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Comment by paddw | Hacker News Reader

For people who use QuickBooks, what's the main barrier to a viable open-source competitor? Does QuickBooks offer a ton of necessary integrations or something?

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Your accountant knows it. When you're on other software, it's a challenge for them - and that costs you extra money.

How hard would it be to export a Quickbooks file to hand over to the accountant (assuming read-only case)? Sort of like Google docs exporting to docx.

My accountant and bookkeepers go in and edit entries and accounts. So there is no read-only case where my CPA is concerned.

QuickBooks desktop isn't really a supported platform anymore. Most people have migrated to QuickBooks Online and their accountant has a login to their account.

I think this is the major reason. Accountants would usually label themselves as "Quickbooks/Xero certified partner" as a selling point.

I had Wave...it was free. Accountant was OK w/ it then asked me to change to Quickbooks after 2 years. I understand Quickbooks has a lot of functionality that's great for CPAs, but none that I need. I'm the one who spends hours a week in it.

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).

First - My accountant knows it (along with a few other), it directly imports into their other back-office intuit software that does my taxes.

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).

QuickBooks has a ton auf functions that no online competitor has. E.g. customize bill layout, many reporting sheets, tax submit, bank account sync, recurring invoices / bills, ...

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.

Bank, payroll, and tax integration on the lock in front. Also, QuickBooks is really easy to get going for non-accountants and historically at least, their support was really good. That's what really made them really popular.

beig able to quickly either upload a QBO file which would have all your transactions, or direct bank integration with Plaid...after that, being able to quickly create rules to categorize different transactions based on string comparisons and then finally generate the Profit and Loss statement which is what the CPA wants to see. I used to have a bookkeeper who would manually type in all the transactions into the Check Register, but the past few years you can do all this in a few hours by just importing the QBO files and changing the categories and generating the P&L.

For me it is if my CPA and bookeepers can and will use it.

Banking integration

That's a helpful new feature, but they've held the market by the throat far longer than that was an offering.

They are on the backend too.

IIRC, some features of the customer-facing interface to my credit union appear to be from Intuit.

Cheap, good, no major issues, everyone knows it, tons of integrations.

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