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An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

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Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#191

Post by degrees57 »

chris_wot wrote: post #68

I strongly advise people learning bookkeeping. The best online site I've seen for this is here: https://www.accountingcoach.com/ Quite incredible, and well explained.

Agreed about learning bookkeeping. I was a programmer on a minicomputer decades ago, and when the bookkeeper spoke debits and credits at me, I stared back like a deer in the headlights (I had an engineering education). When I asked the bookkeeper if that was like positive and negative integers, she stared back at me like a deer in the headlights. I went to night school and learned bookkeeping. Turned out to be a very useful skill, both in my professional career and personally.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#192

Post by enos_feedler »

Every time I check my finances on Mint I cringe at the $15 charge for Quickbooks. I'll pay the $2/mo to drop ads on Mint. I absolutely hate paying $15/mo for an app that allows me to swipe left/right to sort my credit card charges into business vs. personal. It's disgusting.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#193

Post by andreasha »

ghostpepper wrote: post #172
andreasha wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seems to be still available for "Workspace Owners/Admins and Org Owners/Admins" https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#194

Post by cosmodisk »

rco8786 wrote: post #151
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…

> 'support' link is a link to Discord For a FOSS project targeting people who are comfortable using FOSS this seems entirely fine...desirable even. "We don't have money for phone staff who would put you on hold and only be reading off scripted responses anyway, but you can come chat directly with the leaders and maintainers of the software by chat".

People who are comfortable with Discord as a platform for support don't make purchasing decisions for accounting software.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#195

Post by RamblingCTO »

gen220 wrote: post #175
RamblingCTO wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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, links to the invoice/contract causing the accounting event (that's mandatory) and a whole lot more.

So I think our requirements are a tad more complex than ledger can support. We are compatible with the German DATEV format. DATEV is the accounting software and we don't wanna replace it. I could write a whole lot about that but I'll spare you that. Let me just say that we have good reasons to have our own format of accounting internally and there's no benefit in supporting ledger. I don't think there's even one person in the world that is a) our target persona and b) uses ledger.

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#196

Post by RamblingCTO »

sandGorgon wrote: post #150
RamblingCTO wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

as far as the ledger-cli google groups [1] go, they seem to think it is a proper journal file. It has been fairly tested with OFX imports ( https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/OFX-Import ) as well bank autosync ( https://github.com/egh/ledger-autosync ). In fact, someone also wrote a book on this - https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger/ I will defer if you are indeed building your own competing tool in…

I'll just link to my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36129740

tldr: we have quite different requirements and we operate in a very different space. I still think ledger looks cool!

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#197

Post by garbagecoder »

hluska wrote: post #163
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…

This sort of armchair quarterbacking is why many people won’t open source things. Instead of shitting on someone’s work, get involved and make changes. It’s easier and keeps people involved.

Maybe people don't because getting involved means dealing with a bunch of thin-skinned people who can't take a legit criticism, like "accounting software can't have support on Discord."

Do you want people to use it or to like you?

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#199

Post by icemelt8 »

rco8786 wrote: post #152
icemelt8 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so you want them to roll-out a discord like platform themselves?

And an ISP to host it on. As we know, if you don't self-host your ISP then you're beholden to the goodwill of a large corporation who could shut you down at any time.

what about the deep sea cables that run the internet, those can still be blocked by governments right?

Re: An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

#200

Post by bcrl »

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…

I did some integration work with QuickBooks online, and oh the horror! Simple things like reconciling transactions against a bank account couldn't be done via the supported API. There was basically no way to automate clicking on every single customer payment aside from scraping the website.

Bonus: the website screws up when you have thousands of transactions that need to be reconciled. I couldn't come up with a good test case as it seems to be some weird internal race condition.

In other words: I wholeheartedly welcome an open source project my business can build on.

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