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

201–210 of 218 posts

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#201

Post by predictabl3 »

evilduck wrote: post #188
epgui wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah but it doesn't mean they're useful as non-Docker build steps for reproducing an image. For example: https://hub.docker.com/layers/library/mysql/latest/images/sh... "ADD file:e15c235506d8dd134e69d458a7c0afefef1522e9d0cfb28e3538760ddf032785" isn't much help in installing MySQL on a bare metal server. It's also not something commonly done (I've never seen a project do it), but you can also just push around a very s…

Not to mention accordingly to highly scientific calculations "damn near" every Dockerfile runs `apt-get update` as a first step, so the, you know, core valuation is questionable from the outset.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#202

Post by gen220 »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #195
gen220 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

No, better actually means more than hobbyist accounting with publication obligations. While I think it's a cool tool, for proper (German/European) accounting you'd need tax quotas, reverse charge taxation, compatibility with SKR04 most likely (your tax consultant uses that in > 90% of the cases). You'd also need different dates for each journal entry: invoice date, date of service and booking date, booking notes, lin…

Well, I'm not going to tell you what's good and bad for your business, but for what it's worth Ledger supports all of those things. Whether it's right for your business or not is up to you and your customers, but you're selling Ledger short by describing it as "hobbyist accounting".

Tax quotas, reverse charge taxation, the various date types, notes, links are all totally supported with Ledger's primitives as they are. SKR04 just looks like a list of account classifications, which is totally fine. You can either make that 1:1 with the account list you use, or you can tag entries in a transaction with metadata indicating that it's associated with that SKR04 classification.

Again, not attacking your decision to use your own format, it's the right choice in many situations. But ledger is literally the primitives of accounting – it's up to you to superimpose your system of rules and regulations on it, but since it's just double-entry accounting with metadata and tags, it almost certainly can.

Here's an example transaction, where somebody pays $20.00 for 20 tons of scrap metal, with links to the invoice, an invoice and transaction date, a mark to indicate that it's settled, and a $8 VAT liability that accrues at the end of the month.

    2021-01-01=2021-01-03 * ACME Supplier
        ; invoice_num: 123
        ; invoice_link: https://invoices.widgetsandthings.de?id=123
        ; service_date: 2021-01-02
        ; notes: John said he'll charge us more next year.
        Liabilities:CreditCards:Chase:XXXX  $-20.00
        Liabilities:Taxes:VAT                $-8.00  ;[=2021/01/31]
        ; reverse charge tax, accrues at end of month
        [Quotas:Tax:VAT]                      $8.00  ;[=2021/01/31]
        ; you'd use a "virtual" account to express "quotas" or "budgets".
        Expenses:ScrapMetal                  $28.00
        ; I'm bundling the VAT and metal expense into a single entry.
        ; But if you wanted to record them separately, with their own effective dates, you can.
        Assets:ScrapMetal                   10 tons  ; skr_code: SM2201 (I'm making this up)
        Receivables:ScrapMetal             -10 tons

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#203

Post by theK »

ezekg wrote: post #171
theK wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had mentioned the problem and my workaround in their support forum. The only feedback I got was from other users stating they had the same problem. Maybe I'll make an out of the blue PR at some point but looking at PRs and Issues on GH it doesn't seem that there is a lot of crossborder discussion happening there either.

That said, I'm still going to be invoicing my clients via my selfhosted akaunting instance tonight. So maybe its not that bad after all.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#204

Post by epgui »

predictabl3 wrote: post #201
evilduck wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but it doesn't mean they're useful as non-Docker build steps for reproducing an image. For example: https://hub.docker.com/layers/library/mysql/latest/images/sh... "ADD file:e15c235506d8dd134e69d458a7c0afefef1522e9d0cfb28e3538760ddf032785" isn't much help in installing MySQL on a bare metal server. It's also not something commonly done (I've never seen a project do it), but you can also just push around a very s…

Not to mention accordingly to highly scientific calculations "damn near" every Dockerfile runs `apt-get update` as a first step, so the, you know, core valuation is questionable from the outset.

There is value in making things "more reproducible" even if you don't achieve "total reproducibility". Even just having a basic layer of extra isolation from the host system (even when updating everything at will without pinned versions) can be enough to motivate the tool's usage. There are varying degrees of reasonable pragmatism in different situations. Heck some people even decide not to use containers at all, and some of those even have well-motivated reasons for this choice!

(And will this stuff even still run on chips 10-20 years from now anyway? Is there maybe a practical limit to reproducibility?)

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#205

Post by RamblingCTO »

gen220 wrote: post #202
RamblingCTO wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, better actually means more than hobbyist accounting with publication obligations. While I think it's a cool tool, for proper (German/European) accounting you'd need tax quotas, reverse charge taxation, compatibility with SKR04 most likely (your tax consultant uses that in > 90% of the cases). You'd also need different dates for each journal entry: invoice date, date of service and booking date, booking notes, lin…

Well, I'm not going to tell you what's good and bad for your business, but for what it's worth Ledger supports all of those things. Whether it's right for your business or not is up to you and your customers, but you're selling Ledger short by describing it as "hobbyist accounting". Tax quotas, reverse charge taxation, the various date types, notes, links are all totally supported with Ledger's primitives as they are…

Nice, I appreciate that, thank you so much! As I said, ledger looks cool and I might play with it just for the fun of it. But as far as I can see it's file based, right?

We obviously keep our accounting data in databases and only support exporting to DATEV atm, hence the compatibility with that format. The point of our whole endeavour is to *not* do accounting. You process your documents and we use OCR and simple input from the user to create the correct journal entries. Your tax consultants and accountants work in the background to review everything and export that into their systems to continue working on that. That's necessary for all the publications and tax reports you need to do in Germany/Europe. You can think of us as a pre-accounting software. A nice input layer. It's more about the bigger picture. Think multiple companies, real estate. You get a real time overview of your finances. You get banking integration. You can collaborate, with your employees, your family, notaries, lawyers, tax people and accountants. So accounting is just a side-effect for the user. Having a real time overview of a more complex financial setup is the USP.

Having said that, I don't see a real value to support import/export of the ledger format for now. Our first persona we're targeting aren't people that do their accounting themselves.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#206

Post by evilduck »

predictabl3 wrote: post #201
evilduck wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but it doesn't mean they're useful as non-Docker build steps for reproducing an image. For example: https://hub.docker.com/layers/library/mysql/latest/images/sh... "ADD file:e15c235506d8dd134e69d458a7c0afefef1522e9d0cfb28e3538760ddf032785" isn't much help in installing MySQL on a bare metal server. It's also not something commonly done (I've never seen a project do it), but you can also just push around a very s…

Not to mention accordingly to highly scientific calculations "damn near" every Dockerfile runs `apt-get update` as a first step, so the, you know, core valuation is questionable from the outset.

True, but bare metal systems also receive those updates on a regular basis, and containers need security updates too. Unless you're willing to throw it all out and use NixOS you're not going to solve that problem. And if you do, you're opting into far more work since you've just thrown out every standard package management solution and install or setup instructions you were previously relying on and you've just became a pain in the ass to your coworkers and ops teams who haven't drank that koolaid with you.

Personally, I've never once ran into an issue where updating Debian packages in a Docker image impacted my daily life. I'm sure there's some anecdotes and greater than zero potential for it but it just doesn't seem like a major issue anywhere. Docker and Dockerfiles are a practical and low-friction means of getting install steps documented and it's generally a step up over what is normally done. I'm not going to let perfect be the enemy of good and will gladly deal with a Dockerfile that updates its packages first over a markdown file that does nothing.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#207

Post by gen220 »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #205
gen220 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm not going to tell you what's good and bad for your business, but for what it's worth Ledger supports all of those things. Whether it's right for your business or not is up to you and your customers, but you're selling Ledger short by describing it as "hobbyist accounting". Tax quotas, reverse charge taxation, the various date types, notes, links are all totally supported with Ledger's primitives as they are…

Nice, I appreciate that, thank you so much! As I said, ledger looks cool and I might play with it just for the fun of it. But as far as I can see it's file based, right? We obviously keep our accounting data in databases and only support exporting to DATEV atm, hence the compatibility with that format. The point of our whole endeavour is to *not* do accounting. You process your documents and we use OCR and simple inp…

Correcto, it's meant to live at-rest in plain text files. When you exec the `ledger` binary, you point it at a collection of ledger files, and it parses them into memory to perform whatever operations you request (report generation, etc.).

It's written in C++ and scales about as well as you'd imagine (i.e. mainly a function of memory constraints).

It sounds like exporting to DATEV is the right choice for your customers and region.

The benefit of a format like ledger is that it's universal and relatively trivial to write your own parser for. Most accounting software packages might not import ledger files natively, but there's probably a ledger -> $your_format converter out there – if not, it's generally trivial to write one. It's kind of like how "markdown" became a common language for latex-generated PDFs, HTML, and powerpoint slides thanks to Pandoc. Ledger doesn't quite have a pandoc-style tool yet, but `.ldg` files are basically the accounting equivalent of markdown or HTML.

I did some googling around for datev and ledger, found this thread that might be interesting to you (much of it is over my head): https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/jzi6ci...

Sounds like a good product! Wish you the best of luck with it. :)

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#208

Post by predictabl3 »

evilduck wrote: post #206
predictabl3 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention accordingly to highly scientific calculations "damn near" every Dockerfile runs `apt-get update` as a first step, so the, you know, core valuation is questionable from the outset.

True, but bare metal systems also receive those updates on a regular basis, and containers need security updates too. Unless you're willing to throw it all out and use NixOS you're not going to solve that problem. And if you do, you're opting into far more work since you've just thrown out every standard package management solution and install or setup instructions you were previously relying on and you've just becam…

>Unless you're willing to throw it all out and use NixOS you're not going to solve that problem.

Well, I have been running NixOS systems for nearly a decade, and now have it deployed across 3 cpu archs in 3 continents. :) Tailscale also uses NixOS in prod, etc.

Not to mention, NixOS means: no docker hub/repo, all you need is a dumb blob store, no container signing, no complicated tooling for BOM or source provination, or tooling for version dep analysis. Much of the entire Golang/K8s devops-startup-chasing/adjacent ecosystem is obliviated by first-order Nix features. You don't have to think about container bloat, or container optimization, storage on nodes is cheaper; it's really hard to name an area that isn't strictly better other than "yes, you have to learn more than running an imperative bash script and capturing the tar filesystem". But, maybe there's good reasons for that. I've personally also sheparded probably half a dozen or more users into full-time contributors, so I know it's not impossible.

When Tvix hits with their NAR alternative, a number of other benefits are just going to start appearing for Nix users that try to adopt it. Much, much faster path downloads, significantly more on-disk de-duplication "for free", much better options for potential P2P replication, etc.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#209

Post by predictabl3 »

epgui wrote: post #204
predictabl3 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention accordingly to highly scientific calculations "damn near" every Dockerfile runs `apt-get update` as a first step, so the, you know, core valuation is questionable from the outset.

There is value in making things "more reproducible" even if you don't achieve "total reproducibility". Even just having a basic layer of extra isolation from the host system (even when updating everything at will without pinned versions) can be enough to motivate the tool's usage. There are varying degrees of reasonable pragmatism in different situations. Heck some people even decide not to use containers at all, and…

>And will this stuff even still run on chips 10-20 years from now anyway?

NixOS Con Paris had a talk running a decade+ old version of Firefox, complete with Flash.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#210

Post by simonmic »

Naga wrote: post #162
edpichler wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guys, all of this amazing text based accounting software are very interesting to me. Does anyone knows if is there any feature for automatic registering of depreciation? If not, how to do not forget to register and how to keep track of all assets that will depreciate? Separated file?

You'd need to write a script yourself for this. The general ledger generally doesn't include enough information about all of your assets, expected end of useful life, serials, etc. It's pretty common for accounting software packages to track this stuff and calculate depreciation, but like you're guessing its a separate process. I was an accountant in a former life, and this is a question that most companies end up so…

After a quick search of docs, I think that's still the case. hledger-interest is possibly a useful component.
Post reply on HN