[HN Gopher] Show HN: I've Built an Accounting System
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Show HN: I've Built an Accounting System
        
       It can create invoices and receive payments.  Not quite production
       ready, yet.  Only need PostgreSQL installed to try.  I will add
       support to choose SQLite when they add native support for geography
       types.
        
       Author : journal
       Score  : 162 points
       Date   : 2024-09-18 21:04 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | bbor wrote:
       | Thanks for posting, looks pretty polished to me! Lowkey love the
       | design, super modern finance applications do make me irrationally
       | afraid. Perhaps it's trauma from Navient-administered student
       | loans...
       | 
       | I will say this is by far the most passionate README.md I've ever
       | seen, lol;                 Intuit didn't invent accounting;
       | they've stolen it. Accounting existed before computers,
       | databases, and software. Transactions were recorded in physical
       | journals using pen and paper, which forced accountants to have a
       | better understanding of company finances due to the process of
       | manual entry, with little room for error. Now, the process has
       | been automated through software, and the journal entries are
       | hidden away, leaving only the final report to spot errors and
       | fraud. None of you can call yourselves accountants; you're just
       | QwackBooks users. The truck drivers of the office. Your boss
       | thinks of you as a whiny, tail-dragging *****.
       | 
       | Do you have any particular reason/motivating experience for this
       | ethos? Why not just use a piece of a paper/the default Excel
       | ledger template/the `ledger` CLI tool if it's so important to do
       | things by hand?
       | 
       | P.S. "Truck drivers of the office"...?
        
         | journal wrote:
         | There are multiple reasons.
         | 
         | 1. Intuit discontinued QB desktop on may 31 this year. 2.
         | Intuit recently raised prices. 3. QB online has terrible
         | navigation. I can make invoice in my system in less clicks. 4.
         | I needed a feature to optionally print supporting documents
         | with the invoice while having the ability to arrange the order
         | of those documents. I then can integrate with mailing service
         | and have PDF ready to mail programmatically. Instead of having
         | to join PDFs together. (this feature doesn't work cause I can't
         | afford IronPDF, it's the only PDF package I would use). 5. I
         | don't like any limits on users or numbers of invoices I can
         | have in my system. 6. Excel is error prone for more than a few
         | records. Drag and drop accidentally one cell to another? 7.
         | Multi-tenancy. I wanted to manage multiple companies without
         | logging out.
        
       | xupybd wrote:
       | Hahaha, this is the most aggressive readme ever.
       | 
       | None of you can call yourselves accountants; you're just
       | QwackBooks users. The truck drivers of the office. Your boss
       | thinks of you as a whiny, tail-dragging . That's why he needs
       | just one of you who knows the entire system. Maybe you'll get
       | lucky with an assistant, but most likely they'll cause more
       | problems, because it'll be the boss's daughter and she doesn't
       | give a .
        
         | journal wrote:
         | Yes, this initiative has been fueled by hate directed towards
         | Intuit and the overall accounting community for refusing to
         | advance. It's like playing AoE with a noob who's refusing to
         | advance to the next age because there will be more units,
         | technologies, and strategies to manage. Most businesses have
         | one accountant, which means this entire profession is one
         | initiative away from not existing at all. There's no excuse for
         | a modern accountant to not know at least SQL.
         | 
         | The patterns and practices that I demonstrate in the solution
         | are nothing genius, it just took a while to put it all
         | together, and it's very basic. Just one table with credit/debit
         | columns, rows of which have to be organized into a transaction
         | and linked with user-actions, like creating invoice, receiving
         | payment, adjusting inventory, really anything, including
         | foreign transactions.
         | 
         | When the calculator was invented, we didn't get stuck with a
         | bunch of "calculator-operator" professions, so why does
         | accounting get to stay stagnant?
        
           | xupybd wrote:
           | Keep up the passion!
           | 
           | What are your thoughts on plain text accounting? I know it's
           | not really for businesses applications and really not for
           | accountants but that's how I learnt accounting basics. I find
           | that approach much better as I have total control of the
           | structure. I suspect your application provides a similar
           | level of control as the end company has to implement the
           | details.
        
             | journal wrote:
             | I've thought about separating the journal into a command-
             | line application, where the end result might look exactly
             | like plain text accounting, a sorta like ffmpeg for
             | accounting. Plain text is part of my backup strategy.
             | 
             | If plain text are roads, then my approach is rail roads. A
             | strict set of application logic so the operator doesn't get
             | overwhelmed and is capable of managing large number of
             | transactions at higher speeds of entry.
             | 
             | Then, it's just a matter of building more rail roads for
             | any additional functionality. Once built, you'd probably
             | never have to touch that code again.
        
           | 7bit wrote:
           | > It's like playing AoE with a noob who's refusing to advance
           | to the next age
           | 
           | I will steal that, and there's nothing you can do to stop me!
        
           | tonyedgecombe wrote:
           | In the UK with have a concept called a micro entity in the
           | tax code. Micro entities have some fairly strict constraints
           | on them (10 employees or less, turnover under PS350,000, no
           | foreign currency transactions and so on). Within those
           | constraints the rules are fairly simple and most importantly
           | HMRC provides online forms for filing your books.
           | 
           | I always wondered about starting from those constraints and
           | working back to a basic accounting solution for your typical
           | business person. It would probably cover 90% of the companies
           | in the UK as most of them have really simple requirements.
           | 
           | Luckily I retired before I got around to it.
        
         | patrickmay wrote:
         | > . . . the most aggressive readme ever.
         | 
         | I love it. It reminds me, in tone, of the Acknowledgements
         | section of the Scsh manual: https://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html
        
       | codeonline wrote:
       | Some big claims in that readme for a project with no tests :)
       | 
       | Lots of C# repo's here demonstrating unit/integration/acceptance
       | testing within dockerised containers if you need some examples
       | https://github.com/PeterKneale?tab=repositories
        
         | journal wrote:
         | Big things have small beginnings.
         | 
         | I think Donald Rumsfeld said something about unknown unknowns.
         | 
         | But, tell me what you want tested and add that to my list.
        
         | HumblyTossed wrote:
         | Lots of very successful software never had those things.
        
           | bbkane wrote:
           | Your accounts ARE the tests!!
        
       | wg0 wrote:
       | Brutally minimized to first principles and to the very core. It's
       | always about the journal and that's it. No fluff. Great project.
        
       | gamblor956 wrote:
       | If you think Intuit is accounting than you don't really know what
       | accounting is.
       | 
       | Off the top of my head... every major ERP has better
       | functionality, customizability, and usability than this
       | relatively simple take on a financial system. Even Workday... and
       | that's an accounting system grafted on top of a HR platform.
       | 
       | This is basically yet another product created by a programmer
       | that doesn't actually know enough about the field they're
       | disrupting that they don't even realize that their disruption was
       | obsolete a decade ago.
       | 
       | And no, as is this program couldn't be used to run a bodega, let
       | alone an aircraft carrier.
        
         | minimalist wrote:
         | Please elaborate more, my friend! Let's say that I was^W am a
         | programmer who is seduced by the plain-text accounting / one-
         | database-is-all-you-need notion and I think my needs will be
         | simple, as I can keep the business of my bodega all in the RAM
         | of my brain... Or at least I think I can.
         | 
         | How can this go wrong? What are some of the needs that compel
         | the bodega owner to move on to more sophisticated tools? Is it
         | because of calculating things like taxes and hourly rates and
         | the like?
        
           | FredPret wrote:
           | Imagine it's the year 1890 at Standard Oil and they have a
           | building full of filing clerks.
           | 
           | It's run by the great John D Rockefeller, of which you can
           | read more in the fantastic biography _Titan_. He's a stickler
           | for accurate accounting at all times.
           | 
           | Now they decide to buy a batch of barrels for all their oil.
           | 
           | - one clerk runs down to the cabinet with a file for all the
           | items SO buys.
           | 
           | - another cross-references each item and fetches the files of
           | the vendors for each of those items
           | 
           | - another cross-references with past invoices to get the most
           | recent price for each item
           | 
           | - another gets a list of locations SO uses to store barrels
           | 
           | Now the purchasing manager looks at all this and decides
           | which barrels to buy, from which vendor, how many, and where
           | its getting delivered. So he writes out a purchase order /
           | PO.
           | 
           | So back to the clerks:
           | 
           | - one runs along to file the PO in the PO filing cabinet.
           | Remember, uncle John is watching and he wants to go to any
           | cabinet or any manager at any time and get up-to-date details
           | of what's going on.
           | 
           | - another one goes to the Items cabinet, finds the barrels we
           | ordered, and notes on them that a PO was issued for this many
           | barrels on such and such a date.
           | 
           | - one actually sends a copy of the PO to the vendor.
           | 
           | Skipping over some steps for simplicity, the barrels arrive
           | one day with their invoice attached.
           | 
           | An Invoice! Now the army of clerks swing back into action.
           | They get their guy at the warehouse to send them the original
           | invoice that came stapled to the barrels. Then:
           | 
           | - one runs to the PO cabinet, finds the PO that was issued,
           | marks it as done, and writes the invoice number on it.
           | 
           | - another one runs to the accounting department. There they
           | make the double-entry bookkeeping entries to account for the
           | money that is now owed to the vendor, and for the inventory
           | value that has gone up.
           | 
           | - another one runs to the vendor cabinet and records the
           | purchase on their file
           | 
           | - another one goes to the inventory cabinet and files a
           | record updating the inventory balance for the barrel item
           | 
           | - someone files a copy of the invoice for future reference
           | 
           | Eventually we pay the invoice:
           | 
           | - a clerk keeps an eye on the payment terms for this and
           | other vendors and calculates how much cash we have to send to
           | each vendor each month
           | 
           | - another runs around to each paid invoice marking them as
           | paid
           | 
           | - another one actually writes the cheques and mails them off
           | 
           | - someone has to tell the accounting department how much
           | money we just paid, to which vendors, out of which bank
           | accounts
           | 
           | Things get fun when these barrels eventually get sent to a
           | production facility and filled with oil. Now the clerks have
           | to do the correct filings to destroy the barrel items along
           | with a quantity of oil, and create a new filled-barrel item.
           | The cost of this depends on all of the cost of the barrel
           | item, the oil, the labour, and some other things, all of
           | which is determined using past entries.
           | 
           | This is a toy example and the complexity spirals from here.
           | For example another invoice can arrive from the people who
           | transported the barrels. Depending on your CFO, or the
           | current accounting laws, you might want to include that in
           | the cost of the barrels, or record it as a business expense.
           | 
           | You might have different departments who do their accounting
           | separately, so now each transaction has to be split
           | correctly. You might want to track the hourly rates of each
           | employee and factor that into the cost of each finished-
           | barrel item, and also tracking what everybody should get
           | paid.
           | 
           | Add to this any idiosyncratic business rules stemming from
           | management decisions, laws, unique physical constraints, or
           | whatever.
           | 
           | An ERP system is all of these cabinets and their rules put
           | into a relational database with a front-end.
        
             | PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
             | The question was about a bodega owner ...
        
               | FredPret wrote:
               | Bodega guy can probably get away with Excel (I shudder at
               | the thought but it could work) or a very lightweight and
               | cheap ERP (which doesn't exist)
        
             | RagnarD wrote:
             | An excellent post, thanks.
        
             | minimalist wrote:
             | Thank you for the excellent reply! I think I understand
             | now... Once a business starts transacting in things other
             | than a single type of money (say durable goods,
             | consumables, services, or say other types of money) it
             | becomes necessary to reconcile these non-money-denominated
             | accounts. And for that, you need more than a single
             | database, or single spreadsheet. You need a suite of
             | persons or softwares that can __account__ for these stocks
             | and flows, and the rules that come along with them.
             | 
             | And that is called ERP, of which "simple" money accounting
             | is but one component of.
             | 
             | So root commenter's objection was more along the lines of:
             | "those are some bold claims for mere money-accounting
             | program. if you used a _real_ accounting program (as in an
             | ERP) then you'd understand how complex peoples' needs can
             | be". And the tone they phrased it elicited the downmods :)
             | 
             | I guess I understand. I still admire the OP and the
             | frustration that fueled their desire to create a tool that
             | works for them. And the tone of the readme is very
             | endearing, it reminds me of the things my IRC friends would
             | say to kick-off a lively discussion...
             | 
             | And so it has!
        
               | FredPret wrote:
               | Thank you!
               | 
               | To add to your point, there's also other complexities
               | like multiple currencies, keeping track of tax owed, and
               | probably the biggest one: multiple people of all skill
               | levels entering data into the system at the same time.
        
         | InMice wrote:
         | This comment doesnt deserve the downvotes its getting. If you
         | ever work in an ERP system you will realize the complexity of
         | tracking cost, inventory management (which is not just simple
         | item, location quantity), purchasing, quotes, lead times,
         | approval processes, BOM data structure, assembly, work orders,
         | sales orders internal/external, etc etc. All these may boil
         | down to basic cost account primitives but making a system that
         | is a ledger then dismissing other solutions and saying you
         | could manage the project of constructing an aircraft carrier
         | make you wonder if the author has ever touched an ERP frontend
         | or back. On top of that there are open source ERP and other
         | smaller companies that make proprietary ERP that do not do some
         | of the things intuit may do draw the ire of some.
        
           | 7952 wrote:
           | I agree. Although do you think ERP as a discipline is
           | actually successful in solving these kind of problems? It
           | seems to be a field dogged by underperforming or failed
           | systems.
        
       | sotix wrote:
       | Cool project! I think it is worth pointing out contra accounts in
       | the section where you discuss how accounts can increase and
       | decrease. Debiting a contra-asset account would decrease its
       | balance for example.
        
       | j45 wrote:
       | Wow, this is really neat. Congrats on the launch. Are you seeking
       | or accepting contributors? I'll be installing it today.
       | 
       | I've unintentionally worked with and helped implement
       | systemization and automation over a dozen different accounting
       | systems and ERPs. They blur together.
       | 
       | Since I have a tech background, it's not uncommon for me to say
       | an accounting system or ERP is just line item rows moving though
       | tables leaving their history behind... and how do you need it...
       | and now it exists, haha.
       | 
       | A few questions:
       | 
       | - Journals and accounts are traditionally taught as the manual
       | way to track different financial activities and ensure accurate
       | reporting. Journals capture transactions as they happen, while
       | accounts categorized them for analysis. Now that we have
       | databases and reporting tools, is there a sense of where
       | reporting or crunching things like profitability, job costing,
       | etc could be built up from this?
       | 
       | Account code migration - when implementing a new accounting
       | system, companies tend to dither over getting their GL right, or
       | changing it up at implementation. Being able to maintain that
       | history could help migration of data easier.
       | 
       | As someone who has helped design and lead implementations
       | overall, with accountants handling their part, accounting depts
       | can get caught in trying to do a lot with accounts and journals
       | in lieu of a report.. while databases have allowed ERPs to report
       | in ways (dimensions, etc) that might not be about accounts or
       | journals alone.
       | 
       | Mostly I'm thinking about organizations that wanted to build up
       | calculation of profitability by asset, or resource or service, or
       | product, and how a project like this could help people easily do
       | it from these first principles.
        
         | journal wrote:
         | I have a few ideas in the works for accepting contributions
         | that I will iron out in the coming days. I have some breaking
         | changes in the works to make the journal more reliable and
         | testable. The current implementation requires deep
         | understanding of my vision.
         | 
         | AFAIK, North Korea, Russia, and United States, all have the
         | same five accounts types and require double-entry.
         | 
         | This truly is a mission to rebuild an institution. My goal is
         | to educate a new generation of accountants. The kind who can
         | produce any report from raw journal entries and who can add new
         | features to the journal.
         | 
         | Parent-child relationships help with reporting, but I notice
         | the need to include parent-child relationships almost
         | everywhere; locations, items (products/services), chart-of-
         | accounts, users, tasks, etc.
         | 
         | I've not touched reporting because I know it will be easy to
         | do.
         | 
         | If I get the journal, accounts, and transactions right, the
         | rest is easy street.
         | 
         | One thing to mention at this time is that I don't see a need to
         | manually enter journal entries. I'm ready to catch flack for
         | saying this, but maybe... idk. Still in R&D phase.
        
           | karl11 wrote:
           | Lack of manual journals would be a non-starter, I am actually
           | not clear how a business could possibly run their books
           | without manual journals.
           | 
           | An example: you make something that uses 5 inputs. I have
           | inventory and cost of goods sold accounts for each of those
           | inputs, but my invoices out to customers only reference the
           | final product. This is where ERPs add insanely complex
           | inventory management solutions. However, the simple way to
           | deal with it instead is to use a manual journal to reconcile
           | your inventory and cost of goods sold accounts monthly or
           | however often you like.
        
             | journal wrote:
             | I have all the in the works, including complex assemblies
             | and reporting.
             | 
             | I wish I had the $ to hire help.
        
             | j45 wrote:
             | Interesting example - Complex ERP inventory management and
             | manufacturing experience here:
             | 
             | It seems reasonable to need manual adjustments, but I'm not
             | sure if entries would be needed. Deciding how to make
             | corrections and adjustments seems to be key in any manual
             | journal entries, or not.
             | 
             | If journal entries derive from transactions elsewhere,
             | chaining those together, or something to adjust them them
             | is pretty reasonable.
             | 
             | About split entries like the scenario you've outlined? Cost
             | of Goods Sold, vs manufacturing are all often in different
             | parts of the ERP that may not tie back to journals always.
             | Perhaps there is a pattern to setup that is repeatable. I'm
             | not sure if you have a software background, but source code
             | control of managing the bits of what changed when is
             | important.
             | 
             | Another scenario where manual stuff might not work is if we
             | have a just in time manufacturing process, and don't
             | complete the finished goods until the items are on the
             | truck and signed for by the driver (un damaged) so then you
             | can finalize manufacturing, invoicing, shipping documents,
             | etc. There's ways to reduce having to undo all of those if
             | product is damaged between manufacturing and shipping. Of
             | course this has it's own caveats. Implemented OK in SAP
             | though.
             | 
             | Overall, a real need and goal is: reducing the amount
             | accountants or anyone who works with an accounting data has
             | to dump out data from the accounting system to "manipulate
             | the data" to get a view of what happened/happening/needs to
             | happen.
             | 
             | Unpopular take based on experience: It's been my experience
             | that a good chunk of accounting groups that run around with
             | their hair on fire that the system is somehow not
             | working... calls in someone with database or analysis
             | skills, to discover something wasn't done as needed, or not
             | configured and implemented. In this way, the Technical ERP
             | whisperers out there who are not accountants but handle the
             | "in depth analysis"..
        
       | hersko wrote:
       | As someone who was unfortunate enough to use Quickbooks
       | professionally for several years, I laughed out loud at that meme
       | on the bottom of the readme. Wish you all the luck.
        
       | stevoh wrote:
       | It is a good start but the hubris here is quite high (and maybe
       | not a bad thing). Funny readme but rather harsh. Seems I have
       | been trolled enough to provide a response here...
       | 
       | I am not a fan of _" Qwakbooks"_ and I can't believe I am about
       | to defend it but... it does allow you to enter journal entries
       | manually. In fact, you do not have to use any of the screens
       | overlayed on top of the GL. The additional features are meant to
       | help users do things faster and more efficiently. The details are
       | not hidden at all but most users don't need to see them to be
       | successful.
       | 
       | QuickBooks has all of the same core functionality including a
       | well structured database too. You can interact with the
       | QuickBooks Online API with a few endpoints and achieve the same
       | thing much faster with scalability depending on which features
       | you would like to use. If you don't believe me, just read through
       | the API documentation which is really easy to follow.
       | https://developer.intuit.com/app/developer/qbo/docs/api/acco...
       | 
       | So yes, this is a well structured database for an accounting
       | system but beyond that there isn't much here.
       | 
       | Some other points:
       | 
       |  _" Due to its wide scope, the system is designed to be
       | incomplete, allowing organizations to finalize the
       | implementation."_ The customization involved to make this useable
       | would be quite substantial and unaffordable unless you did it
       | yourself (which would be a distraction from core business)
       | 
       |  _" Companies that adopt my system are far less likely to get
       | audited..."_ This is false. You might survive an audit with a
       | clean general ledger but it doesn't reduce the likelihood. There
       | is also way more to audits than whether the TB balances - the
       | substance of the transactions is obviously more important. ie.
       | the accountant needs to know accounting otherwise audits with any
       | system go poorly.
       | 
       | At quick glance... both this and QuickBooks do not have purchase
       | order management, capex or prepaid amortization automation,
       | approval workflows, muti-dimension transaction classification
       | (for FP&A), or strong multi-company/currency support. These are
       | all reasons why companies switch to a more robust (and usually
       | more expensive) system. These features are needed for most but
       | not all big companies with hundreds of employees moving around
       | tens of millions of dollars.
        
         | journal wrote:
         | Intuit has how many? I am one. Give it time.
        
           | stevoh wrote:
           | That is fair, I can respect that! Keep going!
        
       | emeril wrote:
       | omg, I'm an actual old fart accountant... "quickbooks" is good
       | enough for small businesses (though I 100% appreciate the
       | problems it has) if you need something robust with more controls,
       | you either just use netsuite/etc. or something more specialized
       | for your industry
       | 
       | and FFS, only go the route of custom code as a last resort, you
       | are better off slightly changing your business process to match
       | whatever workflow/etc. is in the OTS ERP instead of having some
       | cheap crappy dev (only crappy since most who do ERP programming
       | are often not well paid) shoehorn your (likely ill conceived)
       | process or report into the existing ERP...
        
       | zie wrote:
       | Nice start!
       | 
       | There are a few other OSS implementations, a list on Wikipedia:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_accounting_softw...
       | 
       | As someone who has helped write and manage one used internally at
       | a thousands of active employee organization I have some thoughts:
       | 
       | Most of these skip over authorization of transactions, which is
       | very important in many organizations. I.e. Tootie wants to buy a
       | new widget. Her supervisor probably has to approve it along with
       | someone from budget/accounting to confirm we actually have the
       | cash to pay for said widget, etc.
       | 
       | These authorization/workflow systems can get stupidly complex.
       | Ours is rule/action based via regex matches against columns in
       | the DB, and we support a _rules view on said table, to help
       | achieve our goals and allow customization for each "module" or
       | type of transaction that needs authorization.
       | 
       | The other thing often missing is auditing. We have auditors show
       | up once or twice a year and pour over our transactions, audit and
       | access logs. We record every I/U/D that happens against any table
       | in the DB and have kept this information forever. We also have a
       | support ticket system with integrated VCS that we use religiously
       | to help handle the _why_ , that also never erases information.
       | 
       | The next big thing often missing is reporting. We have thousands
       | of reports. Every employee basically needs a few different ones.
       | The key people(The accounting, payroll, AP and budget
       | departments, tend to get dozens of reports per employee).
       | 
       | We perhaps overly abuse use PostgreSQL's access controls. Every
       | user gets a login, and we use row and column level access
       | controls. This way all of the above features are tied into access
       | control. So if we make a generic report(say a birthday list), we
       | can make it available for everyone, but a supervisor can only see
       | their own employees and say the main manager at a particular
       | location can only see records pertaining to their location.
       | 
       | Lastly, these systems do not live in isolation, we are often the
       | first and last source for information. We import and export data
       | automatically against a wide range of various systems, from SSO
       | to random one-off messes some employee managed to get installed
       | somewhere. Having a sane way to deal with IO is essential. Our
       | current best method is for every system we have to two-way sync
       | with(which almost always happens if the product lives past the
       | first year), we keep a separate world-view of what we think their
       | data is. This way when stuff inevitably breaks, we can easily
       | track down if it's an us or them problem and get it routed
       | appropriately. Since we keep both our world-view _AND_ their
       | world-view in our PostgreSQL database, we can replicate any
       | previous state(due to keeping both world-views and precise
       | auditing).
        
         | robertlagrant wrote:
         | All of that makes sense. Using your database's user model is
         | something I've thought about for different types of system, but
         | never done.
         | 
         | I have a random, different question: what was the process by
         | which this effort was approved? I can imagine a lot of
         | companies (and their C[TI]Os) would say "Well, we should buy
         | Oracle Financials and customise it".
         | 
         | How do you get a large enough org to afford this development
         | effort, without getting an org that picks a prebuilt solution
         | that can be customised?
        
           | zie wrote:
           | It's because we are very old and we had custom software
           | originally, way back in the 70 and 80's when we were first
           | getting computers. When OpenVMS(the system our custom
           | software was running on) was EOL'd, the existing team was
           | given a lot of leeway to find a replacement. We were not very
           | excited about the options and we had programmer staff already
           | dedicated to the old custom software. Also users wanted "GUI"
           | and "Web". So we implemented a new system in Python and
           | PostgreSQL. PG functions are written in Python too.
           | 
           | I wasn't part of the original team, but I was there for the
           | re-write. I brought in Python and PostgreSQL and I created
           | two-way sync between the old OpenVMS system and PostgreSQL,
           | so we could take our time and didn't need to have a big
           | cutover date. That was a _HUGE_ selling point that got
           | everyone on board.
        
       | MichaelRo wrote:
       | Congrats on completing a rather involving project. Accounting
       | isn't easy, I know coze I got a degree in it, although haven't
       | pursued a CPA: I make a lot more as software dev and competition
       | is way lower. Like, for every software company a few accountants
       | would do, while it takes hundreds of developers, QA, HR, IT and
       | other stuff to run it.
       | 
       | But I digress. There's no shortage of accounting software, I know
       | coze my wife works for a company selling one :) But to survive
       | and succeed the key is not in the software per se as in support.
       | Continuous support for all the dumbass questions the clients may
       | ask and continuously updating the software to keep up with the
       | incessant small changes in the legislation. Updates without which
       | one cannot even submit a balance sheet to the IRS and are only
       | available upon subscription.
       | 
       | Without those the software is dead in the water.
        
       | danielmarkbruce wrote:
       | If a user understands accounting + software + databases, the
       | problem and solution is quite simple. Unfortunately that subset
       | is small. Given how much the world runs on software, one can
       | imagine a company where a prerequisite to working there is
       | understanding software and databases.
        
       | Havoc wrote:
       | >GAAP and IFRS compliant implementation of a forward-only double-
       | entry accounting method
       | 
       | You may want to replace well most of your lead image. It sounds
       | like gibberish to accountants. It's the accounting equivalent of
       | saying this is an IPv6 compliant x64 CPU. The words are all from
       | the right field but they're put together in a way that makes no
       | sense to someone familiar with it.
       | 
       | That said accounting software is a fuckin trainwreck on both UI
       | and features so I understand the hn urge to jump on this. Xero
       | basically cornered the young company market by being a web based
       | and being not entirely fuckin terrible.
        
         | meiraleal wrote:
         | Not knowing what they are doing is the basic premise of
         | disrupting a market. It fails most of the times, but when it
         | succeeds, big chances it was made by someone that didn't really
         | understood the problem
        
       | latentsea wrote:
       | But does it support multi-currency?
        
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