
Manager.io – Free accounting software for small businesses - Heliosmaster
http://www.manager.io/
======
lubos
Wow. I'm founder of Manager.io and long-time member of HN but I was always
afraid to submit on HN link to my own startup thinking it won't ever get any
upvotes. There are hundreds of people on www.manager.io right now. I'm amazed
and completely humbled by the interest right now.

~~~
sashagim
Hey there! The software looks very good, although I'm not in your target
audience. Good luck!

I'm curious as to why have you decided to package this as a desktop software,
rather than a web app?

~~~
lubos
I will release server edition for people who want to install this on their own
web-server. That way it can run as a web app too.

~~~
Heliosmaster
this is great!

And, incidentally, you are welcome for this submission ;)

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breckinloggins
"Enter bank transactions."

Nope. Customer lost.

Look, I _hate_ Quickbooks and Quickbooks Online. I really, really do, but I
will _not_ use a financial product that doesn't connect to my financial
institutions. Period.

Do you want to know what MY startup dream is? I want someone to give me money,
and then I want to go create a service that kicks the crap out of Yodlee and
Intuit's own bank connection system. I want it to use REST APIs when it can,
OFX when it should, and intelligent screen scraping when it must.

I want to build a startup based on an open core of specifications for how to
connect to every financial system in the world. I want that spec to be
executable and available as a simple library with bindings to every language
you can think of. If you have a new institution or your bank changes and you
can fix it, I want you to be able to fork the library and send us a pull
request.

I want end users to be able to go through a "guided login process". "OK, log
in now", "OK, click on the accounts list", "OK click on a transaction".
"You're done! We've autogenerated a basic scraper for your bank. Thanks for
helping us out."

I want to make money off this library by providing a simple, unified REST API
behind all this mess that provides the computational resources to handle
millions of customers connecting with thousands of institutions.

I want this company to provide push notifications so your app can do clever
things when people spend money.

I don't want you to have to sign an NDA and pay thousands of dollars just to
get permission to play with it.

I want it to be the Twilio of Banks.

But if you want to take the code and go your own way, you can.

I really don't know why we've let just a few companies keep our collective
financial data locked up for so long. Is it because it's so expensive to get
it working? Well why not spend it on people who will create an open, scalable
system that can _still_ make money?

Instead, we have Mint.com and mvelopes. That's it, really. Have an idea for a
personal finance tool that lets you create "virtual subaccounts" for your
checking and savings accounts so you can leverage double-entry bookkeeping in
your personal finances through a clear metaphor? Great! Now have fun spending
10 minutes every two days copying and pasting stuff from 10 websites into 1.

It's just madness.

You know that "one weird thing" you're passionate about that's not really
related to anything else you're passionate about? This is it for me.

P.S.: _lubos_ \- this isn't really about you or manager.io. I commend you for
making something and getting it out there. This is about the thing that makes
every one of these attempts inevitably fail, and it's sad that we're all being
held hostage to crappy software because of it. I wish you success, I hope that
I'm completely wrong.

~~~
whockey
We're actually building this product over at plaid.io!

Shoot me an email at william [at] plaid.io, always love to talk with people
passionate about the space.

~~~
fishtoaster
That is a really cool service. I can't help but notice, though, that the
example on your front page sends bank credentials over http instead of https.
Is that particularly wise?

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whockey
Nope its not! That's just our development endpoint and only used for testing
purposes - nice find though :)

~~~
BallinBige
um ok... (fixes media site ASAP) hehe

~~~
whockey
haha - switching it over as we speak!

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tobeportable
I wished this would be based on [http://www.ledger-
cli.org/](http://www.ledger-cli.org/)

~~~
ams6110
That's what I use. A simple CSV download of transactions (what bank doesn't
offer that?), an awk script or two, and my bank transactions are ledger
entries.

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quarterto
Interesting. My immediate question was "is this US-specific", but it seems
not: [http://www.manager.io/about](http://www.manager.io/about), section
"First-class support for every country".

~~~
cjg
That was exactly my first thought. Something else encouraging as far as
internationalisation is concerned is that the company is based in Australia
not the US so they are less likely to be blinkered to only their home market.

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arbuge
Looks interesting. My main concern with something like this is that my
accountant won't be able to work with the file it generates, or will charge me
more to do so. My accountant, like most others, speaks Quickbooks.

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jaboutboul
I use wave (www.waveapps.com) for this and its been absolutely fantastic.
absolutely fantastic. (yes it had to be said twice.

~~~
gregd
Except, Wave accounting is missing bank reconciliation...a really important
feature that your accountant will probably tell you, needs to be there.

~~~
davidandgoliath
Precisely why you should all be using Xero! :)

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brass9
A nice piece of work!

But I'm curious about a few architectural decisions. What made you to decide
to build each HTML page by hand?

Code like this[1] makes my eyes bleed... reminds me of the faux-OOP HTML
builder classes that used to be a fad among PHP programmers (or ISAPI & Delphi
web developers of old) a while ago.. No offence, but much of your
Manager.HttpHandlers.* codebase feels like messy, ugly PHP4 code ported to
C#...

What made you decide against template-based output rendering (Razor,
NVelocity, NHaml, .liquid to name a few)? With template-generated output, the
business logic layer could be decoupled from the UI. I had only a cursory
glance at your code (and thus could be wrong), but it seems manager.io's
DAL/BLL layer is intermingled within the GUI parts.

The protobuf DLL was named protobufnet.dll in the MSI. But the proper filename
should be _protobuf-net.dll_

I think user input validation and error handling could be made more robust.

Additionally, spawning 5 HTTP worker threads to serve a single user seems a
little overkill.

These are few of the issues I've noticed during the 5 minute tinkering with
your assemblies. But don't let this critique discourage you. The app looks
good - I guess end users won't care how it's built so long as it provides real
value...

PS: Thanks for the heads up about Eto forms! I'll give it a spin and see how
it fares against Xamarin's XWT.

[1]
[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/7003337](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/7003337)

------
elwell
Will check this out. Have been using Wave Accounting rather happily.

~~~
MistahKoala
I've been attempting to 'love' Wave for the past couple of days now and it
doesn't seem to be happening. I've done the homework on double-entry
bookkeeping and have tried to fit my brain into Wave's workflow.
Unfortunately, the total lack of documentation on how to get started with it
is making life very difficult.

I've downloaded OP's application and whilst it seems much more straight-
forward, I've come across a problem with transfers between accounts that makes
me feel that it isn't quite ready yet.

Looks like I might have to settle for GNUCash.

I can't believe how difficult it's been to find a solution for simple double-
entry accounting that's also self-contained (ie, I can create invoices and
attach receipts). Our side project doesn't make enough money to justify
spending on Quickbooks or a monthly site subscription, but I'm not convinced
that they would be the right answer, anyway.

~~~
anandpdoshi
Have you looked at ERPNext? It is Open Source -
[http://github.com/webnotes/erpnext](http://github.com/webnotes/erpnext)

Though it is an ERP, you can just use the accounting and sales modules and
hide the rest.

(I am a developer at erpnext)

------
free652
Sadly I got an exception right after trying to add a company:

System.FormatException: Guid should contain 32 digits with 4 dashes (xxxxxxxx-
xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx). at
System.Guid.GuidResult.SetFailure(ParseFailureKind failure, String
failureMessageID, Object failureMessageFormatArgument, String
failureArgumentName, Exception innerException) at
System.Guid.TryParseGuidWithNoStyle(String guidString, GuidResult& result) at
System.Guid.TryParseGuid(String g, GuidStyles flags, GuidResult& result) at
System.Guid..ctor(String g) at Manager.Objects.Get(String entityId) at
Manager.HttpHandlers.File.Upgrade.Get() at
HttpFramework.HttpModule.ProcessRequest(HttpRequest request) at
Manager.HttpModule.ProcessRequest(HttpRequest request)

~~~
free652
Looks like a comma - ',' cause an issue in the business name.

~~~
Pxtl
Little Bobby Tables strikes again.

------
mixmixmix
Just curious, but what is the app written in? Is it something like Adobe Air?

~~~
lubos
It's written in C#. I'm using cross-platform GUI framework
[http://github.com/picoe/Eto](http://github.com/picoe/Eto)

~~~
sandGorgon
Did you look at using something like Qt ? Or did you want something in C# ?

curious to understand your technology choice

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shuzchen
It appears to be a wrapper around a webservice that runs in process. So I
assume the webservice is something like .NET and so they stuck with C# for the
GUI bits.

~~~
sandGorgon
interesting - strange choice of architecture. Is there an advantage to
something like this ?

------
Felipe1976
Great app congrats!

I have a tech related question. It seems like you are running a web server
locally and using a web browser component to display the pages processed
locally.

Would you care to explain how everything is setup?

What webserver are you using?

Is it a QA app with a webview?

Thanks!

~~~
lubos
Regarding web-server, I'm just using HttpListener class in .NET Framework (or
Mono) which is ultra lightweight solution. As per web-browser, Manager doesn't
bundle it. I'm just using whatever is available on target operating system,
that is Internet Explorer on Windows, Firefox on Linux and Safari on Mac OSX.
Lots of credit goes to
[https://github.com/picoe/Eto](https://github.com/picoe/Eto) which allows easy
creation of these cross-platform apps.

------
gregd
When I try to email an invoice, I get an "Error", which isn't very helpful. I
can't find anywhere to setup the emailing functionality, so I assume that that
part isn't ready yet?

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krmmalik
This is brilliant. I'm referring to the execution, the landing page, design,
pricing model etc.

One question, can bank accounts be linked for realtime importing or is it
based on importing csv's only etc?

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cmalpeli
Very nice! Does this pull in transactions from your bank accounts
automatically? I'm using Xero right now (awesome BTW) and that is a killer
feature for me.

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rexreed
Any interest in making personal accounting software as well? On the Mac, there
are few good low-cost options if you want desktop software and not cloud-
based.

~~~
rfnslyr
What are some desktop based OSX accounting solutions? I run a small
consultancy (just myself) and need to track expenses, taxes, write offs.. etc.

~~~
mixmixmix
I'm actually planning to build a native OSX app. Would love to talk more about
your needs/pains. Shoot me an email if you get a chance. My email is in my
profile.

~~~
rfnslyr
Awesome! Will do. Heck we could even work on it together :)

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mcescalante
Seems like you could put the *.manager file into dropbox or another "sync
service" and put a symlink into the Users/... folder to point it to the
dropbox file, which would probably allow multiple users to all access the same
data. I feel like this would sort of be bypassing your cloud service

~~~
lubos
I don't mind but the problem is, if two people edit the file concurrently,
Dropbox won't merge them. It will just create a copy. Cloud Storage is
designed to merge changes no matter how many people work on file concurrently.

~~~
mcescalante
I hadn't tested and suspected something like that may happen. Just keep in
mind it's possible people could hack together their own working versions of a
multi-user sync.

~~~
lubos
No need to hack anything. I'm going to release server edition which will give
users multi-user access without putting data into cloud storage. That will
settle this matter.

~~~
mcescalante
I'll bet you you're going to make a lot of people happy with that :) (Not even
me, just know people like it!)

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deweller
What is the business model? Will they charge for upgrades? Or will they use
your data to send you targeted ads?

~~~
kiosan
They sell Cloud Storage for $5/month. Very interesting software.

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pbreit
If this works, it could be a new model for software. There's something about
accounting that seems more appropriate as desktop software. I like avoiding
the monthly fees and it's probably more comforting to the developer not to be
serving the app (I realize they are offering cloud storage).

------
maheart
This looks really good. I'm kind of concerned (wondering?) about the long-term
viability of this product:

1\. It's free (how does the company backing it plan to stay in business?).

2\. It's free (as in beer), so I/the community cannot take over in case the
product/company ever goes under.

Thanks for your work.

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nigekelly
This is really superb. It's quick and responsive. Looks good. Looks easy to
use. Will give a test drive over next few days as have to get my taxes done. I
see that many of the plugins are disabled so suspect that's the business
model.

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NKCSS
I like the creditcard form, where you ask your customers to send their
creditcard details + CVV to be sent via mail... is that secure?

[http://www.manager.io/invoice](http://www.manager.io/invoice)

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jonathanmarcus
Downloading now. Based on the screenshots, this looks pretty damn solid.

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elyase
It would be nice to be able to customize the text in the invoices (for example
to translate them to other languages) and be able to add your logo. Also full
screen on mac would be very welcome.

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joebo
Good work. The install process was very smooth. I like that it doesn't require
admin. Also a neat architecture. Looks like it's a .NET app running an in
process web server.

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mrjatx
You should work on integrating this into various niche apps, like WHMCS
(webhosting control panel), VOIP panels, basically any reseller panel you can
find. It'd take off.

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lukashed
Really looking great! If you could attach files to bills (i.e. a PDF scan) it
would fit all our needs perfectly! :)

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ikonos_de
What environment is used to create this app? Seems to be made of simple HTML-
sites, but what is used as a backend?

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ptr
Feels very polished, even as a Mac app. Well done. Lion full screen support
would be a nice feature to have.

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tommis
For those who have tried it out: what kind of options does it offer for taking
out/exporting your data?

~~~
lubos
I will implement export to any format that will be in demand. I have
configured UserVoice page, please check it out
[http://manager.uservoice.com/forums/202564-plugin-
ideas](http://manager.uservoice.com/forums/202564-plugin-ideas)

~~~
airtonix
Make sure you mention this on your website.

I'd also suggest you create a bitbucket account for issue submission since:

1\. You can enable access only to issue tickets 2\. you can keep your source
code private 3\. it's got a low barrier to entry (you don't actually need to
keep source code there, but git is awesome and so is bitbucket)

------
mbostleman
This is awesome. I have rental properties and I am so sick of Quickbooks. This
is everything Intuit is not.

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nickler
Cool stuff. Reminds me of www.waveaccounting.com, is it ad supported as well?

Looking forward to taking it for a test drive.

~~~
nickler
downloaded, can't get it to work. /sad

~~~
lubos
What's your operating system?

~~~
theperson
It wont work for me either. Win7. It says it's missing a .dll file when I try
using the installer.

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madao
Thanks for this, I am starting a small side business and this looks like a
nice solution for what I need.

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joshdance
I don't really download software much. If you had a web app I would probably
try it out.

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ckdarby
I thought this was open source ;_;

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thoughtpalette
Sent the link to a family member who still uses Quicken 2000. The invoicing
looks great!

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acount5437
This is wonderful. Where do you get your tax codes? Any plans for an API?

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dragthor
I might download and try to use for me own personal expenses and bills.

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blind4x
Is there something simmilar but solely online and with a good design?

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airtonix
love that you have GST and BAS statement generation. I sent you an email about
dpkg errors since I only use Linux (ubuntu 13.04 Gnome Shell 3.8)

------
chatman
GNUCash just rocks. And it is more trustworthy.

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stwr
I am definitely going to check this out :)

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holri
important clarification: it is free as in beer not as in speech.

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rfnslyr
I am so jealous of any product or startup with a perfect domain name. I'll
definitely use this.

