Restarting the free accounting search

Back in 2012, we started a quest to find a free replacement for the QuickBooks Pro package that is used to handle accounting at LWN. As is the way of such things, that project got bogged down in the day-to-day struggle of keeping up with the LWN content treadmill, travel, and other obstacles that the world tends to throw into the path of those following grand (or not so grand) ambitions. The time has come, however, to restart this quest and, this time, the odds of a successful outcome seem reasonably good.

Accounting data is crucial to the proper operation of any but the most trivial of businesses. It provides metrics showing how well the business is operating, and a company's duties to report to governments cannot be performed without it. Accounting is often tightly tied to a company's day-to-day operations, such that a failure of the accounting system can bring the entire business down. Given that, one would think that businesses would demand open and free access to their own accounting data.

Proprietary systems like QuickBooks do not provide that access; instead, accounting data is stored in a mysterious, proprietary file format that is difficult to access — especially if one is uninterested in developing on Windows using a proprietary development kit. Locking up data in this way makes moving to a competing system hard, naturally, though a number of (proprietary) alternatives have found a way. It also makes it hard to get company data into the system in any sort of automated way. LWN operates with a set of scripts that convert data into the IIF format for importing, for example.

Recently, as has happened in many other settings, accounting has moved into the cloud; web-based accounting systems abound. These systems can be convenient if you're not trying to do anything that its developers haven't anticipated, and they often interface well with various other sources of financial data, such as banks, payroll services, credit-card processors, and more. But online accounting services take the proprietary-file problem and turn it up a notch, in that now even the file is inaccessible. Somehow, these services tend not to prioritize making it easy for customers to extract their own data, so moving away is even harder than it was before. Making backups can require the (paid) intervention of third-party providers.

There are a number of other interesting questions raised by online accounting services. If the company goes out of business or is forced off the net by a DDOS attack, the accounting data is inaccessible at best, and perhaps gone altogether. The temptation to find other uses for all that business data will be tempting, and not all of these companies are particularly good at resisting temptation. It also makes an attractive target for attackers, as does the widespread sharing of credentials needed to make the integration with other services work.

In other words, even when software-freedom issues are not considered, use of an online accounting system seems like an unacceptable risk for a business to take.

So what is an acceptable solution for a business that wants to maintain control over its own accounting processes and data? As was the case in 2012, there are a number of free-software accounting systems out there, none of which seem like a perfect drop-in replacement for a tool like QuickBooks. But, while no conclusion has been reached as of this writing, it seems like there should be some options that are good enough. So we are going to spend some time playing with these systems using years' worth of real accounting data; the results will appear back here.

In particular, we will be looking at the alternatives from these points of view:

• How hard is it to import existing data into the system and, importantly, how hard is it to get that data back out again?

• How well does the system carry out basic accounting functions, and how painful is it to use? It is fair to say that "painless accounting" is a contradiction in terms, but one should not have to set up a corporate account at a local dispensary (this is Colorado, after all) to be able to survive the process of putting together this month's numbers.

• Does the system support a company's governmental reporting requirements? We would prefer that our accountant not charge extra because doing our taxes gets more painful, for example. QuickBooks can generate forms like the 1099s that we must send to some of our authors; filling them in by hand would be an unpleasant regression.

• How easily can the accounting system be integrated with the rest of the LWN operation? The site itself generates a fair amount of financial data, for example, that must be imported and reconciled with data from other sources.

• Will the system be around for the foreseeable future? That comes down to how healthy its development community is. Accounting isn't an area that naturally calls to developers, so sustaining a project can be hard. Sustaining a business on an abandoned accounting system would also be hard.

Doubtless there will be other concerns that will arise as actual systems are put into operation.

The first step, though, will be focused on the challenge of extracting accounting data from QuickBooks — a challenge which, it turns out, can be overcome. The next article will describe that process while, it is hoped, also filling in some documentation that is desperately needed by a certain financial software project and including the release of the scripts that were written to get the job done.

Stay tuned for that exciting installment, and those that follow. Your editor shall endeavor to finish the job without getting distracted this time around. That should be doable: even writing about accounting is more enjoyable than, say, going anywhere near anything to do with grsecurity. At the end, with any luck at all, LWN will have managed to wean itself from the one piece of proprietary software that is part of its operations.

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