Ask HN: My product idea: Easy Bookkeeping, Simple Accounting

Hi. Do you think there is still a market for another online bookkeeping/accounting SaaS app? My idea for the app is to be a bare basics accounting system for freelancers, micro-isvs, and small businesses. I'm a one-man startup registered as a sole proprietorship. I am required to submit annually my financial statements (Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Cash Flow Statement) along with my tax return. What I need is a simple and basic app that can generate the three basic financial statements (if PDF or Excel format). From what I've read, these are the most important financial statements to any business. So my idea is an online app that does simple and easy bookkeeping and can generate the three financial statements. No invoicing, no proposals, no accessing my bank account, and so on. I looked at Xero and Less Accounting, they're not simple and basic enough for my needs. So I'm thinking of scratching my own itch. I was just wondering if others have this itch too. Would you be willing to pay for a service like this? For example, would you pay $5 per month for this SaaS app? What monthly price would you be willing to pay for?Thanks!

Check out Outright too, their big draw is integration with plenty of other web services.

Basically when breaking into an existing market, you want to be at least 15% better than the competition to convince people to switch. That doesn't mean you have to START better, but you should have a good idea of what you can do to accomplish that.

Doesn't Freshbooks do really basic accounting?

I like what I've seen in Outright. Outright is focusing initially on the "single member LLC". This suits me...except: I need to account for me as a person in addition to my LLC. I want both accounts in the same system since it is common to make mistakes or to rethink the expense later: I paid on my personal credit card but its a business expense. I paid on my business card but it should have been paid on my personal card and then reimbursed as a travel expense to employee. There are many of these types of "reconciliations" between personal and business. A good accountant looks at my mistakes and ends up making three or four entries to fix my mistake. I don't even know how to fix the mistake. I want one-click fixing the books for these common cases.

I am not sure what response you get here because accounting is traditionally a non-hacker domain. In my own research, there is a huge need of a service like yours for the particular segment you are aiming for.

I have been offering SQL-Ledger (and its fork LedgerSMB; both open source) hosting, training, support, customization for many years. (See my info)

Though both packages are targeted to small to medium sized business, the biggest problem I find with new users is they always find it difficult to learn. This is mostly because of a large number of features even for smbs (and also because accounting software does require you have a basic understanding of accounting) And no one has time to read the fine manual.

I have been experimenting for the last few months by removing/rearranging menus, adding context sensitive help/tips, making it more user-friendly but still not satisfied with the results.

So yes I also want to target exact same segment (bare basics accounting system for freelancers, micro-isvs, and small businesses) but I need to do a lot of work/testing before doing that.