
Ask HN: What simple finance tool for a small business? - illuminated
Can you recommend an online finance tool that would help me track the ins and outs of my (business) finances. I&#x27;m looking for something simple, I&#x27;m not incorporated in US so I do not need accounting or payroll or to charge people through that tool, but multi currency would be highly desirable (as I&#x27;m invoicing in both USD and EUR). Just to be aware of where I am financially.
Apart from ins and outs, a nice feature would be to be able to write down my invoices and be able to track paid ones by a simple checkbox or similar and, therefore, have an overview of the unpaid ones.<p>Everything I have found so far is either full of features I don&#x27;t need or way too simple (and made for personal finance).<p>Any idea, is something there that I have missed? Thanks!
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brudgers
My take is that such software needs to follow double entry principles and part
of that is that the system is based on human attention to detail to at least
some minimum degree. It also means that the software requires minimal domain
knowledge.

GnuCash might be an alternative:
[https://www.gnucash.org/](https://www.gnucash.org/)

Ledger is another: [http://www.ledger-cli.org/](http://www.ledger-cli.org/)

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illuminated
Thanks brudgers!

I know already of both these applications. I probably wasn't clear enough in
the original post - I'm looking for something online so all the partners would
have access to all the data and be able to manage it. Or, a desktop solution
with shared data...

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brudgers
I see. I think it might be helpful to distinguish between financial accounting
and managerial accounting.

Financial accounting is the primary role of a tool like GnuCash. It is focused
on accurately and precisely recording transactions in detail and creating
reports against external standards. There is an expectation that financial
accounting data and reports are subject to audit.

Managerial accounting is for the businesses' operational decision making
process. It will rely on financial accounting data for historical trends
within the business but can use arbitrary sources for projecting the future
course of the business.

From a financial accounting standpoint 'managing the data' is somewhere along
the path to 'cooking the books' because the expectation of standardization and
consistency. On the managerial accounting side, it's more a matter of slicing
and dicing the financial data and spicing it up with data from other sources.

What the partners need is 'read only' access to the financial data and the
historical method is via reports and this can be CSV fed into Excel or R or
whatever else meets the business needs. The important thing here are flexible
tools for _analysis_ relevant to the specific business at a specific moment in
time.

My advice is that any system designed around financial accounting is unlikely
to be very flexible for analytics because financial accounting has a rigid set
of abstractions. It's perhaps better to think in terms of a data pipeline and
running tools over the output of the financial accounting data.

