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, leaving us scrambling to migrate promptly. The experience was an eye-opener, teaching me a valuable lesson: regardless of any reassurances given after a product acquisition, it's best to start preparing an exit strategy as soon as possible.
> 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 business clients, yet I can't imagine a business forgoing real documentation for 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".
Discord (and other non-indexable chats like Slack) is where conversations go to die and be hidden forever. FOSS and other "open" projects should be using something like Zulip, or even anything else, that can actually be indexed by Google and other search engines.
I'm a part of a few Discords, and questions are repeated over and over again, forever. People who answer the questions, get tired of answering the same thing and eventually stops helping people. In contrast, using Stack Overflow or anything else, people can search Google for answers and actually find it.
~~~Well, besides the whole thing about my previous comment that everything you write in Discord stays in Discord and is basically not findable unless you're already a part of the Discord. While phpbb (or any public forum really) is by default readable by anyone, so searching for questions let you find answers without having to sign in and join the forum.~~~
(not arguing that discord should be used for these kinds of projects, just an aside)
to my knowledge, this is is only an optional moderation feature on some servers, not a global policy - you can still use discord without an email address if the server rules are loose enough
The last time I looked for quickbooks documentation, I just found some YouTube videos.
Support has been useless too.
As much as I don’t use discord at all, having a 50% chance of getting someone that understands internet banking to help troubleshoot internet banking would be compelling.
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.
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.
I see these as complimentary, knowledge base for search and self support. Email for well documented transactions or low priority questions. Slack/Discord to avoid making phone calls when looking for real people responses quickly. Phone for emergencies.
Seems like a brilliant way to choose your customers, actually. A great way to avoid Pareto rule type problems that suck away too much time. I could easily imagine that e.g. 200 "smart customers who need very little help" could be more profitable than 1000 who do, after a time v. money calculation.
Presumably this would follow the pattern other big open source projects take, where other companies (who are experts on the software) host and/or support the software for a cost.
This is like 90% of Enterprise IT work. Install some box, follow their directions, make sure the port is open on your firewall... call the vendor when it breaks. IT is so often just being the middle man.
Yet this is the middle man that brings in the business aspects, the context etc. Installing a product in a bank and at a soft ware vendor's can be dramatically different.
I think just having someone who acts as a gatherer of info, so Intuit aren't being sent junk tickets, means service is resumed much quicker. And that's worth paying for.
It can be a decent side business for an IT support contractor. Quickly you learn the biggest issues, and only really need to spend time on special scenarios.
Having interacted with Stripe's chat and email support, I have a similar feeling - their goal is to get me to go away instead of actually helping with my problem.
My first and only choice is their discord support, when that doesnt help I rather work around the problem than get stuck in their email limbo.
It's an open source project - their customers are going to be small businesses with small teams of technical people to maintain it. I don't think they're competing with QuickBooks at all. Why is Discord not a viable method of communication for these users?
I'm sure there's some subreddit or something where people appreciate knee-jerk defensive reactions to the entire idea of free/libre/open anything. There are people out there who actually hate public libraries…
Supposedly HN is for reasonable discussions of things.
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."
For better or worse OSS communities organize on Discord now, having an active server where the core contributors participate is the sign of a healthy project. Honestly looks better than a public Slack imho and it's where they'll get the most engagement from devs.
Discord is a serious thing now, I've seen enterprise products add support for Discord before Slack.
Gonna have to disagree with you. Most projects I interact act with are either on IRC or Matrix, or solely communicate through some type of git web instance.
Discord is actively hostile to users by randomly banning and/or phone-walling users, especially any browser or connection that cannot be fingerprinted well enough, and giving them no recourse at all, just saying "yep our automated system is working, bye". There's so many more awful things they do, just search this site to find lots more.
Hostile to users as you're describing it is just "dealing with spam at scale." I find it hard to fault a service for doing sucky things that every other large service eventually succumbs to out of necessity. I can't be on some high horse and demand this company somehow magically solve problems no one else has.
Anyone who figures out how to have pseudoanonymous identities that can't be endlessly minted to evade bans that doesn't involve aggressive fingerprinting will be the internet's favorite child overnight.
> For better or worse OSS communities organize on Discord now
OSS communities, yes. More and more FOSS communities are on Matrix, either using matrix.org or connecting their own instance to the network. FOSS projects using FOSS tools, and decentralized for that matter too.
Even this is no longer true - current free tier of Slack (as of a couple of months ago IIRC) is 90 days of retention, which for low-volume groups of users is even worse.
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.
And if you want to preach the virtues of FOSS of your product, you’d offer FOSS real-time communications as at least an option. Slap in IRC, an XMPP MUC, Matrix Space. You could bridge to (not from) Discord as a second-class option if it was deemed valuable, but shouldn’t be the primary host.
Wow, there's so much hate toward Intuit here. Makes me glad I stopped upgrading at QB2010.
Still using it regularly. No subscriptions, no cloud, no nasty surprises to contend with. I have custom code that automatically pulls exchange rates from public sources and injects into the appropriate UI fields. My accountant's still able to ingest the file for year-end. Will probably be on it for another decade.
This is the issue with subscriptions that could be regular old software: When the other side of the equation changes you can be in deep troubles. With regular old software you are in control when to make updates, how to vet them and how to move on when no updates are coming.
Ah...but things like payroll/tax integrations usually require periodic changes, so folks get stuck on the upgrade treadmill even if they're happy. I somehow ended up supporting half the quickbooks users in my town and I can assure folks that most of the quickbook hate out there has been earned. :/
This project looks interesting, especially as a non-cloud offering. As for support...well that's certainly something folks can provide if there's a need.
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].
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 now…
I had mentioned the problem and my workaround in their support forum. The only feedback I got was from other users stating they had the same problem. Maybe I'll make an out of the blue PR at some point but looking at PRs and Issues on GH it doesn't seem that there is a lot of crossborder discussion happening there either.
That said, I'm still going to be invoicing my clients via my selfhosted akaunting instance tonight. So maybe its not that bad after all.
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.
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.
When I was a contractor, I set up a Ltd company in the UK and had a really hard time working out which software could do my reports for me. I just wanted something that could easily make documents that would be accepted by HMRC.
The UK tax system is incredibly lenient in my experience. They're happy to help you out with any problems or mistakes you make. You just need documents filed on time in the correct format. But it was a nightmare working out which software could export the correct format for me, so I ended up just paying for Xero in the end.
£28/month for a small business, that's over £300 a year I could save if something open-source was well document and said on the website that it supported UK tax documents. But I didn't have the time to download every option, put in a bunch of fake data, and then inspect the report against the HMRC guidelines.
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?
A cursory Google search lead me to this[1], which seems to be what you're looking for, something similar probably exists for ledger/hledger.
Personally having dealt with crypto in beancount a few times I used a separate file which got updated periodically with a script, which worked well enough.
If you're interested I suggest reading the beancount cookbook[2] as it contain many examples.
You'd need to write a script yourself for this. The general ledger generally doesn't include enough information about all of your assets, expected end of useful life, serials, etc. It's pretty common for accounting software packages to track this stuff and calculate depreciation, but like you're guessing its a separate process.
I was an accountant in a former life, and this is a question that most companies end up solving with their accounting software. Last time I looked into ledger or hledger it didn't include this stuff (or I didn't notice that it did).
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.
I am really happy to see something like this. This is not a criticism of the project. Rather, I lament that more-and-more web-based projects document only a Docker-centered install process for self-hosting as opposed to the process of installing from source. This goes strongly against the spirit of self-hosting where you know what you're running and you see the steps and all the integrations that are needed, including any reliance on third-party services that may come back to bite you.
I feel like Docker-based installs are closer to binary, closed-source installs than they are to open-source, compile-or-build-from-source ones in how much they hide how the program works and limits where and how you can run the application. I'd love to hear points for against this, because I think this may also just be me yelling at a cloud like an old man now a days.
> This goes strongly against the spirit of self-hosting where you know what you're running and you see the steps and all the integrations that are needed, including any reliance on third-party services that may come back to bite you.
No it doesn't. Just read the Dockerfile, it's self documenting and contains all the build steps.
Most of the time a Dockerfile is a very useful living installation reference documentation, but it's not guaranteed. It's entirely possible to encounter a Dockerfile that's just copying in binaries built outside of Docker or was a published image capture of hand installed stuff that is just being referenced in downstream images.
> This goes strongly against the spirit of self-hosting where you know what you're running and you see the steps and all the integrations that are needed, including any reliance on third-party services that may come back to bite you.
Dockerized apps are typically just as transparent, so that's a bit of a non-argument IMO.
Their main advantages are portability, reproducibility, and security.
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.
"ADD file:e15c235506d8dd134e69d458a7c0afefef1522e9d0cfb28e3538760ddf032785" isn't much help in installing MySQL on a bare metal server.
It's also not something commonly done (I've never seen a project do it), but you can also just push around a very simple base image like a plain Debian image and then move around an image's runtime filesystem through `docker export` as .tar.gz which could have been crafted by someone who started an interactive shell session and just manually performed some install steps without recording what was being done. It's still technically a containerized system but it does obscure or omit a lot of the value proposition.
Not to mention accordingly to highly scientific calculations "damn near" every Dockerfile runs `apt-get update` as a first step, so the, you know, core valuation is questionable from the outset.
True, but bare metal systems also receive those updates on a regular basis, and containers need security updates too. Unless you're willing to throw it all out and use NixOS you're not going to solve that problem. And if you do, you're opting into far more work since you've just thrown out every standard package management solution and install or setup instructions you were previously relying on and you've just became a pain in the ass to your coworkers and ops teams who haven't drank that koolaid with you.
Personally, I've never once ran into an issue where updating Debian packages in a Docker image impacted my daily life. I'm sure there's some anecdotes and greater than zero potential for it but it just doesn't seem like a major issue anywhere. Docker and Dockerfiles are a practical and low-friction means of getting install steps documented and it's generally a step up over what is normally done. I'm not going to let perfect be the enemy of good and will gladly deal with a Dockerfile that updates its packages first over a markdown file that does nothing.
>Unless you're willing to throw it all out and use NixOS you're not going to solve that problem.
Well, I have been running NixOS systems for nearly a decade, and now have it deployed across 3 cpu archs in 3 continents. :) Tailscale also uses NixOS in prod, etc.
Not to mention, NixOS means: no docker hub/repo, all you need is a dumb blob store, no container signing, no complicated tooling for BOM or source provination, or tooling for version dep analysis. Much of the entire Golang/K8s devops-startup-chasing/adjacent ecosystem is obliviated by first-order Nix features. You don't have to think about container bloat, or container optimization, storage on nodes is cheaper; it's really hard to name an area that isn't strictly better other than "yes, you have to learn more than running an imperative bash script and capturing the tar filesystem". But, maybe there's good reasons for that. I've personally also sheparded probably half a dozen or more users into full-time contributors, so I know it's not impossible.
When Tvix hits with their NAR alternative, a number of other benefits are just going to start appearing for Nix users that try to adopt it. Much, much faster path downloads, significantly more on-disk de-duplication "for free", much better options for potential P2P replication, etc.
There is value in making things "more reproducible" even if you don't achieve "total reproducibility". Even just having a basic layer of extra isolation from the host system (even when updating everything at will without pinned versions) can be enough to motivate the tool's usage. There are varying degrees of reasonable pragmatism in different situations. Heck some people even decide not to use containers at all, and some of those even have well-motivated reasons for this choice!
(And will this stuff even still run on chips 10-20 years from now anyway? Is there maybe a practical limit to reproducibility?)
I think it goes against the spirit of FOSS, as docker is all but a proprietary Linux format, and definitely not POSIX(-ish) compliant.
As I prefer using OpenBSD for self-hosting (and I speculate that if more self-hosters learned OpenBSD, they likely would also prefer it), I am acutely aware of not only how Docker has gradually taken over nearly all new FOSS projects, but also how many people involved in FOSS projects generally assume GNU / Linux as a prerequisite to all FOSS projects.
There is a docker-compose file at the root of the repository, which gets you most of the way there. But the above link will undoubtably be more helpful.
As a non-accountant, I used GnuCash for a small consultig business (including hours tracking, invoicing, and AP), and now mostly really like it for personal finance. https://gnucash.org/
One thing GnuCash doesn't currently do, but this Bigcapital apparently does, is inventory management.
I use GnuCash for business too. My only complaint is that reports are still hard to customize. Instinctively that feels like something a web platform could do very well.
The other thing GnuCash doesn't do is be a multiuser web app. It's an executable, remember them? There is https://github.com/joshuabach/gnucash-web 0.1.0 but that is just an access to the register you might (or might not) set up on a server to access your database.
> The other thing GnuCash doesn't do is be a multiuser web app.
Businesses large enough to hire one full time accountant will struggle to use GnuCash, and management (i.e., the owner) isn't going to re-organize all business systems around using an executable. They are going to migrate to Quickbooks.
(Note, however, it doesn't require a "web app" as it could just be a locally hosted database, but GnuCash does not support this feature.)
I have always found this frustrating because Quickbooks ~2005 has pretty much every feature a business actually uses, so it is at least theoretical that a "feature complete" open source small business accounting software could be realized.
Most of the discussions I see in forums here and elsewhere seem to revolve around web-based or technology-based businesses, but the bulk of the Quickbooks small business customers aren't any of these, and I would consider them as the target customer.
(GunCash is great for independent contractors and personal finance, so I'm not knocking it.)
I was slightly interested by this. Moved from MYOB to Gnucash about 20 years ago, and am sometimes thinking there might be a better alternative. However a look at their FAQ (page not found), their documentation, and their discord channel, which is full of people complaining that the installer doesn't work, I don't think this is it, at least not yet.
And in fact, for it to be an option for me, there would have to be some sort of migration process, which doesn't seem to exist. Will put it on my "one to watch" list.
This is very interesting and couldn't have come at a better time for me as I am recently self-employed and I'm having to figure out bookkeeping for myself.
Quickbooks blows my mind in how poorly designed and overly complex it feels. I would only use it if my CPA requires it and even then it would still feel like pulling teeth.
The main thing for me is as a real estate investor, quickbooks doesn't seem designed for me. It feels designed for a large enterprise with accounts receivable and with multiple products. I don't have any of that. I just have some basic revenue and expenses that I need to track, track my mortgage remaining, and understand cash flow as well as profit and loss. I don't know if BigCapital handles this, but I'm just glad to see a new open-source alternative to quickbooks.
Would definitely help to have more information about the functionality other than 9 paragraphs on the front page. GL, chart of accounts, AR, AP, inventory, invoices, purchase orders, financial reporting (income statement/balance sheet/cash flow), etc etc. Preferably with screenshots and links to some walk-troughs.
Would definitely help to add comparison to other solutions (including OSS) out there. I used frontaccouting back in 2010s and was mostly satisfied with it (it is not free or open source but does have "community edition" which is). There's gnucash, plain text accounting, ERPNext, and probably dozens of others... How are you different/better?
People already mentioned discord support. I know people hate BBs these days and consider them old-fashioned, but they do provide one central point to see the latest announcements, questions sorted by area (installation vs accounting vs upgrade etc), links to articles and any other useful resources. Discord lacks all of this, and requires de-anonymization and can restrict your access to the platform on a whim. Non-starter for a lot of people.
Yep, trying out a self hosted erpnext. It’s quite smooth and reliable especially when you compare it with Odoo. The cost for their cloud options is also way more economic to Odoo. Want to try out their integration with woo commerce.
Many layers of the financial system for small and medium businesses are used to working with QB. It's a means of communication. You can hire people who know it. It integrates with every bank and every, well, everything you might need. You accountant --internal or external-- knows it and has a process to work with it. Etc.
While FOSS is great, it isn't always better. I think FOSS works well when you have a deeply committed, enthusiastic and dedicated community around a pain point or a need. There are great examples of this, GIMP, KiCAD, Krita and various 3D printer tools being examples of this.
Accounting software? I'll believe it when, one day, I walk into my CPA's office and he enthusiastically tells me how he is asking the firm's hundreds of customers to switch to a FOSS solution.
In case it was missed, that was sarcasm. I cannot possibly imagine an accounting firm with hundreds of clients both engaging in turning their entire practice upside-down and having their clients endure untold pain just to save a few hundred bucks on software that just happens to work just fine today and has for decades.
There is a tendency towards a knee-jerk response by people who have little broader industry experience, saying "I have to pay for that? It's so easy. Why can't it be open source and free?" Well, because this and this and this and also that little detail which turns out to be a massive deal. The Chinese have an old saying, you get what you pay for. Yes, why can't we have open core + accounting as a service, pay 2x, and have the rug pulled out at any time? Possibly the largest deterrent is the recent tendency of financial VC backed startups to play extremely fast and loose with house (investor) money...
Of course, there are lots of businesses who fit this description. This is nothing new. That does not mean that millions don't benefit from and are happy using Quickbooks.
Before the mob interprets what I am saying through their reality distortion field, I should note I am NOT hating on FOSS and defending closed-source software as general categories.
There is such a thing as useful industry-standard software on both sides of that divide. And it is perfectly OK to point this out. This doesn't have to be a war. This shouldn't be twisted into hatred or attacks on FOSS or even non-FOSS software. Nobody has the moral high ground. There is no such thing.
These are tools. Some are free and open, some are not. And that's perfectly OK. Sometimes a little critical thinking and reason is a good thing.
This is for 2020. Numbers for 2023 are likely larger.
Quickbooks offerings have a 75% dominance of the market. And, for a good reason. This is the standard I was talking about.
Again, nobody gives a shit about FOSS, only us nerds. In other words, those of us who likely live two or more standard deviations from the mean. Go ask your local dentist if she gives a shit about FOSS.
Everywhere else under the curve, people want to focus on their core business and get on with the job of making money, supporting their families, innovating and growing their business. Their accountant/CPA says "Use Quickbooks. It will make the process simpler". That's what they do. The cost is a rounding error for any non-trivial business. FOSS does not matter. What matters is solving a non-revenue-generating problem in a way that does not consume clock cycles and moving on to more important things.
> Which mob? Reality distortion? Nobody was accusing you of hating FOSS, why do you feel you need to defend yourself?
Saying anything even remotely in favor of paid closed-source software or hardware is considered "unholy" by a certain segment of the tech community. Online, they can be quite vocal and even aggressive. They generally lack what I call "real world sense of proportion and common sense" and behave as FOSS absolutists. At the extremes, it is a cult or a mob or a group of seriously misguided individuals who lack context.
I love FOSS and support it as much as possible. I hope to be able to have the time to contribute to some of it (KiCAD, I have you at the top of the list!) when I retire. However, very frequently in business you have to make decisions based on what gets the job done so you can focus on what you were there to do in the first place.
I have tons of examples of this. We have been licensing Solidworks almost since it came out. This amounts to tens of thousands of dollars per seat. Our SW Flow and Thermal simulation license probably cost tens of thousands of dollars per seat as well. And the same is the case for our SW CAM tools. I'd have to do the math, yet I would not be surprised to learn that the full suite of SW tools and SW cost us in the order of $75K to $100K to license and maintain over the years. And that was, and continues to be, the right decision. It's the right tool for the job. We get to focus on our core business of developing technology. We have immediate support and points of contact whenever we need something, anything. The software is good and always getting better. And it is a standard (much like Quickbooks is a standard).
We actually pay for a Fusion360 license, yet, we've had difficulties using it in some cases because some of the work we do falls under ITAR regulations and the whole cloud thing can be a serious non-starter for that world. In other words, while it is cheaper, it's a non-starter because it would introduce more problems than we would ever care to deal with.
Another example is paying for the Jetbrains tool suite. Excellent software. It works. We get to focus on other things that matter. Yeah, we also use VSCode where it makes sense. We pay for lots of other tools when it makes sense. Photoshop and the Adobe suite is another example of something that is still a standard.
In business, any second spent focusing on anything other than your core revenue-generating mission is a second wasted. While FOSS can be great when it works well, anyone with any experience has stories of problems that can burn time at a massive rate. There's a place for everything.
> There is no such thing as moral high ground?
Some feel that being a FOSS absolutist is a moral high ground. There is no such thing as a moral high ground purely based on whether software is free and/or open source or paid and/or closed source.
To state it in the simplest possible terms: You pick-up and use a screwdriver because it gets the job done. It matters not if that screwdriver was given to you for free along with full design files on how to make your own or you bought it at the store. What matters is that it let you tighten the screw and you move on.
> Many layers of the financial system for small and medium businesses are used to working with QB
This is more US-based, I'm working for a QB competitor in France and let me tell you that they are going to be crushed at very high speed either by us or another similar modern competitor. They are going to lose the whole market within 5 years and TV ads won't help them. They are moving way too slowly for the market.
I’m not familiar with the French market but Intuit is still on track to keep crushing it in the USA. Intuit spent $2.35B USD on R&D last year (across all products) and QBO revenue grew 33%.
Many startups in the space are building features, not products, and are at risk of QBO adding their feature the same way Stripe has been killing off fintechs with every new feature rollout.
There are many “let’s fix accounting” startups but the market itself moves slowly. It’s difficult to nudge users to switch accounting software and QBO has deeply entrenched network effects with accountants and integrations.
Another huge issue for QBO competitors is that there’s only so much you can do with the general ledger (GL) and closely associated functionality. The GL system is an end user of multiple different transaction sources/pipelines while most of the time those pipelines are outside of the GL software’s control. There isn’t enough there to strongly differentiate and pull users off QBO unless (maybe) you build a mega platform that handles all parts of the transaction lifecycles (something like what Brex is doing), and then you need to convince users to be all-in on all of the components to get the benefits.
I use freshbooks for my small business (timekeeping, expenses, invoicing) and I just received notice my annual subscription fee will be increased from $270/yr to $324/yr.
Not only have they not added any new features to justify this fee increase, but they have actually removed a few features that I depended on like multi-currency reports. I am actively looking for an alternative.
I’m in the same position as you. They keep removing features and raising the prices. Been with them for 6 years. Biggest concern is moving all of my monthly recurring revenue elsewhere since I’m auto billing stored CC information (stored with CC processor only).
Same here - mostly just need something for invoicing etc. and its just outrageously expensive.
I have been eyeing up https://www.waveapps.com/ as a free alternative (not open source though) but I have not seen it mentioned much in this thread so either its just less known or not very good.
We started migrating our data to Wave a couple years ago, then it was purchased by H&R Block so we cancelled, I haven't seen it mentioned much since the acquisition.
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.
also i dont see mention of an API. Being able to provide an API to one's own accounting system is a super-power (and probably very incremental to the work you're doing anyway)
I don't see how this is actually a use-case. How many people that need accounting software do it from the terminal? And on what earth is that a worthwhile business decision to spend time and money on this?
being able to maintain local backup/copies of your entire general ledger, even if u are using a cloud tool is generally the #1 blocker for any accounting team.
Instead of building a whole new format (with implications on testing, etc) - it would be incremental effort to build support for ledger-cli format . And completely mitigate 90% of the objections by accounting teams.
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 generator for their format, as a happy user, and without being affiliated with the project -- it's quite good!
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.
Well, I'm not going to tell you what's good and bad for your business, but for what it's worth Ledger supports all of those things. Whether it's right for your business or not is up to you and your customers, but you're selling Ledger short by describing it as "hobbyist accounting".
Tax quotas, reverse charge taxation, the various date types, notes, links are all totally supported with Ledger's primitives as they are. SKR04 just looks like a list of account classifications, which is totally fine. You can either make that 1:1 with the account list you use, or you can tag entries in a transaction with metadata indicating that it's associated with that SKR04 classification.
Again, not attacking your decision to use your own format, it's the right choice in many situations. But ledger is literally the primitives of accounting – it's up to you to superimpose your system of rules and regulations on it, but since it's just double-entry accounting with metadata and tags, it almost certainly can.
Here's an example transaction, where somebody pays $20.00 for 20 tons of scrap metal, with links to the invoice, an invoice and transaction date, a mark to indicate that it's settled, and a $8 VAT liability that accrues at the end of the month.
2021-01-01=2021-01-03 * ACME Supplier
; invoice_num: 123
; invoice_link: https://invoices.widgetsandthings.de?id=123
; service_date: 2021-01-02
; notes: John said he'll charge us more next year.
Liabilities:CreditCards:Chase:XXXX $-20.00
Liabilities:Taxes:VAT $-8.00 ;[=2021/01/31]
; reverse charge tax, accrues at end of month
[Quotas:Tax:VAT] $8.00 ;[=2021/01/31]
; you'd use a "virtual" account to express "quotas" or "budgets".
Expenses:ScrapMetal $28.00
; I'm bundling the VAT and metal expense into a single entry.
; But if you wanted to record them separately, with their own effective dates, you can.
Assets:ScrapMetal 10 tons ; skr_code: SM2201 (I'm making this up)
Receivables:ScrapMetal -10 tons
Nice, I appreciate that, thank you so much! As I said, ledger looks cool and I might play with it just for the fun of it. But as far as I can see it's file based, right?
We obviously keep our accounting data in databases and only support exporting to DATEV atm, hence the compatibility with that format. The point of our whole endeavour is to *not* do accounting. You process your documents and we use OCR and simple input from the user to create the correct journal entries. Your tax consultants and accountants work in the background to review everything and export that into their systems to continue working on that. That's necessary for all the publications and tax reports you need to do in Germany/Europe. You can think of us as a pre-accounting software. A nice input layer. It's more about the bigger picture. Think multiple companies, real estate. You get a real time overview of your finances. You get banking integration. You can collaborate, with your employees, your family, notaries, lawyers, tax people and accountants. So accounting is just a side-effect for the user. Having a real time overview of a more complex financial setup is the USP.
Having said that, I don't see a real value to support import/export of the ledger format for now. Our first persona we're targeting aren't people that do their accounting themselves.
Correcto, it's meant to live at-rest in plain text files. When you exec the `ledger` binary, you point it at a collection of ledger files, and it parses them into memory to perform whatever operations you request (report generation, etc.).
It's written in C++ and scales about as well as you'd imagine (i.e. mainly a function of memory constraints).
It sounds like exporting to DATEV is the right choice for your customers and region.
The benefit of a format like ledger is that it's universal and relatively trivial to write your own parser for. Most accounting software packages might not import ledger files natively, but there's probably a ledger -> $your_format converter out there – if not, it's generally trivial to write one. It's kind of like how "markdown" became a common language for latex-generated PDFs, HTML, and powerpoint slides thanks to Pandoc. Ledger doesn't quite have a pandoc-style tool yet, but `.ldg` files are basically the accounting equivalent of markdown or HTML.
I will defer if you are indeed building your own competing tool in this space which is better, but holding to the original point of my request - maybe it will be incremental to support your format if ledger-cli format is supported today. versus not supporting any disk format (or inventing a new one).
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.
Ok well this makes some sense -- the Gitea business model, where a pretty complex piece of s/w is developed open source primarily funded by one or more business deploying said s/w as a commercial SaaS.
But...while QB is a dumpster fire, it has incredibly deep and finicky functionality. Accountants know how to make magic "integrity override" journal entries in its data. It understands how to electronically file a W-2 report in all 50 states. And on and on.
I'd be surprised if any OSS solution ever has this richness of functionality, with the level of trust in its correctness required for money and taxes.
The SaaS vendor might be able to produce such a thing but it'll end up being the "enterprise upgrade" that isn't available OSS.
"It understands how to electronically file a W-2 report in all 50 states."
Filing a w-2 is payroll related not accounting related. While lots of accounting software does payroll it is not a requirement for accounting software to do so.
It never seems like any of these opensource accounting solutions have bank feeds? Why would anyone manually import bank info when an automatic feed exists.
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 making bank, or it's insanely expensive.
Banks don't give out access to this API easily. Unfortunately it's not some OAuth thing that a new upstart accounting software could easily hook into, therefore the banks gate keep feeds to major accounting providers and no doubt charge excessively for the privelage. We need regulation to open feeds to anyone willing to consume them, or a bank to add it as a feature but why would they when they can charge Xero and MYOB to access proprietary feeds
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.
Back in the day bank feeds were horrific to develop but these days I think there are aggregate feed services. Seems like you could just implement support for one of those?
Even Plaid regularly fails to sync and they still rely on screen scraping for many banks. It might get better though, with the CFBP open banking initiative.
I haven't used it, but the team (person?) that makes Buckets (https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com) makes SimpleFIN (https://www.simplefin.org), which seems like it exposes exactly what you want: simple transaction data from arbitrary banks.
Plaid offers transactions APIs (https://plaid.com/products/transactions/), but I guess to your point these APIs are geared towards fintech companies, not personal use.
EDIT: I don't know how well it works in general, though. You'd have to test it yourself.
I'm currently writing a library that implements SimpleFIN. While the main website hasn't been updated in a while (even the demo endpoints are out of date, and I've written to the maintainer last month about it[1]), the demo endpoint described on the Simplefin Bridge the docs still works[2] so hopefully there's still movement.
They probably don’t want to deal with individual subscribers but if enough open source users wanted feeds you’d create a niche for a SaaS that does nothing but provide bank feeds for a few bucks a month. That’s the kind of micro SaaS one person could run.
There are some things that are “natural SaaS” and interoperability with ugly services run by huge banks that are probably moving targets and probably have administrative overhead to use is one example.
This seems to be exactly what the creator of SimpleFIN is doing with their "SimpleFIN bridge". Pay a small price and you can use the simplefin API to access any banks that they've supported so far.
Fintable offers the service but it only interfaces with Airtable. You can easily download a csv from there, or use the Airtable API. It's not for those who don't want their data in the cloud, but I've found the service to be pretty good.
For people who use QuickBooks, what's the main barrier to a viable open-source competitor? Does QuickBooks offer a ton of necessary integrations or something?
QuickBooks desktop isn't really a supported platform anymore. Most people have migrated to QuickBooks Online and their accountant has a login to their account.
I had Wave...it was free. Accountant was OK w/ it then asked me to change to Quickbooks after 2 years. I understand Quickbooks has a lot of functionality that's great for CPAs, but none that I need. I'm the one who spends hours a week in it.
The only reason why I said yes is because of the many CPAs I've interviewed they were the best (they probably aren't the best, just a lot of them are terrible).
First - My accountant knows it (along with a few other), it directly imports into their other back-office intuit software that does my taxes.
Secondly - my bookkeepers are trained specifically in QB (same with most bookkeeping services), and if I replace the software, I need to find new bookkeeping, or do it myself (which if I wanted to be a bookkeeper, that's what I would have become).
Lastly - this wont apply to most and a lot of people will probably look down on me, but I really like their "QuickBooks Capital" short-term medium interest loans. It is easy to get a $50k 12 month loan at around 8%. It comes in handy when clients are slow at paying (happens way too often).
QuickBooks has a ton auf functions that no online competitor has. E.g. customize bill layout, many reporting sheets, tax submit, bank account sync, recurring invoices / bills, ...
I tried many years to find somehting that could replace Quickbooks in our company, cause it lacks on API access. But everything else is lightyears ahead of competitors solutions.
Bank, payroll, and tax integration on the lock in front. Also, QuickBooks is really easy to get going for non-accountants and historically at least, their support was really good. That's what really made them really popular.
beig able to quickly either upload a QBO file which would have all your transactions, or direct bank integration with Plaid...after that, being able to quickly create rules to categorize different transactions based on string comparisons and then finally generate the Profit and Loss statement which is what the CPA wants to see. I used to have a bookkeeper who would manually type in all the transactions into the Check Register, but the past few years you can do all this in a few hours by just importing the QBO files and changing the categories and generating the P&L.
Has anyone tried https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii? It seems to be under active development but it always makes me nervous when the vast majority of updates come from one person. (What happens to the project when that person isn’t working on it anymore?)
GNUCash (which I also use btw) is a local install without multi-user web management. If you're a single person working on the taxes then GNUCash may tick all boxes (although another comment mentioned the need for inventory management which GNUCash doesn't support).
It looks like this offers more of a web approach without the need for a local install so it can be a bit more collaborative.
Also - and this is personal preference - the GNUCash UI feels quite dated.
As an accountant I think of the single source of truth being a single table of double entry transactions (the ledger) but most ERPs actually have a maze of tables to support a sophisticated UI that's easier to use, and when you actually want a ledger then it's generated as a report.
It depends on how they classify them but in many systems sales is separate from the rest because you generate quotes and invoices and mark them as sold but reconcile that against the actual line items in your bank account separately. I.E. sales isn’t ( ecessairly) a subset of all transactions but entirely apart. In addition to sharing few fields and having more columns all to itself, it can just be semantically completely orthogonal to the journals.
But I say all this not having looked at this product and I don’t know if sales here works that way or not.
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.
It looks rather generic... rather than being customized to fit any specific country's regulatory system. From what I can tell, the author is not from the United States.
I'm in the early stages of starting a small home business and came across ERPNext which has what appears to be a pretty solid accounting section. Anyone else here used that?
