The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update [LWN.net]

The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update

Posted Jan 13, 2009 23:45 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
Parent article: The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update

Sometimes, when an obstacle seems impossible to overcome it's worth looking at it from a completely different angle.

Maybe the right angle to look at this from is the accountant's. Suppose you're an accountant. If I'm starting a new business I have no reason to choose you over another accountant. You both want me to use QuickBooks, which sucks. But suppose you can make it possible for me to use GnuCash. GnuCash sucks much less than Quicken, maybe not enough that I'd pay extra, but enough that I would hire you rather than the other accountant who requires QuickBooks.

In the US, what are the legal and practical restrictions on locality of your accountant? Would an accountant who took GnuCash files as "accounts" be able to work with companies anywhere in the state? More widely? Less widely? Because if we imagine one accountant is handling 50% of the small Free Software businesses in California, that's a lot of work == income. It seems like it would be worth going to some trouble to secure that work. And if QuickBooks sucks as much as I think it does, it wouldn't just be Free Software people who'd want to switch once they saw it worked.

Am I barking up entirely the wrong tree here ?

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The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update

Posted Jan 14, 2009 0:24 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Go back and read the article again, focusing on the section about the very specific, finicky legal requirements for government tax forms. Where the existing free software tools aren't able to comply with the law, something else needs to be used. Trying to bludgeon accountants into accepting the free formats would address the accountant interface problem (though why not support the data formats they are used to?), but it doesn't solve the tax-form problem.

Perhaps someone could persuade the FSF that investing in tools that would allow small businesses to go 100% free software would be a good idea. They tend to take the unglamorous bits when no one else will.

The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update

Posted Jan 14, 2009 2:09 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

it's not that free software tools aren't _able_ to comply with the law (at least in most cases)

it's that free software tools don't _try_ to comply with the law (again, in most cases), they don't break the laws, they just don't provide these features.

One solves the other

Posted Jan 15, 2009 3:37 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Whatever the accountants are using must have solved the tax form problem, so the remaining problem is solved once the accountant can import your data. The accountants, then, need to bludgeon their own software suppliers into accepting some sort of open format. It's conceivable that they do already, but we just don't know about it, and the accountants don't know either because they never asked.

One solves the other

Posted Jan 15, 2009 23:10 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Yes, the article is a little confusing in that it gives as one reason LWN can't use free accounting software that LWN wants a separate accountant to figure LWN's taxes. The article gives as another reason that LWN couldn't print tax forms with the free software. Seems to me, that's not an issue if LWN uses a separate accountant, so I don't know why the article brings it up.

I once tried to hire a professional tax accountant for a business, but he did business only with clients who used Quickbooks, and the business had a custom bookkeeping system that integrated with several other business systems.

I thought it was strange for him to limit his business (remember, we never got to discussing price), but he said there was a shortage of accountants (i.e. surplus of Quickbooks-based clients) in the world at that time, which made it impossible for an accountant to profitably do anything else.

I presume that shortage eventually resolved itself, which means it's conceivable that a few accountants in a place such as California could achieve an equivalent economy of scale working with free software clients.