An open-source alternative to QuickBooks
bigcapital.ly
bigcapital.ly
That is interesting to me, because I had the complete opposite take after less than a minute on the website. I actively avoid QuickBooks because I despise Intuit.
But there is no way I would take a project like this seriously when the 'support' link is a link to Discord.
Competing with QuickBooks means competing for business clients, yet I can't imagine a business forgoing real documentation for Discord.
Support has been useless too.
As much as I don’t use discord at all, having a 50% chance of getting someone that understands internet banking to help troubleshoot internet banking would be compelling.
If the final user is finance, should the support be targeted towards them?
Discord is a serious thing now, I've seen enterprise products add support for Discord before Slack.
Discord is actively hostile to users by randomly banning and/or phone-walling users, especially any browser or connection that cannot be fingerprinted well enough, and giving them no recourse at all, just saying "yep our automated system is working, bye". There's so many more awful things they do, just search this site to find lots more.
Anyone who figures out how to have pseudoanonymous identities that can't be endlessly minted to evade bans that doesn't involve aggressive fingerprinting will be the internet's favorite child overnight.
OSS communities, yes. More and more FOSS communities are on Matrix, either using matrix.org or connecting their own instance to the network. FOSS projects using FOSS tools, and decentralized for that matter too.
If you’re targeting businesses, then you’d want a contact-us form at the bare minimum.
A forum, hell even a subreddit would be better, at least it wouldn't require an account to view and is indexable.
I always felt that projects used discord-only as a way to signal that they don't want to deal with users.
My first and only choice is their discord support, when that doesnt help I rather work around the problem than get stuck in their email limbo.
It's an open source project - their customers are going to be small businesses with small teams of technical people to maintain it. I don't think they're competing with QuickBooks at all. Why is Discord not a viable method of communication for these users?
Someone could fork the project and build on top of it to build a commercial project though.
For me, this is actually a common problem with lots of open source projects. They're hobby projects with no commercial support behind them.
It's a super good hobby project tho. If they invested in docs I think it would be onto a winner.
For a FOSS project targeting people who are comfortable using FOSS this seems entirely fine...desirable even. "We don't have money for phone staff who would put you on hold and only be reading off scripted responses anyway, but you can come chat directly with the leaders and maintainers of the software by chat".
I'm a part of a few Discords, and questions are repeated over and over again, forever. People who answer the questions, get tired of answering the same thing and eventually stops helping people. In contrast, using Stack Overflow or anything else, people can search Google for answers and actually find it.
Edit: Misheard parent...
to my knowledge, this is is only an optional moderation feature on some servers, not a global policy - you can still use discord without an email address if the server rules are loose enough
Instead of shitting on someone’s work, get involved and make changes. It’s easier and keeps people involved.
Do you want people to use it or to like you?
Bonus: the website screws up when you have thousands of transactions that need to be reconciled. I couldn't come up with a good test case as it seems to be some weird internal race condition.
In other words: I wholeheartedly welcome an open source project my business can build on.
Still using it regularly. No subscriptions, no cloud, no nasty surprises to contend with. I have custom code that automatically pulls exchange rates from public sources and injects into the appropriate UI fields. My accountant's still able to ingest the file for year-end. Will probably be on it for another decade.
This project looks interesting, especially as a non-cloud offering. As for support...well that's certainly something folks can provide if there's a need.
Knowing that these things happen is why I use gnucash.
I’m my case I even need to patch their css to get invoices to render to PDF „somewhat“ correctly.
I’m still sticking around to see if this is just a momentary lapse but it’s been more than a year now…
Akaunting is a great product, I just wish I could actually pay to self host it so that they have income from that and actually keep selfhosted in mind in the long run.
That said, I'm still going to be invoicing my clients via my selfhosted akaunting instance tonight. So maybe its not that bad after all.
Personally having dealt with crypto in beancount a few times I used a separate file which got updated periodically with a script, which worked well enough.
If you're interested I suggest reading the beancount cookbook[2] as it contain many examples.
[1] https://github.com/davidastephens/beancount-plugins#automati...
[2] https://beancount.github.io/docs/command_line_accounting_coo...
I was an accountant in a former life, and this is a question that most companies end up solving with their accounting software. Last time I looked into ledger or hledger it didn't include this stuff (or I didn't notice that it did).
When I was a contractor, I set up a Ltd company in the UK and had a really hard time working out which software could do my reports for me. I just wanted something that could easily make documents that would be accepted by HMRC.
The UK tax system is incredibly lenient in my experience. They're happy to help you out with any problems or mistakes you make. You just need documents filed on time in the correct format. But it was a nightmare working out which software could export the correct format for me, so I ended up just paying for Xero in the end.
£28/month for a small business, that's over £300 a year I could save if something open-source was well document and said on the website that it supported UK tax documents. But I didn't have the time to download every option, put in a bunch of fake data, and then inspect the report against the HMRC guidelines.
I feel like Docker-based installs are closer to binary, closed-source installs than they are to open-source, compile-or-build-from-source ones in how much they hide how the program works and limits where and how you can run the application. I'd love to hear points for against this, because I think this may also just be me yelling at a cloud like an old man now a days.
Edited for clarity.
No it doesn't. Just read the Dockerfile, it's self documenting and contains all the build steps.
If you don't want to run docker you can read the Dockerfile as it will contain all of the build step. Then you can enter everything yourself manually.
Dockerized apps are typically just as transparent, so that's a bit of a non-argument IMO.
Their main advantages are portability, reproducibility, and security.
For example: https://hub.docker.com/layers/library/mysql/latest/images/sh...
"ADD file:e15c235506d8dd134e69d458a7c0afefef1522e9d0cfb28e3538760ddf032785" isn't much help in installing MySQL on a bare metal server.
It's also not something commonly done (I've never seen a project do it), but you can also just push around a very simple base image like a plain Debian image and then move around an image's runtime filesystem through `docker export` as .tar.gz which could have been crafted by someone who started an interactive shell session and just manually performed some install steps without recording what was being done. It's still technically a containerized system but it does obscure or omit a lot of the value proposition.
(And will this stuff even still run on chips 10-20 years from now anyway? Is there maybe a practical limit to reproducibility?)
NixOS Con Paris had a talk running a decade+ old version of Firefox, complete with Flash.
Personally, I've never once ran into an issue where updating Debian packages in a Docker image impacted my daily life. I'm sure there's some anecdotes and greater than zero potential for it but it just doesn't seem like a major issue anywhere. Docker and Dockerfiles are a practical and low-friction means of getting install steps documented and it's generally a step up over what is normally done. I'm not going to let perfect be the enemy of good and will gladly deal with a Dockerfile that updates its packages first over a markdown file that does nothing.
Well, I have been running NixOS systems for nearly a decade, and now have it deployed across 3 cpu archs in 3 continents. :) Tailscale also uses NixOS in prod, etc.
Not to mention, NixOS means: no docker hub/repo, all you need is a dumb blob store, no container signing, no complicated tooling for BOM or source provination, or tooling for version dep analysis. Much of the entire Golang/K8s devops-startup-chasing/adjacent ecosystem is obliviated by first-order Nix features. You don't have to think about container bloat, or container optimization, storage on nodes is cheaper; it's really hard to name an area that isn't strictly better other than "yes, you have to learn more than running an imperative bash script and capturing the tar filesystem". But, maybe there's good reasons for that. I've personally also sheparded probably half a dozen or more users into full-time contributors, so I know it's not impossible.
When Tvix hits with their NAR alternative, a number of other benefits are just going to start appearing for Nix users that try to adopt it. Much, much faster path downloads, significantly more on-disk de-duplication "for free", much better options for potential P2P replication, etc.
However, where did you find the steps to install this with Docker? I can't find it.
There is a docker-compose file at the root of the repository, which gets you most of the way there. But the above link will undoubtably be more helpful.
As I prefer using OpenBSD for self-hosting (and I speculate that if more self-hosters learned OpenBSD, they likely would also prefer it), I am acutely aware of not only how Docker has gradually taken over nearly all new FOSS projects, but also how many people involved in FOSS projects generally assume GNU / Linux as a prerequisite to all FOSS projects.
One thing GnuCash doesn't currently do, but this Bigcapital apparently does, is inventory management.
Businesses large enough to hire one full time accountant will struggle to use GnuCash, and management (i.e., the owner) isn't going to re-organize all business systems around using an executable. They are going to migrate to Quickbooks.
(Note, however, it doesn't require a "web app" as it could just be a locally hosted database, but GnuCash does not support this feature.)
I have always found this frustrating because Quickbooks ~2005 has pretty much every feature a business actually uses, so it is at least theoretical that a "feature complete" open source small business accounting software could be realized.
Most of the discussions I see in forums here and elsewhere seem to revolve around web-based or technology-based businesses, but the bulk of the Quickbooks small business customers aren't any of these, and I would consider them as the target customer.
(GunCash is great for independent contractors and personal finance, so I'm not knocking it.)
Quickbooks blows my mind in how poorly designed and overly complex it feels. I would only use it if my CPA requires it and even then it would still feel like pulling teeth.
The main thing for me is as a real estate investor, quickbooks doesn't seem designed for me. It feels designed for a large enterprise with accounts receivable and with multiple products. I don't have any of that. I just have some basic revenue and expenses that I need to track, track my mortgage remaining, and understand cash flow as well as profit and loss. I don't know if BigCapital handles this, but I'm just glad to see a new open-source alternative to quickbooks.
Would definitely help to have more information about the functionality other than 9 paragraphs on the front page. GL, chart of accounts, AR, AP, inventory, invoices, purchase orders, financial reporting (income statement/balance sheet/cash flow), etc etc. Preferably with screenshots and links to some walk-troughs.
Would definitely help to add comparison to other solutions (including OSS) out there. I used frontaccouting back in 2010s and was mostly satisfied with it (it is not free or open source but does have "community edition" which is). There's gnucash, plain text accounting, ERPNext, and probably dozens of others... How are you different/better?
People already mentioned discord support. I know people hate BBs these days and consider them old-fashioned, but they do provide one central point to see the latest announcements, questions sorted by area (installation vs accounting vs upgrade etc), links to articles and any other useful resources. Discord lacks all of this, and requires de-anonymization and can restrict your access to the platform on a whim. Non-starter for a lot of people.
Just my 2c.
I had a beast of a time getting Frappe Bench up and receiving requests, but then it refused to serve a page.
There doesn’t seem to be any documentation either.
Plain Text Accounting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36022005 - May 2023 (43 comments)
The end of the accounting search - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36021197 - May 2023 (203 comments)
Many layers of the financial system for small and medium businesses are used to working with QB. It's a means of communication. You can hire people who know it. It integrates with every bank and every, well, everything you might need. You accountant --internal or external-- knows it and has a process to work with it. Etc.
While FOSS is great, it isn't always better. I think FOSS works well when you have a deeply committed, enthusiastic and dedicated community around a pain point or a need. There are great examples of this, GIMP, KiCAD, Krita and various 3D printer tools being examples of this.
Accounting software? I'll believe it when, one day, I walk into my CPA's office and he enthusiastically tells me how he is asking the firm's hundreds of customers to switch to a FOSS solution.
In case it was missed, that was sarcasm. I cannot possibly imagine an accounting firm with hundreds of clients both engaging in turning their entire practice upside-down and having their clients endure untold pain just to save a few hundred bucks on software that just happens to work just fine today and has for decades.
They have some very specialized, industry specific, reporting and invoicing needs that can't be met with a general purpose purpose software.
An application provides a great way to modernize their software without a full rewrite.
Before the mob interprets what I am saying through their reality distortion field, I should note I am NOT hating on FOSS and defending closed-source software as general categories.
There is such a thing as useful industry-standard software on both sides of that divide. And it is perfectly OK to point this out. This doesn't have to be a war. This shouldn't be twisted into hatred or attacks on FOSS or even non-FOSS software. Nobody has the moral high ground. There is no such thing.
These are tools. Some are free and open, some are not. And that's perfectly OK. Sometimes a little critical thinking and reason is a good thing.
> This is nothing new. That does not mean that millions don't benefit
Nobody claimed this is new or that not millions benefit or are happy with QB (source needed though).
> Before the mob interprets what I am saying through their reality distortion field
Which mob? Reality distortion? Nobody was accusing you of hating FOSS, why do you feel you need to defend yourself?
> This doesn't have to be a war.
To me there was no indication it is a war. Why do you feel it is?
> Nobody has the moral high ground. There is no such thing.
Bold claim. There is no such thing as moral high ground?
You are reading something into my comments that isn't there. Don't take it personally, none of it is aimed at the person I was replying to anyway.
> source needed though
Ah, the HN response when...
Evident to anyone who actually knows anything about how businesses work. Still, here, go to page 5:
https://www.codat.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Codat_Guide-...
This is for 2020. Numbers for 2023 are likely larger.
Quickbooks offerings have a 75% dominance of the market. And, for a good reason. This is the standard I was talking about.
Again, nobody gives a shit about FOSS, only us nerds. In other words, those of us who likely live two or more standard deviations from the mean. Go ask your local dentist if she gives a shit about FOSS.
Everywhere else under the curve, people want to focus on their core business and get on with the job of making money, supporting their families, innovating and growing their business. Their accountant/CPA says "Use Quickbooks. It will make the process simpler". That's what they do. The cost is a rounding error for any non-trivial business. FOSS does not matter. What matters is solving a non-revenue-generating problem in a way that does not consume clock cycles and moving on to more important things.
> Which mob? Reality distortion? Nobody was accusing you of hating FOSS, why do you feel you need to defend yourself?
Saying anything even remotely in favor of paid closed-source software or hardware is considered "unholy" by a certain segment of the tech community. Online, they can be quite vocal and even aggressive. They generally lack what I call "real world sense of proportion and common sense" and behave as FOSS absolutists. At the extremes, it is a cult or a mob or a group of seriously misguided individuals who lack context.
I love FOSS and support it as much as possible. I hope to be able to have the time to contribute to some of it (KiCAD, I have you at the top of the list!) when I retire. However, very frequently in business you have to make decisions based on what gets the job done so you can focus on what you were there to do in the first place.
I have tons of examples of this. We have been licensing Solidworks almost since it came out. This amounts to tens of thousands of dollars per seat. Our SW Flow and Thermal simulation license probably cost tens of thousands of dollars per seat as well. And the same is the case for our SW CAM tools. I'd have to do the math, yet I would not be surprised to learn that the full suite of SW tools and SW cost us in the order of $75K to $100K to license and maintain over the years. And that was, and continues to be, the right decision. It's the right tool for the job. We get to focus on our core business of developing technology. We have immediate support and points of contact whenever we need something, anything. The software is good and always getting better. And it is a standard (much like Quickbooks is a standard).
We actually pay for a Fusion360 license, yet, we've had difficulties using it in some cases because some of the work we do falls under ITAR regulations and the whole cloud thing can be a serious non-starter for that world. In other words, while it is cheaper, it's a non-starter because it would introduce more problems than we would ever care to deal with.
Another example is paying for the Jetbrains tool suite. Excellent software. It works. We get to focus on other things that matter. Yeah, we also use VSCode where it makes sense. We pay for lots of other tools when it makes sense. Photoshop and the Adobe suite is another example of something that is still a standard.
In business, any second spent focusing on anything other than your core revenue-generating mission is a second wasted. While FOSS can be great when it works well, anyone with any experience has stories of problems that can burn time at a massive rate. There's a place for everything.
> There is no such thing as moral high ground?
Some feel that being a FOSS absolutist is a moral high ground. There is no such thing as a moral high ground purely based on whether software is free and/or open source or paid and/or closed source.
To state it in the simplest possible terms: You pick-up and use a screwdriver because it gets the job done. It matters not if that screwdriver was given to you for free along with full design files on how to make your own or you bought it at the store. What matters is that it let you tighten the screw and you move on.
I don't think the FOSS vision in this space is to compel one new option on everyone that isn't an option. I can only imagine it's quite the opposite.
This is more US-based, I'm working for a QB competitor in France and let me tell you that they are going to be crushed at very high speed either by us or another similar modern competitor. They are going to lose the whole market within 5 years and TV ads won't help them. They are moving way too slowly for the market.
Many startups in the space are building features, not products, and are at risk of QBO adding their feature the same way Stripe has been killing off fintechs with every new feature rollout.
There are many “let’s fix accounting” startups but the market itself moves slowly. It’s difficult to nudge users to switch accounting software and QBO has deeply entrenched network effects with accountants and integrations.
Another huge issue for QBO competitors is that there’s only so much you can do with the general ledger (GL) and closely associated functionality. The GL system is an end user of multiple different transaction sources/pipelines while most of the time those pipelines are outside of the GL software’s control. There isn’t enough there to strongly differentiate and pull users off QBO unless (maybe) you build a mega platform that handles all parts of the transaction lifecycles (something like what Brex is doing), and then you need to convince users to be all-in on all of the components to get the benefits.
Not only have they not added any new features to justify this fee increase, but they have actually removed a few features that I depended on like multi-currency reports. I am actively looking for an alternative.
I have been eyeing up https://www.waveapps.com/ as a free alternative (not open source though) but I have not seen it mentioned much in this thread so either its just less known or not very good.
https://www.accountingcoach.com/
Quite incredible, and well explained.
also i dont see mention of an API. Being able to provide an API to one's own accounting system is a super-power (and probably very incremental to the work you're doing anyway)
Instead of building a whole new format (with implications on testing, etc) - it would be incremental effort to build support for ledger-cli format . And completely mitigate 90% of the objections by accounting teams.
not asking for them to build cli functionality.
this is the file format - https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Example-Journal-File
But I really appreciate all the different solutions in this space! I build our own when we started.
In fact, someone also wrote a book on this - https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger/
I will defer if you are indeed building your own competing tool in this space which is better, but holding to the original point of my request - maybe it will be incremental to support your format if ledger-cli format is supported today. versus not supporting any disk format (or inventing a new one).
[1] https://groups.google.com/g/ledger-cli/search?q=double%20ent...
tldr: we have quite different requirements and we operate in a very different space. I still think ledger looks cool!
It's about as minimalistic as you can get while still incorporating legibility and flexibility to support arbitrary transactions (including in commodities, etc.).
I say this as somebody who voluntarily wrote a parser and generator for their format, as a happy user, and without being affiliated with the project -- it's quite good!
So I think our requirements are a tad more complex than ledger can support. We are compatible with the German DATEV format. DATEV is the accounting software and we don't wanna replace it. I could write a whole lot about that but I'll spare you that. Let me just say that we have good reasons to have our own format of accounting internally and there's no benefit in supporting ledger. I don't think there's even one person in the world that is a) our target persona and b) uses ledger.
Tax quotas, reverse charge taxation, the various date types, notes, links are all totally supported with Ledger's primitives as they are. SKR04 just looks like a list of account classifications, which is totally fine. You can either make that 1:1 with the account list you use, or you can tag entries in a transaction with metadata indicating that it's associated with that SKR04 classification.
Again, not attacking your decision to use your own format, it's the right choice in many situations. But ledger is literally the primitives of accounting – it's up to you to superimpose your system of rules and regulations on it, but since it's just double-entry accounting with metadata and tags, it almost certainly can.
Here's an example transaction, where somebody pays $20.00 for 20 tons of scrap metal, with links to the invoice, an invoice and transaction date, a mark to indicate that it's settled, and a $8 VAT liability that accrues at the end of the month.
2021-01-01=2021-01-03 * ACME Supplier
; invoice_num: 123
; invoice_link: https://invoices.widgetsandthings.de?id=123
; service_date: 2021-01-02
; notes: John said he'll charge us more next year.
Liabilities:CreditCards:Chase:XXXX $-20.00
Liabilities:Taxes:VAT $-8.00 ;[=2021/01/31]
; reverse charge tax, accrues at end of month
[Quotas:Tax:VAT] $8.00 ;[=2021/01/31]
; you'd use a "virtual" account to express "quotas" or "budgets".
Expenses:ScrapMetal $28.00
; I'm bundling the VAT and metal expense into a single entry.
; But if you wanted to record them separately, with their own effective dates, you can.
Assets:ScrapMetal 10 tons ; skr_code: SM2201 (I'm making this up)
Receivables:ScrapMetal -10 tonsWe obviously keep our accounting data in databases and only support exporting to DATEV atm, hence the compatibility with that format. The point of our whole endeavour is to *not* do accounting. You process your documents and we use OCR and simple input from the user to create the correct journal entries. Your tax consultants and accountants work in the background to review everything and export that into their systems to continue working on that. That's necessary for all the publications and tax reports you need to do in Germany/Europe. You can think of us as a pre-accounting software. A nice input layer. It's more about the bigger picture. Think multiple companies, real estate. You get a real time overview of your finances. You get banking integration. You can collaborate, with your employees, your family, notaries, lawyers, tax people and accountants. So accounting is just a side-effect for the user. Having a real time overview of a more complex financial setup is the USP.
Having said that, I don't see a real value to support import/export of the ledger format for now. Our first persona we're targeting aren't people that do their accounting themselves.
It's written in C++ and scales about as well as you'd imagine (i.e. mainly a function of memory constraints).
It sounds like exporting to DATEV is the right choice for your customers and region.
The benefit of a format like ledger is that it's universal and relatively trivial to write your own parser for. Most accounting software packages might not import ledger files natively, but there's probably a ledger -> $your_format converter out there – if not, it's generally trivial to write one. It's kind of like how "markdown" became a common language for latex-generated PDFs, HTML, and powerpoint slides thanks to Pandoc. Ledger doesn't quite have a pandoc-style tool yet, but `.ldg` files are basically the accounting equivalent of markdown or HTML.
I did some googling around for datev and ledger, found this thread that might be interesting to you (much of it is over my head): https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/jzi6ci...
Sounds like a good product! Wish you the best of luck with it. :)
If that's the case (if bigcapitalhq gets full IP ownership rights to your contributions), bigcapitalhq can dual licence the software other contributors made and profit of them.
But...while QB is a dumpster fire, it has incredibly deep and finicky functionality. Accountants know how to make magic "integrity override" journal entries in its data. It understands how to electronically file a W-2 report in all 50 states. And on and on.
I'd be surprised if any OSS solution ever has this richness of functionality, with the level of trust in its correctness required for money and taxes. The SaaS vendor might be able to produce such a thing but it'll end up being the "enterprise upgrade" that isn't available OSS.
Filing a w-2 is payroll related not accounting related. While lots of accounting software does payroll it is not a requirement for accounting software to do so.
it works self hosted and on desktop.
Currently only for indian tax markets but work is slowly underway for bringing internationalization. Feel free to check the demo on https://gnukhata.gitlab.io/gkapp and if interested, help on https://gitlab.com/gnukhata/gkapp
I prefer erpnext/FBook over odoo due to much better performance ,not gimped by freemium/opencoure model (ERPNext promise no freemium )
There are some things that are “natural SaaS” and interoperability with ugly services run by huge banks that are probably moving targets and probably have administrative overhead to use is one example.
Plaid offers transactions APIs (https://plaid.com/products/transactions/), but I guess to your point these APIs are geared towards fintech companies, not personal use.
EDIT: I don't know how well it works in general, though. You'd have to test it yourself.
[1] https://github.com/simplefin/simplefin.github.com/issues/14
YNAB promoted not having it, as a feature. They claimed it would make you more responsible by taking 30 seconds after every purchase to open the app and add the purchase. Then they went from a one time fee ($30) to SaaS and began charging $100 + VAT a year, with automatic bank import being the only new feature. Either they are making bank, or it's insanely expensive.
In Aus all our major software providers do it directly with a bank connection - why can't this program.
It’s time consuming to add every new expensive every time. Specially with so many small SaaS subscriptions.
The only reason why I said yes is because of the many CPAs I've interviewed they were the best (they probably aren't the best, just a lot of them are terrible).
IIRC, some features of the customer-facing interface to my credit union appear to be from Intuit.
Secondly - my bookkeepers are trained specifically in QB (same with most bookkeeping services), and if I replace the software, I need to find new bookkeeping, or do it myself (which if I wanted to be a bookkeeper, that's what I would have become).
Lastly - this wont apply to most and a lot of people will probably look down on me, but I really like their "QuickBooks Capital" short-term medium interest loans. It is easy to get a $50k 12 month loan at around 8%. It comes in handy when clients are slow at paying (happens way too often).
I tried many years to find somehting that could replace Quickbooks in our company, cause it lacks on API access. But everything else is lightyears ahead of competitors solutions.
It looks like this offers more of a web approach without the need for a local install so it can be a bit more collaborative.
Also - and this is personal preference - the GNUCash UI feels quite dated.
But I say all this not having looked at this product and I don’t know if sales here works that way or not.