[HN Gopher] The end of the accounting search
___________________________________________________________________
The end of the accounting search
Author : belter
Score : 284 points
Date : 2023-05-21 14:26 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Serious question - why are people stuck on QB when there are
| seriouly decent alternatives put there, like xero?
|
| My minimum price to go back to QB online would probably be $150k,
| maybe even more. Here is why: - constant down time - constant
| errors - clueless offshore support - inflexible reporting -
| constant UI changes for no reason
|
| Switched to Xero, havent looked back.
|
| QB Desktop was quite good but working offline is impossible these
| days for any tech startup.
| coolestguy wrote:
| >why are people stuck on QB when there are seriouly decent
| alternatives put there, like xero?
|
| When you're an business owners employee you don't have time or
| authority to change accounting software because you're
| overworked & thought of as a cost centre.
|
| When you're a business' owner you do whatever your accountant
| says which is usually a legacy software because a lot of tax
| preparers & accountants aren't actually in the trenches anymore
| and don't know about the granular bookkeeping part of
| accounting and how much better software has gotten in the last
| decade.
|
| When you're an tax preparers employee you don't get to talk to
| the client.
|
| When you're the tax preparer director/owner you don't use
| software anymore.
|
| Source: accounting startup who has doubled revenue 2 years in a
| row thanks to all of the above
| Dwolb wrote:
| Industry momentum.
|
| If you're not an accountant, and want someone to take it over
| for your business, they usually start you on QB.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| More personal finance so only tangentially related but I thought
| Microsoft Money was as great program years and years ago.
|
| I wonder why MS killed it.
|
| Every now and again I look around for something similar.
| zdw wrote:
| I'm somewhat surprised that GNUCash was picked over Ledger or
| another of the plaintext systems out there:
|
| https://plaintextaccounting.org
|
| Maybe this was primarily done based on the users being
| comfortable with a GUI driven system?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I used Ledger to manage the accounting for a small nonprofit.
| It worked for me, but I was the Treasurer and the only person
| managing the books. Multiuser would have required git or
| something similar to handle the updates and possible conflicts.
| That's all stuff I'm comfortable with as a developer but a
| complete non-starter for anyone else. These issues would
| quickly make text-file accounting infeasible for larger
| organizations.
|
| When I moved out of that role, the next Treasurer wanted to use
| Quickbooks so I had to help import the data. That's another
| problem with using obscure software -- it's more difficult to
| hand it off to someone else who only knows the mainstream
| systems.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| _At the other end, there are a number of accounting systems
| that are based on plain-text files and an associated set of
| programs. These systems are much easier to work with [than the
| non-GnuCash GUI tools evaluated] and are adaptable to most
| needs. Such a system could have been made to work for LWN, but
| they tend to lack some useful features. Check writing and
| report generation, for example, tend not to be well supported.
| The user interface for many operations is a text editor; this
| is often seen as an advantage, but it becomes less so as the
| number of transactions grows. There are advantages to a
| graphical interface designed for the job at hand._
| seltzered_ wrote:
| > Maybe this was primarily done based on the users being
| comfortable with a GUI driven system?
|
| FWIW I started prototyping a plaintext accounting 'app' that
| combines a popular plaintext accounting system (beancount) with
| the most used web frontend for it (fava) - it's called
| beancolage and makes use of eclipse theia (vscode-like
| experience): https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage
|
| My observation is the plaintext accounting ecosystem is
| wonderful but a bit diffuse to so many specific usecases held
| by a more technical userbase. My aim for prototyping beancolage
| was to ask how things could look if there was a more common
| 'download and try' experience accessible to more people for
| basic workflows. Also have a talk on the motivations here:
| https://youtu.be/mxgoFqmSCFc
| seltzered_ wrote:
| FYI, I recently updated scripts and documentation for migrating
| from QuickBooks to GNUCash : https://github.com/erikmack/qb-
| escape
|
| Would love if someone tried to package it into a standalone
| migration tool, so non-technical folks could make use of it!
| corbet wrote:
| Please consider sending patches back if you think they would be
| of wider interest.
| clircle wrote:
| I loved GnuCash until my database was corrupted and i had no idea
| how to get it back into working order. I stopped tracking my
| finances closely after that
| ericbarrett wrote:
| GnuCash keeps a year of backups (e.g. old saves) by default.
| It's probably still there.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| > Getting our QuickBooks data into GnuCash took a bit of
| scripting using the capable (if poorly documented) Python
| bindings. Another set of scripts has since been written to import
| data from the site and from our bank account. GnuCash has a
| reasonably capable import mechanism for the data formats exported
| by banks, complete with a Bayesian system to assign transactions
| to accounts, but a bit of scripting makes the process quicker
| yet.
|
| I assume the person who posted this to HN is not the article's
| author, but if the author happens to be reading, it would be very
| helpful to see these scripts. The difficulty of writing custom
| scripts for GnuCash data is one of its main limitations IMO.
| ralphc wrote:
| My CPA wife sets up and recommends Quickbooks Desktop installed
| on Right Networks, a Windows Remote Desktop shop where Quickbooks
| and Excel is installed. The convenience of remote work without
| the awful Quickbooks Online. It handles backups and you do file
| transfers and local printing. It doesn't stop the Quickbooks
| subscription pricing but you get to use Quickbooks Desktop.
| mwexler wrote:
| Not open source but free with many features,
| https://www.waveapps.com/ can fit the bill for many small
| businesses.
|
| However, it may not scale the way QB does, and folks you bring on
| won't have had experience with it's way of doing things.
|
| That being said, with QB's changes, chances are that's true of QB
| folks as well (ha, ha).
| tr33house wrote:
| I've used waveapps for my consulting business and it works
| great
| Wronnay wrote:
| I use beancount for my personal finances and Odoo as well as
| ERPnext for my company.
|
| ERPnext is my favourite while Odoo currently supports the
| taxation in my country (Germany) a bit better...
| FredPret wrote:
| Any tips for getting ERPNext up and running? I just spent a
| weekend of yak-shaving, and I get to the point where nginx is
| routing my requests to the "bench start" process, but refuses
| to serve a page.
| commoner wrote:
| Frappe Cloud is by far the easiest way to run an ERPNext
| instance if you're okay with shared hosting. It's a Frappe
| framework-based app hosting service from the developers of
| ERPNext and it supports data file imports from other
| instances of ERPNext:
|
| - Frappe Cloud: https://frappecloud.com
|
| In addition to the Frappe Bench setup process, Frappe
| provides instructions for self-hosting ERPNext with Docker
| and Kubernetes:
|
| - Docker: https://github.com/frappe/frappe_docker
|
| - Kubernetes: https://helm.erpnext.com
|
| There's also a third-party Docker image from pipech that's
| easier to setup, but it's not always up to date:
|
| - Third-party Docker (pipech):
| https://hub.docker.com/r/pipech/erpnext-docker-debian
|
| Bitnami packages ERPNext in single-tier (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
| and virtual machine (local computer) offerings:
|
| - Bitnami: https://bitnami.com/stack/erpnext
|
| To anyone reading this, if you only need software for
| accounting and not an entire enterprise resource planning
| (ERP) suite, do yourself a favor and follow the advice in TFA
| to use GnuCash.
| Wronnay wrote:
| I currently just use a Cloud offering, but I also have
| setting it up on my own server on my ToDo list
| FredPret wrote:
| May you have more luck than me! If you figure it out, I'd
| love to read about it. The official documentation... leaves
| something to be desired.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| I am strongly considering a switch to GnuCash, but not for the
| reasons in TFA.
|
| >Crashes were frequent; QuickBooks users know to make backups
| every few minutes to avoid losing work.[...] More recently,
| Intuit has discontinued support for the desktop version entirely
| in an effort to force all users to its online, paid-by-the-month
| service.
|
| Both of these statements are not true, based on both my
| professional and personal use of Quickbooks desktop for over 15
| years. QB uses transaction logging[0] so that transactions are
| not lost, even after for example a power outage. And the desktop
| versions are still available, but no longer with a perpetual one-
| time license, but rather $800 annual subscription for the
| Accountant's version. (This is a doubling in price over just the
| last few years).
|
| So, I will be able to use my 2022 desktop version into the future
| at no extra cost, however some of the internet-based services
| (receiving payments, for example) will no longer be supported
| after 3 years.
|
| I have installed and started to migrate to GnuCash because I am
| not going to pay $800/yr to Intuit, especially when less and less
| of my use is for professional purposes.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_log
| jasonjayr wrote:
| QB Enterprise uses Sybase internally, which is a sound choice,
| except they also do some kind of crazy file-locking over a SMB
| share, which can sometimes go wrong and cause issues. They
| scramble the login/password (and there are tools to do this
| computation so you can try to connect to the DB directly, but
| the schema is convoluted, and clearly decended from their old
| Dos/Win 3.1 roots), and then connect over the network to
| Sybase.
|
| Network clients crashing can cause issues that are difficult to
| unwind. It should not be possible to get the database into a
| state where backups + verification fail if it was enforcing
| referential integrity, but that seems to be common.
|
| The official tools to get yourself out of a pickle from Intuit
| are guesses at best. There is a cottage industry of people who
| will (for a great fee depending on how urgent it is), attempt
| to recover/correct the database for you, because they have
| experience peeking behind the curtain and building additional
| tools on the XML API.
|
| Good luck if you are using EDI or other electronic document
| exchange with other customers, and you transmit sales order
| numbers for a few hundred orders in the morning, and then
| things go pear shaped and QB refuses to cooperate and open the
| file in the afternoon. Going back to last night's backup means
| carefully/manually re-ordering 4 hrs of work to make sure that
| everything lines up, so you're probably in for a late day.
|
| Intuit "officially" supports a linux based server for QBE, but
| the community seems to thumb it's nose up at it, and offers no
| support for this configuration.
|
| QB, for many years was a very good price for the SMB market.
| There was a _LOT_ of pricing headroom to the next best
| accounting package. Someone @ intuit has figured that out over
| the last 10 years and they are ratcheting up the price till
| customers fall out -- figuring it 's finally worth it to drop
| QB for another solution.
|
| I'm aware of a migration from QB Enterprise to QB Online, that
| after signing up and paying, Intuit basically aborted the
| process. "Sorry, we don't support doing multiple tax rates for
| employees in multiple states in the QB Online version, here's
| your money back". Maybe they fix that eventually, but that's
| where it stood last year.
|
| QB is a frustrating product, for the inertia it currently has.
| wrycoder wrote:
| QB Online works pretty well, I've used it for many years.
|
| Intuit has an obvious disrespect for their customers - some
| important bugs have gone unfixed for years amid continual
| complaints, while the newbie support people suggest they be
| reported to Intuit!
|
| I handle the accounting for a small non-profit. We need the
| ability to categorize our revenue and expense, which now
| requires the full QBO.
|
| At $850 / year, the cost is out of line with our $30K / year
| revenue. But, I'm rather stuck because the organization needs
| to be able to transfer the work to another accountant if
| something happens to me, and GnuCash, ledger, hledger, etc.
| aren't well known. Also, we need the ability to accept payments
| from PayPal and Stripe without a lot of manual entry.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| This article has some real problems. Here is one.
|
| > Such systems are unwieldy to work with and difficult to get
| started with. In truth, many of them appear to have been
| developed as platforms for consulting businesses, though surely
| nobody would deliberately make their software complex and tricky
| just to motivate clients to purchase their services.
|
| Or perhaps some businesses have complications to deal with that
| go beyond what a newsletter website needs? Some businesses have
| inventory, subsidiaries, multiple currencies, have to report
| sales tax in multiple countries with ever changing requirements
| (hence the support and updates that this writer doesn't think are
| required). Some companies have local statutory books that are
| different than their group books.
|
| Really it is a bit like learning 'echo "hello"' and calling
| oneself a programmer. Then maybe one might ask why are lwn making
| Linux so complicated...
| Nevermark wrote:
| > Or perhaps some businesses have complications to deal with
| that go beyond what a newsletter website needs?
|
| So ... perhaps there should be a version of Quickbooks that
| serves the simpler needs of smaller customers better?
|
| Like: Simple. Desktop. Requires no upgrades as long as its
| functionality at-time-of-purchase continues to serve well. No
| forcing of upgrades via dropping of old formats, etc.
|
| I also have given up on Quickbooks.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Imagine you were relying on Quickbooks, and a major taxation
| change, like the European VAT OneStopShop came out. How would
| you deal with that without updates? What about the UKs Making
| Tax Digital, that would be tricky too.
|
| That wasn't the point I was discussing, but there is an
| answer anyway.
| harperlee wrote:
| > Scheme looks like Lisp but isn't really Lisp
|
| Well that's a surprising statement, i've heard it touted as more
| lispy than common lisp.
| nerdponx wrote:
| A lot of people use the name "Lisp" to mean specifically
| "Common Lisp".
| jbotz wrote:
| Scheme is definitely _a_ Lisp. One of its primary innovations
| over previous dialects of Lisp was lexical scoping, and most
| later Lisps adopted that, including Common Lisp.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Scheme looks like Lisp but isn't really Lisp
|
| The Lisp world is extremely confusing.
|
| I'd wager that at this time, most people in that space can't
| even agree on what "being a LISP" means.
| mtreis86 wrote:
| Haven't agreed in half a century, won't agree now, never
| will.
| cratermoon wrote:
| This is good for GnuCash. It could bring enough visibility and
| interest to bring in more skilled developers to contribute a
| little work into adding or polishing some of the features the
| article mentions are lacking.
| dboreham wrote:
| Because someone is going to pay them?
| cratermoon wrote:
| Because LWN adopted it, raising visibility and interest. I
| edited my comment to make it sound less like I was saying
| GnuCash is buggy.
| axiomdata316 wrote:
| I'm a QuickBooks ProAdvisor and have been one for over 20 years
| and the last few years has convinced me that Intuit is determined
| to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by:
|
| 1) Forcing all their customers to migrate to the online version
| of their program. Many of the clients I've spoken to were happy
| with and preferred the Desktop version. The Desktop version is
| faster and can do more than the online version.
|
| 2) Throwing major updates at the online version that hides or
| moves functionality. I work with multiple clients and based on
| the client their version of QuickBooks can be very different from
| another's. Even the same client that has multiple businesses and
| has to use multiple subscriptions could have a different look. I
| don't know what drives this at Intuit but it's confusing for me
| and I'm supposed to be the expert.
|
| 3) Relentlessly raise prices. Intuit has been annually raising
| their prices in what appears to be an attempt to eventually price
| everyone out of their product. Some clients have to pay 200.00 a
| month for the advanced version for one feature they need to have
| for their business! The attitude from Intuit feels like "So where
| else are you going to go?"
|
| For most of my adult life I've worked as an accountant that works
| mainly with QuickBooks but I'm worried that I'm going to have to
| try to find a new way of supporting myself because Intuit appears
| to be demonstrating by their recent decisions that they don't
| need to show loyalty to customers or even keep customers. If they
| can have a few stay on to pay ridiculous subscription fees that's
| all they need.
| bombcar wrote:
| The thing that pisses off the accounting people where I work is
| how often everything changes.
|
| They're one step from just using excel because it won't change
| on them.
| jonah-archive wrote:
| A favorite HN comment of mine from a few years back
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21590482):
|
| > Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most
| professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you
| gave a professional artist a new pencil that had to be
| gripped differently for no reason, they'd throw it in the
| trash.
|
| >
|
| > But in software, we tolerate buggy tools that change all
| the time for no discernible reason. We tolerate software that
| simultaneously targets professionals and casual users,
| serving both segments poorly. We tolerate software that can't
| be customized or adapted for specific workflows. It's tough
| to put into words, but if you watch a musician or a painter
| interact with their tools, there's a very clear difference
| that emerges, and over time you start to realize how much
| better all of their stuff is.
|
| >
|
| > In most professional artistic settings, workflow changes
| only happen because they have a clear benefit -- drawing from
| your shoulder instead of your wrist, changing your embouchure
| if you play an instrument. And even in those fields, it's
| generally accepted that over time people will end up with
| very specialized setups that are very consistent and refined
| and that remain constant for years and years.
|
| >
|
| > Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my
| professional tools should change because change is inherently
| good. Only in commercial software would an elegant,
| consistent interface like Markdown that allowed me to build
| up decades of muscle memory until my computer was an
| extension of my fingers and I didn't need to think about the
| way I typed -- only in software would that be considered a
| bad thing.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| The converse story is all the people that complain about
| $enterprise_software saying things like, it hasn't had an
| update since 1996!
| kortilla wrote:
| Those are people who don't use it judging by superficial
| things.
| jimbokun wrote:
| That also speaks to the enduring appeal of tools like vi
| and emacs.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| this is one of the more annoying things about the Web "apps"
| and the ecosystem.... virtually no control over what's being
| used...
| tialaramex wrote:
| > just using excel because it won't change on them.
|
| Are your accounting people quite young? Excel moves and
| changes stuff, though not on quite such an aggressive
| timeline. Modern Office is not like 1990s Office where you
| buy it and then it doesn't change unless you decide to change
| it.
|
| This is fine, the universe's one constant is change, if we
| fight it we'll lose, but it's worth calling out that there
| will be change, just some of these outfits are taking the
| piss.
| layer8 wrote:
| They're probably older, on the contrary, and are still
| using the non-subscription desktop version instead of
| Microsoft 365.
| drumhead wrote:
| Yes, everyone seems to be stuck on 2010.
| eropple wrote:
| Excel is distinctly different from the rest of Office for a
| power user because while you're right that they've
| reorganized things (though only one real reorganization
| since at least Office 95, that's pretty good), the keyboard
| shortcuts have remained the same for literally my entire
| life. It's why Excel is nonstandard and weird compared to
| even other Office apps: Excel is the most _this-is-for-
| work_ tool in Office, and they 've been loath to break
| things for people like...well...me.
|
| And I don't hate the ribbon interface, I think it's totally
| fine--but also, in Excel specifically, I almost never click
| a button on it.
|
| QuickBooks's online version, on the other hand, has
| terrible discoverability _and_ doesn 't have standard
| keyboard controls.
| c5karl wrote:
| Those keyboard shortcuts (the ones that begin with a
| slash, at least) date back to Lotus 123.
| bobse wrote:
| I use LibreOffice bacause you know what Microsoft.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Are you a professional accountant?
| rvba wrote:
| Many companies have tons of desginers who need to prove
| they are needed, so they force change for the sake of
| change - at the cost of users.
| andai wrote:
| It might be like the thing at Google, where people want
| to get promoted and big changes or new launches are the
| only way up, regardless of the effect on user experience.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| With M$ the bias is towards their certification and
| training business. They have to change enough to make
| training seem more important.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That's just one leg of the stool. They used to be
| relentless at driving SQL Server Enterprise adoption. Now
| it's shifted to M365 E5, plus accessory subscriptions.
| PowerBI, Viva and Copilot for whatever are the new legs.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Many companies have tons of desginers who need to prove
| they are needed, so they force change for the sake of
| change - at the cost of users.
|
| That may be one part.
|
| But another part is companies that need to demonstrate to
| their uses that a version change is a big change.
|
| Microsoft is (im)famous for this: as far as I can tell,
| there has been little need for the constant UI churn in
| windows aside from convincing users that a new version is
| big enough to warrant that appellation (as opposed to a
| service pack/patch).
| bombcar wrote:
| You'd think that the SaaS Office would change less, but
| it seems to churn about as much as ever.
| waboremo wrote:
| Designers alone can't push through a change for the sake
| of change as their work relies entirely on user research.
| Even if they do have the research needed to prove a
| change is required, they also have to get developers on
| board.
|
| So I don't know where this conspiracy theory comes from,
| but it's entirely unfounded unless you're talking about a
| designer like Jony Ive with the power to go through
| multiple obstacles with ease, in which case the change
| isn't happening to prove he's needed but because he has a
| different vision.
| mLuby wrote:
| > as their work relies entirely on user research
|
| Definitely not the case everywhere.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Unless the designers end up becoming the product
| managers/owners and stop scrutinizing the designers.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| The Excel UI has changed once significantly in the past 2
| decades with the addition of the Ribbon.
|
| The Excel data format has changed once, significantly, in
| the past 2 decades (which was forced on MS and even though
| MS has tried to sabotage the openness of the new formats
| they were required to create, its still much better than
| the predecessors).
|
| It's hard to think of any other change that wasn't just an
| addition (new formulas, higher column/row limits).
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The chrome of Excel changes. The core product is COBOL like
| in its stability.
|
| The problem with all of these enterprise web applications
| is that they all suck. I worked for a big government agency
| that transitioned from a mostly homegrown, mainframe 3270
| based accounting system to PeopleSoft. The staff revolted.
|
| We joked about the "Revenge of the Beancounters", but
| looking at it, they were right. It took them 4-6 months to
| train a new person with the old system, but they were
| hyper-productive. With the new system, they actually needed
| to grow the staff because you couldn't build out workflows
| that the business needed.
|
| They did get some benefits, like improved payments and
| invoice tracking. (Which drove the business case) But the
| general financial operations suffered.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I'm older. I still haven't gotten over the "ribbon"
| interface. It drove me to LibreOffice despite all its
| faults.
| eitland wrote:
| It is already many years ago since that I started to do
| certain jobs in Libre Office (back then it was still
| OpenOffice.org) even if I had MS Office. I mean, it was
| better at certain tasks and costed nothing.
|
| In all fairness, back them I also had to use MS Office
| for certain other tasks, but luckily I don't need that
| anymore.
|
| Now there is Confluence instead however to mangle our
| docs and waste our time.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Are you a professional accountant?
|
| EDIT: rather than downvoting, maybe you could engage?
| Following the thread back the question was about
| accountants using Excel and then someone weighed in that
| they use Libre/open office. I have never seen an
| accountant use libre office for accounts work, hence my
| question. Are you an accountant who moved from Excel
| because of whatever, or was your comment irrelevant?
| emeril wrote:
| I'm sure he's not, I am one and I have to use excel
| though I also hate the ribbon but I just use excel 2010 +
| ubitmenu and will continue to use that version or similar
| until I can't anymore
|
| I had used excel 2003 until I was forced to use win 10 at
| which point it barely functioned anymore (i.e., it worked
| great in win 7)
|
| I still miss excel 2003, it has been downhill from there
|
| As for accounting software, they all mostly stink though
| serve a purpose in larger companies where you need some
| degree of separation of duties to reduce (at least in
| appearance as much internal control is theatre)
| error/theft risk...
| kpw94 wrote:
| > Are your accounting people quite young? Excel moves and
| changes stuff, though not on quite such an aggressive
| timeline.
|
| Excel UI interface changes but it won't change your
| spreadsheet content, which is the core functionality Excel
| users care about.
|
| I've been using 15 year old .xlsx files with no issues
| across Excel 2007, to 2021, and Excel online.
|
| I've seen companies using files with an absurd amount of
| worksheets within the file, or with an absurd number of
| rows (up to the limit), and those haven't been broken.
|
| And I don't remember transitioning from xls to xlsx to be
| that painful, but this might be untrue for people using
| some very specific features.
| drumhead wrote:
| Not at the same speed as SaaS software. Jira seems to
| change every five minutes.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I tend to work with ERP a lot.
|
| I once offered to fix the tab order on an input form, so the
| cursor started in the right box. The manager of that team got
| very excited and asked me not to change anything, the team
| had got used to the keystrokes!
| sopooneo wrote:
| I've found that once a behavior is released in the wild,
| even a bug, people _will_ build it into their workflows and
| rely on its presence. Frustrating but unavoidable.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1172/
| toddmatthews wrote:
| I'm a business owner and use Quickbooks online and a couple
| years ago they just flat out changed how they calculated
| taxes. When I reported the bug they just kept repeating how I
| could completely change my process to make it work, like they
| had released some new feature. But they really just broke
| shit, and refused to ever acknowledge it. There's no way I
| was the only person reporting this. They obviously don't care
| TrueSlacker0 wrote:
| Was this in reference to payroll tax, cause I also got
| screwed on that from them. I paid for payroll but they
| didn't file any papers. They paid everything but never ever
| filed a 940 or 941. By the time government speed came
| around and the IRS notified me I was delinquent for 2
| years. I ended paying 2-3k in fees, dropped there payroll
| that day. But sadly still suffer through their accounting.
| cameldrv wrote:
| It's crazy how slow it is to get anything done with Quickbooks
| Online. The site is slow to respond, it has very limited
| keyboard shortcuts, if you open it in multiple tabs to cross
| reference information, it's constantly logging you out of the
| other tab, and they discontinued the desktop electron wrapper
| that let you have more than one tab open.
|
| Historically, a huge strength of Intuit was the huge population
| of bookkeepers and accountants who would recommend QuickBooks
| to clients, but I don't see how anyone would recommend it at
| this point.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Similarly, Intuit Mint has gotten worse and slower over time
| as well. I used to use it to track all my spending (including
| manual entry for cash transactions and much manual
| categorization of all transactions), but I gave up a few
| years back because it was all taking so much time and was so
| slow. Now I just use it to see all my account balances in one
| place, but otherwise don't interact with transactions much at
| all.
| the_only_law wrote:
| From quickbooks to TurboTax, Intuit software has been some of
| the most god awful both to use and to develop against in my
| experience.
| jmainguy wrote:
| Argocd is pretty nice
| airtonix wrote:
| [dead]
| cschmatzler wrote:
| My team's product is mainly built on Argo Workflows, and
| while the idea of the tool is great, we have learned to
| massively distrust it. It doesn't always do what you tell
| it to, or, worse, it tells you it'll do something and
| then does something else.
| technics256 wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Just started building out a new
| platform centered on it
| drumhead wrote:
| Most users and companies I've encountered want to remain on the
| desktop version. Its faster, gives them more functionality, its
| under their control and if they want they can pay or not pay
| maintenance fee. But the software firms are obsessed with the
| cloud and so are the heads of the Finance teams, they think it
| makes them look technically knowledgeable to move to the cloud
| so this pincer movement is forcing the everyday users onto
| something they dont want or need. Any cost savings disappear in
| rapidly rising yearly subs, but by then the people that forced
| the move are gone and everyone's lumbered with an expensive,
| clunky restrictive finance system.
| TrueSlacker0 wrote:
| Point 2 is driving me crazy. Everything moved to places that
| now seem illogical.
| pharmakom wrote:
| Genuine question: do you find there is creativity and the
| satisfaction of creating something from nothing in accounting
| work? It has always seemed so dull from the outside looking in
| (cue the joes about accountants) but is this the reality?
|
| Many people don't see software engineering as creative but it
| certainly can be!
| deepsun wrote:
| I'm a small business owner and I get a lot of satisfaction
| from the feeling of confidence that everything is properly
| counted down to the last cent. Both for business and for IRS
| I have a confident answer. Kinda like designing a proper DB
| schema for the use case, using proper data types, optimal
| queries etc.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Accountants are like attorneys. The shitty ones go through
| the motions and create problems. The great ones often solve
| problems before you know you have one. They get a bad rap
| from a stereotype perspective!
| Frondo wrote:
| My sister is an accountant and she genuinely enjoys working
| with the numbers. She finds it, not exactly fun, but kind of
| fun? She describes it like every situation is a puzzle she
| gets to solve, and then maintain. She also likes working with
| her customers and enjoys those interactions, like she gets a
| good feeling from helping her customers out. That's enough
| for her.
|
| Not the vocation for me but it's very interesting to talk
| with her about her experiences, because they're so remote
| from mine...
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Sounds like some hardcore deep backend software dev jobs (I
| have similar for more than a decade), but actual creativity
| is scaled down to few %.
|
| Accountants are extremely limited by rigid tools they use
| and laws they have to adgere to. Then comes given company's
| 'way we do things here' limit.
|
| Take any modern programming language, you start with unique
| big problem/task, have to crack hundreds little and big
| problems, often with use of stackoverflow and other webs,
| but ie hard alghoritmic problems I solve mostly on my own
| since nobody faced those in exact mix of technologies, data
| and other constraints. There are sone further limits but my
| alghoritms are my solid creations, nobody ever questioned
| them nor made me refactor them for any reason.
|
| To outsiders it may look exactly same weird nerd stuff of
| course. To me, accounting has very little room for
| creativity, its there but almost microscopic. And the joy
| you describe is also present, thats there in many jobs that
| actually create stuff, digital or not
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Note your sister doesn't just work with "numbers". She
| works with a structure of interrelated accounts. In a sense
| she is working with the structure of the business. She is
| observing the business-process which is a bit like looking
| at a simulation.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| FWIW I share your sister's take. A large part of my job
| involves accounting and audit/compliance, and few things
| stimulate me more than trying to figure out "what the fuck
| were they thinking" and fixing it.
| drumhead wrote:
| It is boring, incredibly so. There's no real creativity
| involved unless you're trying to stretch the rules capture a
| transaction in a certain way or make it look like you're
| doing something you're not really. Its not fun and at some
| point you become aware of what you're doing and you quickly
| supress the memory in the deepest part of your mind. Its a
| hugely usefull skill though that helps you with so many other
| things, like budgeting, raising finance, running a business,
| investing. The the profession itself is like being force fed
| cold porridge for eternity.
| toyg wrote:
| I work around financial software, so I met a lot of
| accountants over the decades.
|
| There is some creativity in defining where to stash this or
| that number so that everything works out in the best way for
| the business. As others said, it's a bit like solving
| puzzles, and it's harder than it looks - it requires a
| significant level of preparation, and keeping up with
| constantly changing regulations.
|
| What a lot of them also get pride from is _formatting their
| reports "just so"_ - so that they're readable and enjoyable
| by businesspeople, while still being exact, comprehensive,
| and meeting formal standards. To me, that sort of thing is
| kinda boring and trivial, but for them it can be career-
| defining, life-or-death stuff. In a way, it's a hyper-
| specialized branch of graphic design.
| tough wrote:
| Creative accounting and tax avoidance do exist tho
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I think it is the naive idea that bookkeeping is accounting.
|
| I am an accountant, I never do any bookkeeping.
|
| Last week a few things I did were
|
| 1) worked on a way to get sales rebates to correctly reflect
| in the product cost. This is half accounting knowledge and
| half ERP.
|
| 2) presented accounts at a meeting where I was trying to use
| the numbers to make the business take a different strategic
| direction.
|
| 3) reviewed and questioned the commercial sense in other
| people's plans
|
| 4) worked out how to run a new process through the ERP so the
| accounts flowed through correctly
|
| In other weeks I may be forecasting cash needs, doing an
| investment appraisal, building business plans, getting
| funding, writing sql to get data, building a BI system...
|
| I like the creativity and the amazing variety of what I get
| to do in accounts.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _last few years has convinced me that Intuit is determined to
| kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by:_
|
| Is that you, Arlene?
|
| Seriously, everything you list (and more) are things my
| accountant complains about. You're not alone in being a
| QuickBooks insider who hates QuickBooks and would love to move
| their clients onto something else.
| [deleted]
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| Xero do a similar pricing thing. I have to pay for the $100 a
| month plan to get multi currencies because I contract to an
| overseas company. The standard plan which has everything I need
| but that is 1/3 the price.
| nerdponx wrote:
| This sounds like what Adobe and Microsoft are also doing. It
| seems like they assume that they are somewhat invincible and
| therefore can do whatever they want.
| toyg wrote:
| The sad truth is that they actually are.
|
| Digital feudalism is a real thing.
| ricardonunez wrote:
| I canceled my subscription a month ago and moved to wave. What
| an awful piece of software and company. Slow, ads and promos
| and every interaction, slow, not very intuitive, did I mention
| slow? The only reason I signed up was because of a deal I got
| but it was not worth the gray hairs that I got.
|
| Edit: intuit and quickbooks
| areyousure wrote:
| Which software and company is awful? It is not clear from
| your comment.
| r00fus wrote:
| This is a well-deserved Intuit complain-fest.
| ricardonunez wrote:
| Intuit, tax and quickbooks. In addition to quickbooks
| online not being great, Just an example: I own the gmail
| for my name, somebody used it by mistake on turbo tax so I
| get their emails. I called their support and explained it
| to them but I have to give personal info on the account but
| I don't own the account. It was like that for years until
| recently they fix it, although I already had created a
| filter for it. Similar happened with mint.
| no_wizard wrote:
| One thing they are going to start pushing via their online
| platform is likely things line AR and payments via Melio (their
| a big investor in the company) and likely push out other
| vendors in that space as a result. My grapevine understanding
| is this is less possible with the desktop version because you'd
| need everyone to upgrade.
|
| That's what I think this is all about
| tomrod wrote:
| Why would people not go to Gnucash or Fresh books?
| xupybd wrote:
| Gnucash is hard to use.
|
| I recently attempted to help a non profit setup Gnucash. It
| turned out to be cheaper to get commercial software (Xero) as
| they were spending too much time on upskilling in Gnucash.
|
| They took a week to onboard to the new system and are amazing
| at how quickly they can do everything they need to do.
| molsongolden wrote:
| They are just not as good as QuickBooks and not many
| accountants are familiar with these other packages. The
| prices keep increasing but the QuickBooks online
| functionality is the best out there and it is the platform
| with which most other tools make sure to integrate.
| clashandcarry wrote:
| Also, none of the open source alternatives support
| simultaneous multiuser access.
|
| Users can slowly adapt, but most businesses larger than a
| sole proprietorship need multiuser capability.
| wrycoder wrote:
| This is a big one. I switched from GnuCash to QBO for a
| non-profit because of that.
| toyg wrote:
| One would think it can't be that hard to put together a
| webapp to freaking _sum up some numbers_ , but nobody
| seem to want to do it in open source.
|
| It could be because it's indeed so easy that it's boring,
| or could be that anyone with the necessary knowledge of
| accounting standards makes way more money doing other
| stuff than coding for free.
| gwbennett wrote:
| Quickbooks is currently a necessary evil for me. I have to
| use it, because that is what my bookkeepers and accountants
| use.
|
| If you want to change either your bookkeeper or your
| accountant, your new bookkeeper and accountant know how to
| use it.
|
| Every time I have to open up QB, I cringe. Painful!
|
| Agree with the points above about updates and $$$ increases.
| The worse!
| gavinhoward wrote:
| I'm another happy user of GnuCash.
|
| I use the SQLite backend for the same reason Jonathan chose
| GnuCash: scripting. I can script in bash with the `sqlite3`
| command-line tool.
|
| I also use the reports extensively.
|
| I personally enter every transaction because I want to know where
| the money is going and categorize every expense into a budget,
| but yes, import is important.
|
| As soon as I can, I am going to support GnuCash better than just
| shilling.
| electroly wrote:
| It's not true that Intuit discontinued support for the desktop
| version. Where did they get that idea? It's a subscription, yes,
| but the desktop version is alive and well. I WISH they would kill
| it so I could force my own users to upgrade to the online edition
| but no, it hasn't happened yet. We just upgraded to QuickBooks
| Desktop 2023.
| dboreham wrote:
| As a business owner and software developer I'm extremely
| reluctant to host mission critical and sensitive data with a
| provider like intuit. This is why we use desktop QB.
| corbet wrote:
| I got the idea from the emails Intuit kept sending me saying
| that the desktop version was done and I'd have to buy a
| subscription from now on.
| electroly wrote:
| You do have to buy a subscription, but the desktop version is
| not done. There is a subscription for the desktop edition
| _and separately_ one for the online edition. They are still
| perfectly happy for you to use the desktop edition.
|
| https://quickbooks.intuit.com/desktop/ -- it's the "Work on
| desktop" options.
| snvzz wrote:
| I have been using it for some 15 years now. GNUCash is great.
| asah wrote:
| "Getting our QuickBooks data into GnuCash took a bit of scripting
| using the capable (if poorly documented) Python bindings."
|
| I wonder if LLMs can help with these gaps in documentation and
| examples?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I wonder if LLMs can help with these gaps in documentation and
| examples?_
|
| I wonder if LLMs can do someone's taxes.
|
| But I'm not going to be the first to try it.
| goostavos wrote:
| I was trying to understand what box 2b was on one of my tax
| forms. Google wasn't helping me because I all I found was
| unreadable blog spam. So, I tried ChatGPT. "On form blah,
| what goes in box 2b?"
|
| It descended into me arguing with the machine over whether or
| not 2b even existed. "GPT, I'm literally holding the physical
| paper in my hand and staring at the box labeled 2b!" "That is
| incorrect. Form blah has never had a box labeled 2b"
|
| So, I'm going to go with: probably wanna hold off on the LLM
| taxes.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It descended into me arguing with the machine over whether
| or not 2b even existed. "GPT, I'm literally holding the
| physical paper in my hand and staring at the box labeled
| 2b!" "That is incorrect. Form blah has never had a box
| labeled 2b"_
|
| So, 2b, or not 2b? That was the question?
| [deleted]
| simonw wrote:
| LLMs definitely help with examples. I use them for that all the
| time - for any library that had reasonable usage prior to
| September 2021 they often give me the exact example code I need
| to understand how to solve my problem.
| greatgib wrote:
| Gnucash is awesome even if not perfect.
|
| The problem to use it in France is that there is regulatory
| barriers preventing to use it officially. In theory accounting
| solutions have to comply with rules that are complicated to
| follow with your own opensource solution!
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Is it just me or is that an honest-to-goodness commercial open
| source support business opportunity?
| nelgaard wrote:
| The same in Denmark from next year. What is missing in GnuCash
| is mainly some support for e-invoicing in
|
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEPPOL Peppol]
|
| Is anyone working on something like that?
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| My aunt was an accountant (rip).
|
| She had one of those "not calculators" with a built-in printer.
| Not sure what they are properly called.
|
| Her "not calculator" was old, stained with cigarette smoke and
| coffee and she did not wish for a new one.
|
| I got paid a bit a few times to clean it up inside and out. The
| thing was a tank. (If it still exists, it should still work with
| a bit of care and attention.)
|
| She used some form of financial software running on a terminal. I
| think it was from an AS/400.
|
| She was an expert on both.
|
| Whatever key combinations were required to enter data on the
| terminal had become so ingrained that if you asked her how to do
| it, she would have to look at what her hands did. (weird).
|
| The UX on the terminal was shit if you had to learn it. (Since I
| got paid to do some data entry, I felt the pain).
|
| But if you got used to it, it was damn fast. No lag, no mouse
| pointing, and it stayed entirely consistent. A bit like VI I
| guess.
|
| As far as I know the system never crashed on her. The server did
| need care, but it would order it on its own.
|
| At some point they brought in Windows PCz and Lotus Symphony, I
| think. She hated that.
|
| She found it all slow, inconsistent and did not like the mouse
| one bit.
|
| The other way around though. When someone new was hired and we
| were in the age of Microsoft Windows, new people were horrified
| by the old terminal software.
|
| I still sometimes see people at warehouses or stores that use
| terminal driven software and some of them are just as fast. It is
| fun to see.
|
| The majority though hunt, scratch head, peck, hit whatever undo
| is, and try again.
|
| Should we make easy to use software or software as a tool for
| those who go through the effort to learn?
|
| I dont think any "windows/osx/linux/" screen UI accounting system
| would be as fast to use.
| MBCook wrote:
| Adding machine, perhaps?
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _Plain Text Accounting_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36022005 - May 2023 (31
| comments)
| ValentineC wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of Manager.io [1], which is free for single-user
| desktop use. They make money from their cloud plan and from a
| self-hosted server licence.
|
| It's not open source, but I can export practically everything as
| CSV or TSV, so there's data portability.
|
| [1] https://www.manager.io/
| onedognight wrote:
| GnuCash may not support concurrent users, but it does support
| concurrent programmers as its XML config files can be checked
| into git. From my programmer perspective, revision-controlled
| accounting makes sense. You can fix bugs and change names, merge
| and split accounts, all with history, comments and easy
| reversion. And unlike with h?ledger, you have a nice GUI for
| managing most day to day tasks.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Does the SQLite format support concurrent users? Or would it
| need better conflict resolution support in the application?
|
| Checking the XML data into text-based version control is a
| really interesting idea. you could probably do something
| similar with the SQLite data, using a tool like Dolt.
| slondr wrote:
| SQLite itself doesn't support concurrent users.
| abbeyj wrote:
| The FAQ disagrees with you:
| https://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q5
| noisy_boy wrote:
| The main issue towards adoption is the ease of fetching the
| transactions from various banks. Sure we can write some scripts
| to process the PDF files etc but it is still very manual compared
| to, e.g., allowing transaction query via REST api by granting
| users API keys.
| Forge36 wrote:
| I'd take an API which dumps CSV files. It doesn't help every
| bank times out cookies in less than one day.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| look at https://gitlab.com/gnukhata/gkapp/-/issues
|
| this is a AGPL V3.0 licensed accounting software aimed at small
| businesses and schools and professionals.
|
| Its currently being developed for indian market because devs are
| all based out of india so if anyone wants to implement for their
| own country, please submit a PR.
|
| we need more accounting softwares that are free and open source
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-21 23:00 UTC)