LWN: Comments on "Restarting the free accounting search"

Restarting the free accounting search

benreu — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 23:34:15 +0000

git pushed...

Uhm... just to clarify, I am not looking for more work. I have a lot of features I would like to implement that I would use, not counting all the features people have already told me I should add ;-)

I posted here because it seemed like this is a fairly recent conversation. I thought maybe some of these people would be interested in helping and/or collaborating. If you really want to help or influence the direction of PyGtk Posting, please contact me through email or start a new discussion here https://sourceforge.net/p/pygtk-posting/discussion/

I will not clutter LWN with random noise, therefore consider this my last post here.

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smurf — Sun, 10 Dec 2017 14:12:38 +0000

"pygtk-posting" has no provisions for split ledger entries (i.e. entries on more than two accounts).

This is one of the things Gnucash gets right. Check out their transaction/split data structure.

NB: you might want to "git push" the code …

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benreu — Sat, 09 Dec 2017 12:17:01 +0000

https://sourceforge.net/projects/pygtk-posting/

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smurf — Sat, 09 Dec 2017 08:49:31 +0000

You might consider publishing some way for prospective collaborators to reach you (github, email, …).

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benreu — Sat, 09 Dec 2017 03:37:25 +0000

Would you consider helping out with an accounting system written in Gtk, Python and PostgreSQL? I started it for my own benefit and would collaborate with other individuals. It has invoicing, purchase orders, and a time clock, but needs work and more ambition.

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fest3er — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 01:54:57 +0000

Doesn't QB use BDE (Borland Database Engine)? I know QB Point of Sale uses BDE. As I recall, BDE has an available ODBC interface. If so, accessing the data shouldn't be too onerous; I expect one could transfer the data from BDE to MariaDB or Postgres using perl.

Govt requirements

sdalley — Mon, 14 Aug 2017 09:36:48 +0000

Beautiful!

Govt requirements

Wol — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 22:15:52 +0000

I remember a story on the Pick mailing list - we were talking about accounting packages.

A guy said he'd been asked by the accountants to provide a utility that would permit modifying any field in the accounts. He was suspicious, but the accountant people pressed him so he obliged.

A while later, the fraud people came in, and when they discovered this little utility, the accountant bunch said "that programmer wrote it, blah blah blah" so the fraud guys knocked on his door.

Unknown to the accountants ... the programmer said "Oh, that utility? Here's a log of *every* time it's been used, the change made, and the user who made it". The fraud guys had a field day as they went through it :-) Talk about covering your backside :-)

(The accountants had been moving sales figures around so that things "looked good" - dunno why but something to do with moving things between quarters.)

Cheers,
Wol

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Wol — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 15:42:23 +0000

And don't think that Europe is any simpler. Okay, for small businesses in one jurisdiction it's not that bad, but as soon as you start sending employees overseas to other states, you get into things like are they taxed where they work or where they're paid, are they in home or host social security, etc etc.

Cheers,
Wol

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Wol — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 15:31:20 +0000

> Finances are not the only, or even the most, critical part of a company. That's like saying tires are the most critical part of a vehicle.

So why is it that pretty much ALL companies that suffer a serious failure in their accounting systems cease trading within the year ...

While a failure anywhere else usually only causes serious disruption for a couple of months.

Mind you, thinking about your tyre analogy, maybe tyres ARE the most critical part of the vehicle, after all, a motorway blowout can easily kill you instantly. Most other failures can be repaired.

Cheers,
Wol

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Cyberax — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 18:02:38 +0000

You're probably thinking about Amazon S3 outage: https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

It didn't result in any data loss, as far as I'm aware there have been no data-loss events with S3.

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oldtomas — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 09:10:56 +0000

Perhaps a recent hicup which illustrates this thread nicely:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/06/cisco_meraki_dat...

(Cisco, of all things).

The other recent one I remember was also a big name (perhaps the one with the A? Not sure). Interesting -- in both cases it was (at least officially) "human error", the equivalent of the classical "rm -Rf" at the wrong time/place.

I'm waiting for the first "automatic error" -- when all those Puppets, Dockers, Lambdas and Unikernels and things are managed by some deep-learned network. That will be... weird.

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karkhaz — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 14:34:15 +0000

The implication is that accounting is painful enough to justify using cannabis to alleviate the stress. A "dispensary" is a shop licensed to sell cannabis for recreational purposes; these shops do operate in Colorado and a few other states in the USA.

After reading that sentence, I glanced up to check whether LWN-Tux likes to enjoy a spliff with his morning paper. But he seems disappointingly sober.

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corbet — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 14:26:49 +0000

"That Colorado thing"

With regard to payroll processing: it's complex. Taxes to various governments, paperwork for various governments, withholdings for employee benefits, direct deposits, electronic filings, etc. Multiply that if you have employees in more than one US state. Payroll services are set up to deal with all of that; the services is cheap these days, to the point that it's just not worth even thinking about.

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pizza — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 14:24:43 +0000

Not too long ago, the state of Colorado legalized recreational (not just medicinal) use of marijuana, regulating sales to so-called dispensaries. Our Fine Editor was making a comment on how some aspects of recurring accounting work cause sufficient headaches as to require a steady supply of marijuana in order to make the pain tolerable, and the general practice where businesses typically set up corporate accounts when they need to make purchases from the same vendor on a regular basis.

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ortalo — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 13:58:09 +0000

Sorry to ask for a clarification, but I think I did not catch that "Colorado" thing. Could someone enlighten me? At the very least, flame me a little...

Another question more on topic, why accept that payroll processing be done as a service? Is it so different from accounting (software)?

NB: Personnally, I have been using KMyMoney since 2009 and I am pretty happy about it - though of course, personal finance managers may be far from having all the features you expect for a business.

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GoodMirek — Sun, 06 Aug 2017 18:32:01 +0000

I spent some time with LedgerSMB. Although it does not fulfill all the LWN requirements out of the box, it is extensible, open source, with active community.
I am looking forward to see future updates on this topic.

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emorrp1 — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 16:45:56 +0000

libwebkitgtk-1.0, which is in the process of being removed from all the major distributions (#790204 in debian), so GnuCash have (very very recently) migrated to gtk+3.

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timrichardson — Tue, 01 Aug 2017 07:39:04 +0000

Yes, ODOO is not too bad. GNU Cash works too. But payroll and bank feeds? Online payment integration? Perhaps one approach is to reconcile yourself with closed source cloud due to the convenience, but use the API to develop a robust backup in an acceptable format. Most of the time exporting the transaction journal would be sufficient. This is a more open solution than using QuickBooks, which locks you into a proprietary host system and a proprietary database with no API but possibly ODBC access. Xero has a good API, for example. It's not boring, certainly scope for some puns, which are always an asset to any topic. Thanks for writing about this, it does you credit.

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anselm — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 19:56:33 +0000

(BTW, I am familiar with how bad Legionniare's can get, having had a rather close encounter with it in my youth)

When I was a student at Edinburgh University in the late 1980s, Legionella bacteria were found in a water tank of the air-conditioning system that served the university's computing centre. This was during an early summer that by Scottish standards was quite warm, and running the computers without air conditioning was not an option. Hence the computing centre was duly shut down for at least a week – I don't quite remember the specifics – so the A/C units (all of them) could be thoroughly sanitised. While the operations staff tried to keep a rudimentary service running, this was a huge hassle as lots of people had exams and deadlines for papers or projects coming up and couldn't do the requisite work. For a company, it would probably have been even more of a problem.

So, Legionnaires' disease is not to be trifled with. I don't think anybody actually contracted it at the time, which was just as well.

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drag — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 19:46:45 +0000

Bad backups have caused many businesses to close their doors permanently. Some statistic I've read before says that something like 2/3rds of companies that suffer major data loss are out of business within six months.

Losing access to data or having data breach is a existential threat for almost all types of businesses. Much more serious then, say, being kicked out of a building.

If you depend on cloud providers too much and don't have a alternative way to retrieve and use your data then you are tying the fate of your business into the fate of your cloud providers. Their accidents can mean you are left dead in the water.

Even the best cloud provider has 'lost accounts'.. virtual machines go dead, customers are kicked out of their own accounts, etc. etc. Stuff happens. Their loss is your business. Your loss could be your business, as well. Your risk is much higher then theirs.

I don't have a problem with cloud services, but it really doesn't change much when it comes to dealing with backups and restores.

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farnz — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 19:12:30 +0000

But note that "an outage of this magnitude kills the business" is a reasonable plan, if an outage of that magnitude is expected to be a rare enough event. You could, after all, plan for "aliens obliterate the continent I'm currently on", but it's such an unlikely event that there's no point planning for it.

Similarly, a small business may reasonably plan on the basis that loss of a cloud service for more than (say) 5 days kills the business, and that they'll ensure that they're close enough to up-to-date to cope with a 5 day outage.

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pizza — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 19:01:42 +0000

You're splitting hairs here. What matters is that the cloud service remains available to you, not *why* it is suddenly unavailable.

It doesn't matter if the service outage is caused by incompetence by the provider, bankruptcy, hackers, puntive price increases, popular uprising, road work, solar flares, a rogue ISP in Pakistan pushing bad routes, or a gardener with a shovel. Regardless of the reason, the symptom is the same -- the service is not available, and if you need it to function as a business, you're sunk until it's available again.

One has to plan for outages.

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pizza — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 17:55:40 +0000

> You've done continuity "planning" but have you actually had to cope ?

We came close -- Last summer, a hurricane turned a few degrees to the north at the last moment and missed us entirely. Since then, the worst has been a power outage and an internet service outage, each completely shutting us down for about half a day. (Ironically, the same things that make us more resilient to major disasters makes us more vulnerable to the more run-of-the-mill stuff..)

But your point about being multi-site is well taken; our "continuity" plans only really work because we're so geographically dispersed. Fortunately, this particular site has never had to go into full disaster _recovery_ mode.

(BTW, I am familiar with how bad Legionniare's can get, having had a rather close encounter with it in my youth)

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farnz — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 17:49:41 +0000

And, coming back round to the topic of cloud services, "go bankrupt" is a perfectly good continuity plan for a sufficiently unlikely eventuality (it was my previous employer's continuity plan for "what happens if our site is hit by a nuclear explosion", for example). The question then becomes whether or not a failure of any given cloud service is sufficiently unlikely that "go bankrupt' is a reasonable continuity plan.

You also have to have a reasonable assessment of the likelihood of your outsourced service failing as compared to (e.g.) your in-house service being hit by a catastrophic failure. Accounting in the cloud makes business sense if the likelihood of your cloud service failing is much smaller than the likelihood of any in-house service suffering a terminal failure.

This does, BTW, currently tend towards preferring big centralised services; if (to choose a random example) Salesforce.com goes under, your creditors are much more likely to accept that this is an exceptional event worthy of offering special terms than if your office server explodes in a shower of sparks and cannot be replaced in a reasonable time period. Not least because there's a decent chance that your creditor can't tell what you owe them until they recover from the shock, too.

As a non-business example, my continuity plan for "home hit by a hurricane" is "panic!".

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felixfix — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 17:39:38 +0000

Let me rephrase that. How many companies have gone bankrupt from connectivity problems caused specifically by cloud failures, cloud lockout, cloud price increases, and other cloud-only failures, as opposed to electrical failures, ISP failures, cables cut by anchors or backhoes, hurricanes, floods, and other non-cloud issues?

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felixfix — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 17:34:42 +0000

And how many companies have gone bankrupt from connectivity problems?

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pizza — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 17:33:09 +0000

> Worrying about cloud failures is pointless in comparison. The real world doesn't seem to have many cloud problems.

The real world, however, has many _connectivity_ problems.

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felixfix — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 16:09:34 +0000

This was my point, however clumsily expressed. How many companies have gone out of business from cloud failures? I don't recall hearing of any. But companies go out of business from fires, floods, all sorts of natural disasters, vendor bankruptcies, landlord fiascos, embezzlers, thieves, accidents, and other causes all the time. Every once in a while I read of some company bankrupted by a former employee who destroyed their systems and put them offline long enough to destroy their business.

Worrying about cloud failures is pointless in comparison. The real world doesn't seem to have many cloud problems.

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tialaramex — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 16:02:28 +0000

You've done continuity "planning" but have you actually had to cope ?

Legionnaire's looks at first glance much less devastating than, say, a big fire, but in both cases and many others the only way your business will actually have any real continuity is if it's inherently multi-site. That means in _practice_ not in theory there are several distinct physical locations from which all core elements of the business operate.

Most businesses are far too small for that, so in _practice_ their continuity plan for a lot of eventualities is "Go bankrupt". My favourite burrito place in London was flooded out, went bankrupt shortly after re-opening. It doesn't matter that they didn't cause the flood, or that they worked their backsides off to re-open as quickly as possible, the damage was fatal to the business.

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smurf — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 15:48:09 +0000

The problem with "accounting provider in the cloud" is that, more likely than not, you are unable to either get at your data, or do anything with them if you happen to be able to download the records. If you can't generate new payroll and invoices *now*, your data dump is useless.

In contrast, if you store your database in the cloud you can trivially do a SQL dump and be back online with your own SQL server. Or move to some other AWS-compatible hoster.

In contrast², if you run the accounting system on your own hardware you can at least limp along, and you have time to look for another solution or a migration path, if/when your software provider goes belly-up.

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mfuzzey — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 14:28:34 +0000

It's not *just* about accounting service providers (though that was the original topic) but cloud services in general (non accounting services like SalesForce/Slack/Github have been mentionned).

The difference between cloud services and most of the physical services (buildings / hotels / internet connectivity etc) is that the physical services are generally commodity and it is at least *possible* (which doesn't necessarily mean easy nor cheap, especially in a rush) to find a substitute.

When the data in the cloud is *your* data (be it accounts, code or whatever), it is, by definition, unique to you and hence irreplaceable.

Now, of course, you can also loose all your data on your own servers if you don't have proper backups etc in place but that is at least your own fault.

Many people assume that the cloud means the cloud provider handles all that.
While they will (one would hope at least!) transparently handle disk crashes etc while you have a contract with them, they may not provide a way for you to get your data out (conveniently or at all) if you decide to leave them or they cease to exist.

Maybe you can, in some circumstances, sue a cloud provider who looses your data - but that won't get it back if it's really lost (provider goes broke, auctions off all the servers and the disks are erased...)

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pizza — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 14:24:58 +0000

I just went through a round of "business continuity" planning with my employer. They take this stuff very seriously, and I can categorically state that they consider legionnaire's disease a complete non-issue.

Yes, absolutely anything can go wrong at any time. That's why you make contingency plans, prioritized based on their likelihood. That's why, living in a place prone to hurricanes, I have a week's worth of supplies stashed in two different counties, generators (and fuel), and even portable A/C units. Along with plywood, tarps, and a decent chainsaw. And nobody is ever surprised by a hurricane!

The only way I can mitigate against a failure of an external service is to bring it in-house. For some things (eg accounting, short-term power loss) that's practical. For others, it's not.

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felixfix — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 13:50:06 +0000

Every company has a zillion weak points. Singling out cloud accounting data requires wearing blinders.

Saying there is legal recourse implies legal recourse is speedy. That's a laugh!

Saying conventions are known a year in advance ignores all sorts of complications which can happen and have happened. Fires, Legionnaire's Disease, bureaucratic snafus, anything can disrupt plans. Conventions may prove to be more popular than expected. The President may schedule a campaign speech or international political event and disrupt business as usual.

How many big name companies have forgotten to renew their domain names?

You rent five floors in a skyscraper. Where are you going to put those portable A/C units, which require sealed rooms and outside air? Where are you even going to get those portable A/C units when everyone else in the building also wants them? Maybe it will only take a few days -- how long can you afford to be shut down?

Who cares if your finances are being held hostage if your ISP gets knocked out by a hurricane? What if yoru internet connection is clobbered by a ship dragging anchor?

Finances are not the only, or even the most, critical part of a company. That's like saying tires are the most critical part of a vehicle.

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pizza — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 13:35:52 +0000

The key difference between "your cloud provider" going away and everything else you described is that none of the latter will result in your finances being held hostage.

If your landlord screws you over, you have volumes of laws and regulations to keep you able to at least negotiate while looking for other alternatives. The same for eminent domain seizure, which doesn't just happen overnight. If your roof A/C dies, you bring in portable units to keep your essential equipment cool for as long as it takes.

As for hotels, there are many out there, and conventions are known out a year ahead of time, making it trivial to plan around such things. Ditto for a service center; that's a true commodity.

But your accounting platform is _not_ something trivial to migrate, especially at the last second. That going away will literally put you out of business.

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felixfix — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 13:07:26 +0000

Worries about a vendor going out of business or raising their prices or changing anything should not be restricted to cloud services. What if the landlord goes bankrupt or doubles the rent or just plain doesn't want to renew the lease? What if the city executes eminent domain and throws you to the curb? What if the data center runs out of space or has a power failure or someone else's rack fries itself and takes out your rack? What if the garage that services your vehicles relocates or goes out of business? What if the hotel you have a deal with gets a better deal from a larger company, or a convention hits town and books all the rooms just when you need them? What if the roof air condition dies and it will require city permites to get a permit for the crane and several weeks for the parts?

There is nothing special about cloud vendors.

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mfuzzey — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 09:45:04 +0000

While it's very likely true that serious cloud service providers are probably better able to do a better job at security than most of the user companies it still seems dangerous from a business perspective.

Given the difficulty of getting your (often mission critical for many types of service) data out, what happens if the service provider goes out of business or decides to multiply their prices by 10?

Plain git repos are easy to move but bug trackers, documentation services, accounting services etc much less so.

There are also a lot of online diagramming tools being used which may become inaccessible (or at least become uneditible) if the providers disappear.

For short lived use cases the tradeoffs may be worthwhile as the risk is limited in the short term. But for stuff that needs to be available and modifiable in 10+ years I'm not so sure...

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gfa — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 03:25:21 +0000

> even writing about accounting is more enjoyable than, say, going anywhere near anything to do with grsecurity.

I wonder if 2017 will be the year of the grsecurity flame, it is time for systemd to move out of the spot and let others to be flamed.
LOL

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tonyblackwell — Sun, 30 Jul 2017 20:27:46 +0000

Duh, should have re-read the terms of the article before posting! If future parts can follow the suggested terms, we will all be well-served.

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tonyblackwell — Sun, 30 Jul 2017 20:21:27 +0000

... and perhaps while you are at it, encompass open-source tools to extract data from QB into the selected replacement.