy wrote: post #3

It never seems like any of these opensource accounting solutions have bank feeds? Why would anyone manually import bank info when an automatic feed exists.

My understanding is that automatic import through a third party cost a small fortune. YNAB promoted not having it, as a feature. They claimed it would make you more responsible by taking 30 seconds after every purchase to open the app and add the purchase. Then they went from a one time fee ($30) to SaaS and began charging $100 + VAT a year, with automatic bank import being the only new feature. Either they are makin…

I don't know why you need a third party.

In Aus all our major software providers do it directly with a bank connection - why can't this program.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#95

Post by TobyTheDog123 »

nulbyte wrote: post #18
bratao wrote: 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…

Your take doesn't make sense at all to me.

It's an open source project - their customers are going to be small businesses with small teams of technical people to maintain it. I don't think they're competing with QuickBooks at all. Why is Discord not a viable method of communication for these users?

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#96

Post by FredPret »

M_bara wrote: post #88
kolli_kumar wrote: post #59

Check out this : https://github.com/frappe/books - free desktop accounting software. https://github.com/frappe/erpnext - free if you host yourself or $10+ if they host it on their server. ERP Software Both are free. And they are pretty decent.

Yep, trying out a self hosted erpnext. It’s quite smooth and reliable especially when you compare it with Odoo. The cost for their cloud options is also way more economic to Odoo. Want to try out their integration with woo commerce.

If you don’t mind me asking, how did you get self-hosted ERPNext up and running?

I had a beast of a time getting Frappe Bench up and receiving requests, but then it refused to serve a page.

There doesn’t seem to be any documentation either.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#97

Post by rapnie »

Spivak wrote: post #28
nulbyte wrote: 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…

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.

> For better or worse OSS communities organize on Discord now

OSS communities, yes. More and more FOSS communities are on Matrix, either using matrix.org or connecting their own instance to the network. FOSS projects using FOSS tools, and decentralized for that matter too.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#98

Post by RamblingCTO »

sandGorgon wrote: post #90

If there are BigCapital devs here, could you please maintain compatibility with https://github.com/ledger/ledger also i dont see mention of an API. Being able to provide an API to one's own accounting system is a super-power (and probably very incremental to the work you're doing anyway)

I don't see how this is actually a use-case. How many people that need accounting software do it from the terminal? And on what earth is that a worthwhile business decision to spend time and money on this?

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#99

Post by digisign »

thestepafter wrote: post #84
Element_ wrote: post #51

I use freshbooks for my small business (timekeeping, expenses, invoicing) and I just received notice my annual subscription fee will be increased from $270/yr to $324/yr. Not only have they not added any new features to justify this fee increase, but they have actually removed a few features that I depended on like multi-currency reports. I am actively looking for an alternative.

I’m in the same position as you. They keep removing features and raising the prices. Been with them for 6 years. Biggest concern is moving all of my monthly recurring revenue elsewhere since I’m auto billing stored CC information (stored with CC processor only).

Not a big fan of price increases either, however keep in mind there has been 30%+ inflation the last few years.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#100

Post by akvadrako »

moneywoes wrote: post #49
nulbyte wrote: 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…

What would support be instead, a phone hotline?

A phone is worse, but almost anything else is better: email, forms, old-school forums, discourse, github issues or discussions, etc...
Post reply on HN