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Accounting systems: a rant and a questAccounting systems: a rant and a questPosted May 8, 2012 20:47 UTC (Tue) by cantsin_ (subscriber, #74889)Parent article: Accounting systems: a rant and a quest
I run a small business also. We pretty much settled on Quickbooks as the only viable accounting software, and it's such a pain, since it requires me to maintain a virtual Windows environment just to do our bookkeeping. (Windows isn't installed on any other box we have.)
I really, *really* would like to learn about open source small-business accounting tools out there too. Like the article alludes to, there's a lot of activity on the personal finance software side but seemingly little on the small-business front. I do have to say, though, I'm somewhat relieved that I'm not the only one with this problem...
And at the same time, I'm not really surprised with the dearth of good open source accounting solutions. Quickbooks is the 800lb gorilla -- I don't think any of our small-to-medium sized clients use anything else. It's "good enough" for virtually all cases, so Intuit has a huge moat around that particular business.
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Accounting systems: a rant and a quest Posted May 8, 2012 21:03 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Heh.
Russian accounting giant (1C Enterprise) has just entered the US market. So hopefully Quickbooks would get competition soon.
Accounting systems: a rant and a quest Posted May 9, 2012 8:48 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
One of the reasons that no small business accounting package exists is that, in general, small business owners do not have much time for coding, while the people that have the time and energy lack any knowledge of what those things are supposed to do.
So, one productive thing that you could do to help yourselves is write a good specification of what features an adequate and free Quickbooks competitor needs, and how they should work. Maybe someone will pick it up and convert it into working code.
Accounting systems: a rant and a quest Posted May 9, 2012 9:49 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]
Well, the other thing many of the proprietary systems give you is a machine readable version of the tax code. Depending on the type of business, this could easily justify the subscription costs.
Unfortunately, this data is fairly localised and there can be large penalties if the data is wrong. So it isn't clear that a community project could take over this role.
If the free accounting systems had a standard interface for this type of data, it could provide a business opportunity for companies who were willing to provide the data though.
Accounting systems: a rant and a quest Posted May 10, 2012 14:48 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Even if the details (tax code) is strongly local (both in space and time), a general engine open for extension via plugins should be possible. The explanation about how C1 works by Cyberax seems a good starting point.
Accounting systems: a rant and a quest Posted May 13, 2012 10:40 UTC (Sun) by ortalo (subscriber, #4654) [Link]
+1 for writing a documented specification on your case please.
Personnally, I've been using KMymoney for a while for family money and, well, it definitely proved very helpful.
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