Online accounting? [LWN.net]

Online accounting?

Posted Jan 14, 2009 12:53 UTC (Wed) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640)
Parent article: The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update

Is there any reason why a desktop application is necessary? Seems like This would sound like a case for a online service. You are already taking data from one proprietary online service (network bank), setting everything it up to be sent to your business accountant's proprietary tools. Unlike, say CAD apps, the UI appears like something that can be easily represented as HTML (with perhaps some javascripting :P).

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Online accounting?

Posted Jan 14, 2009 13:24 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

I actually looked into online accounting offerings as a possible solution. QuickBooks has an online version, for example. There are, though, some problems with that approach:

The QuickBooks offering requires ActiveX and Internet Explorer, and it thus still Windows-only. Didn't seem like much of an improvement.
The integration problem remains: for whatever reason, I've had a really hard time finding volunteers to hand-enter thousands of subscription sales every year.
With online offerings you add the concern of putting all of your company's crucial financial records into somebody else's hands. You have to trust them to safeguard that data, to keep the servers running, etc.

The end result of all that is that online didn't seem like the way to go.