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An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

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Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#121

Post by jonathanstrange »

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…

Unfortunately, many countries also have the market regulated and not very open. AFAIK, in Portugal accounting software needs to be certified and comes with some connection to the tax authority for electronic transmission of reports (although this is optional). The certification process is complicated, and the accounting software on the market is all quite expensive. Everybody hires an accountant. My girlfriend works for a small business (6 employees) and they're paying 400 Euro/month for accounting.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#122

Post by kqr »

edpichler wrote: post #103
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…

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?

The dumb answer is that it should be fairly uncomplicated to write a script that idempotently adds depreciation for depreciable assets. I suspect that's the general strength and weakness of plain text accounting. There's not as much pre-built tooling, but it's not that hard to build on your own.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#124

Post by that_guy_iain »

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…

It seems to be a one man show project, which I don't think is their fulltime gig since the contact me is discord.

Someone could fork the project and build on top of it to build a commercial project though.

For me, this is actually a common problem with lots of open source projects. They're hobby projects with no commercial support behind them.

It's a super good hobby project tho. If they invested in docs I think it would be onto a winner.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#125

Post by molsongolden »

coolestguy wrote: post #94
suddenclarity wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Banks don’t all offer API access in the USA. It’s getting better but can still be a mess of needing to use Plaid, Yodlee, screen scraping, etc… for bank data access.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#126

Post by f_devd »

jesprenj wrote: post #108

Given that it's AGPL, are there contributor licence agreements that give bigcapitalhq any exclusive rights over your contributions? If that's the case (if bigcapitalhq gets full IP ownership rights to your contributions), bigcapitalhq can dual licence the software other contributors made and profit of them.

I don't see any indication of a CLA from the pull requests

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#127

Post by theK »

xvilka wrote: post #71
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…

Thanks for the information, this doesn't sound good.

To balance out the almost entirely negative comment let me say that akaunting does do some things quite well though. Using it with multiple users to collaborate on the accounts works without a hitch and stuff like the dashboards you can click together, the automated invoice mails for due next and overdue, the fact you can export pretty much everything you see to excel and account reconciliations are really great features to have, especially if you don't have inhouse accounting.

Akaunting is a great product, I just wish I could actually pay to self host it so that they have income from that and actually keep selfhosted in mind in the long run.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#128

Post by theK »

koili_ wrote: post #80
theK wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This depends on whether the Dockerfile is available somewhere right?

Not necessarily. It is certainly easier to read a dockerfile, but there are tools like https://github.com/wagoodman/dive (im sure there are others) that allow you to inspect images themselves in a very detailed manner.

I was certain there where ways to reconstruct the Dockerfile but wasn't aware that tools like this existed. Thanks for the link!

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#129

Post by hsjqllzlfkf »

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…

So your alternative a use a different web program?

Knowing that these things happen is why I use gnucash.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#130

Post by callmeal »

guax wrote: post #89
balaselvam wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the company is serious enough about competing with Quickbooks and solving a real customer problem, Discord is not going to cut it.

I'm curious. Is this a criticism of their support. Real time chat in general or just specifically discord?

Real time chat in general and discord in particular. Discord cannot be self-hosted, so any support message history will be completely reliant on the goodwill of discord. Another problem with using a chat channel for support (slack has the same problem) is searching for things you know are there but are impossible to find again.
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