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

171–180 of 218 posts

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#171

Post by ezekg »

theK wrote: post #66
xvilka wrote: post #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/akaunt…

Just a word of caution on akaunting, the FOSS product is very much the SaaS product, so lots of buttons will lead to nowhere and you will get CTAs to enable plugins which you later find out only work on the hosted service. I’m my case I even need to patch their css to get invoices to render to PDF „somewhat“ correctly. I’m still sticking around to see if this is just a momentary lapse but it’s been more than a year n…

Have you tried filing an issue, or opening a PR? It's open source after all.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#172

Post by ghostpepper »

andreasha wrote: post #104
Jedd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even this is no longer true - current free tier of Slack (as of a couple of months ago IIRC) is 90 days of retention, which for low-volume groups of users is even worse .

I think they retain it but you can't access it. One Slack I'm in activated the trial and everything was there and searchable.

There used to be a workaround where you can still access the full archive as an exported JSON document

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#174

Post by quadrangle »

icemelt8 wrote: post #140
TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[flagged]

I'm sure there's some subreddit or something where people appreciate knee-jerk defensive reactions to the entire idea of free/libre/open anything. There are people out there who actually hate public libraries…

Supposedly HN is for reasonable discussions of things.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#175

Post by gen220 »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #145
sandGorgon wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

being able to maintain local backup/copies of your entire general ledger, even if u are using a cloud tool is generally the #1 blocker for any accounting team. Instead of building a whole new format (with implications on testing, etc) - it would be incremental effort to build support for ledger-cli format . And completely mitigate 90% of the objections by accounting teams. not asking for them to build cli functionali…

I understand. But this is not a proper journal file imho. We're actually building something in this space as well and there are way better but probably local standards like the Datev format (essentially CSV). Accountants need double book formatted journal entries. This is just a collection of amounts it seems. But I really appreciate all the different solutions in this space! I build our own when we started.

If "better" incorporates "battle-testedness" and portability, I'd advocate for considering Ledger's format. (Or beancount's. It's almost identical and has more accessible FOSS parsers + generators)

It's about as minimalistic as you can get while still incorporating legibility and flexibility to support arbitrary transactions (including in commodities, etc.).

I say this as somebody who voluntarily wrote a parser and generator for their format, as a happy user, and without being affiliated with the project -- it's quite good!

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#176

Post by eschneider »

atoav wrote: post #87
rkagerer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, there's so much hate toward Intuit here. Makes me glad I stopped upgrading at QB2010. Still using it regularly. No subscriptions, no cloud, no nasty surprises to contend with. I have custom code that automatically pulls exchange rates from public sources and injects into the appropriate UI fields. My accountant's still able to ingest the file for year-end. Will probably be on it for another decade.

This is the issue with subscriptions that could be regular old software: When the other side of the equation changes you can be in deep troubles. With regular old software you are in control when to make updates, how to vet them and how to move on when no updates are coming.

Ah...but things like payroll/tax integrations usually require periodic changes, so folks get stuck on the upgrade treadmill even if they're happy. I somehow ended up supporting half the quickbooks users in my town and I can assure folks that most of the quickbook hate out there has been earned. :/

This project looks interesting, especially as a non-cloud offering. As for support...well that's certainly something folks can provide if there's a need.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#177

Post by andrewmcwatters »

theK wrote: post #67
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #64

Wave Financial seems perfectly fine. Clockify for timekeeping. PandaDoc for electronic signatures.

Seems like none of these are open source.

No, what a lot of people do want however, are small business affordable solutions.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#178

Post by capableweb »

cpach wrote: post #161
capableweb wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord (and other non-indexable chats like Slack) is where conversations go to die and be hidden forever. FOSS and other "open" projects should be using something like Zulip, or even anything else, that can actually be indexed by Google and other search engines. I'm a part of a few Discords, and questions are repeated over and over again, forever. People who answer the questions, get tired of answering the same thin…

Personally I like Discourse. Similar to an old-school forum like phpbb, but with a neat and modern UI.

~~~Well, besides the whole thing about my previous comment that everything you write in Discord stays in Discord and is basically not findable unless you're already a part of the Discord. While phpbb (or any public forum really) is by default readable by anyone, so searching for questions let you find answers without having to sign in and join the forum.~~~

Edit: Misheard parent...

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#179

Post by fma »

stanislavb wrote: post #13
djbusby wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your accountant knows it. When you're on other software, it's a challenge for them - and that costs you extra money.

I think this is the major reason. Accountants would usually label themselves as "Quickbooks/Xero certified partner" as a selling point.

I had Wave...it was free. Accountant was OK w/ it then asked me to change to Quickbooks after 2 years. I understand Quickbooks has a lot of functionality that's great for CPAs, but none that I need. I'm the one who spends hours a week in it.

The only reason why I said yes is because of the many CPAs I've interviewed they were the best (they probably aren't the best, just a lot of them are terrible).

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#180

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN