I use waveapp, I try everything else and I it worked the best for me. Fresh books is good too. Do not use quickbooks, their web version is buggy, slow and is and ads machine to sell you more services.
Ask HN: Small business owners on HN. How do you do your accounts?
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: Ask HN: Small business owners on HN. How do you do your accounts?
#12I’m not sure how this is possible? Don’t you need to submit accounts every year and pay corporation tax? Certainly in the U.K. small businesses with a turnover under a certain amount can have their accounts signed off by a chartered accountant and then submitted to companies house. Over a certain amount accounts have to be audited. Day to day - cash flow is the most important thing to any business. Can you meet your…
>Certainly in the U.K. small businesses with a turnover under a certain amount can have their accounts signed off by a chartered accountant and then submitted to companies house.
For very small businesses you can handle it all yourself with the help of an HMRC tool.
https://www.unbiased.co.uk/discover/tax-business/running-a-b...
Re: Ask HN: Small business owners on HN. How do you do your accounts?
#13I used a semi-scripted workflow in google sheets until things got too complicated. After that, quickbooks.
Re: Ask HN: Small business owners on HN. How do you do your accounts?
#14Old version of QuickBooks that's still a desktop app and hails from before its enshitiffication. Along with a small little utility I made which grabs exchange rates from https://fx.sauder.ubc.ca/ and autopopulates certain transaction information.
Also a fair bit of Excel for certain things that are more practical to do separately and put in as summary entries. E.g. I have custom Excel app (VBA/form) for rapidly reconciling credit card and banking expenses and tying in the correct image from a bulk set of receipts that I've scanned.
Re: Ask HN: Small business owners on HN. How do you do your accounts?
#15Back when I ran a VPS, I used weberp which turned into odoo. I’ve used vTiger as well. I have also used a custom erp tool that tied into my infrastructure accounting. This was 10+ years ago.
These tools are great, they allowed me to see instant balance standing and allowed me to do forecasting on my reports. VTiger was really great because my costs were directly tied to project management which allowed me to predict costs way more accurately than my competitors.
As great as that was, it could not ingest bills automagically nor was the format consumable by my accountant. Every month I would spend 8-16 hours updating bills manually. Every year end I would spend 20-30 hours to export my data into excel to send to my cpa. These hours shrunk by half before I sold the business but I never went back to a DIY/OSS approach for accounting again, instead I relied heavily on the OG Quickbooks desktop app.
I don’t know what I would use today, likely salesforce or something similar
Re: Ask HN: Small business owners on HN. How do you do your accounts?
#16I use a locally hosted ERPNext instance. It's opensource, endlessly customizable, and has a workable API. It's also quirky and a bit annoying at times but it beats having to deal with the limitations, ever-changing quirks and annoyances of SaaS offerings.
Re: Ask HN: Small business owners on HN. How do you do your accounts?
#17I’m not sure how this is possible? Don’t you need to submit accounts every year and pay corporation tax? Certainly in the U.K. small businesses with a turnover under a certain amount can have their accounts signed off by a chartered accountant and then submitted to companies house. Over a certain amount accounts have to be audited. Day to day - cash flow is the most important thing to any business. Can you meet your…
>Certainly in the U.K. small businesses with a turnover under a certain amount can have their accounts signed off by a chartered accountant and then submitted to companies house. For very small businesses you can handle it all yourself with the help of an HMRC tool. https://www.unbiased.co.uk/discover/tax-business/running-a-b...
I didn’t know that - very useful!
Re: Ask HN: Small business owners on HN. How do you do your accounts?
#18I trust a proffesional to do all my accounts. I prefer to focus 100% on my business and outsource it.
Re: Ask HN: Small business owners on HN. How do you do your accounts?
#19I used Quickbooks until it became too much for me to do myself. Now I use Bench, and they do my bookkeeping and taxes.
Re: Ask HN: Small business owners on HN. How do you do your accounts?
#20I use a locally hosted ERPNext instance. It's opensource, endlessly customizable, and has a workable API. It's also quirky and a bit annoying at times but it beats having to deal with the limitations, ever-changing quirks and annoyances of SaaS offerings.
Interesting.
How big is the operation for which you're doing accounts this way?