Ask HN: Quickbooks Alternative?

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1. There will never be a viable solution until an ISO standard is published and governments force organizations to use accounting systems certified to follow the standard. 2. Vendors would have to open-source the code that allows us to understand what happened to the data after it was entered into fields and how it's processed. 3. Accountants are simply used as pawns when someone needs to go to prison for embezzlement. Accountant could never prove if the data in the report is interpreted correctly. I built such system, no one wants to use it because it's too different, has no support, no wide adoption. People always want something more mature. They don't realize all these vendors are making up their own rules as they go. Intuit, SAP, they're all just protection against audit. Let's say you have line item called "muffin" and it was sold for $80. Maybe it's a valid operation, maybe it's a sign of embezzlement. The point is, there is no way to check the largest organization because, say, YouTube, has so many operations, you'd need to use LLMs to check each one automatically against possible examples of questionable operations, and that's after you have standard schema, which none exists today. You're best waiting until modern Luca Pacioli is born and publishes that standard and everyone agrees to follow. So, best you can do is wait. Simply no one cares about how to do it the right way. Everyone has their own interpretation of what accounting system schema should look like. The solution is so obvious that if implemented people would end up in prison because they just couldn't follow the rules most likely going forward. They'd be exposed as only being in existence because the government doesn't have the audit capacity. Again, YouTube, if you had to check legitimacy of transactions manually, or even after triggering anomaly, you'd still need five seconds on each transaction at minimum. Unless it is acceptable to justify that some transactions will never be checked for legitimacy. Every time you watch YouTube video, you are shown an ad. That ad is associated with an amount someone was willing to pay to get you to watch it. There are simply so many entries in the journal every second, that if you had to spend five seconds on each transaction to verify, you couldn't because the number of transactions in the world is increasing faster than resources we have to check them. Especially in high frequency trading, again, if the journal has to record a debit and credit, that's two rows of data in the database. We have no audit capacity. Organizations know this and simply know which numbers on tax forms don't trigger audit. That's why tax forms often have occupation, EIN, and historical anomalies in income/expense. As long as you don't trigger those, you will never be checked. Organizations know this. The accounting department is simply smoke and mirrors and they'll pick an accountant who can't prove the system misinterpreted or didn't correctly save or calculate, and they'll end up in prison with no ability to prove their innocence unless the source code is released. Furthermore, quickbooks and others don't let you receive payment against individual line item on the invoice, which is important if your invoice has multiple vendors you are a funnel for and they have different terms where partial payments have to be allocated correctly. Anyone entering this space has no idea what they want and what they're getting themselves into. You are better off waiting for Pacioli V2 while using QB than anything. It benefits oneself to have perfect accounting system, but it's an insane effort, you literally become accounting system vendor instead of your core business. You'll be so good at providing such software others will envy you and want to use your system. Besides, any effort must be international. You should be able to use QB in North Korea, but you can't. Which means QB is not that good. ...

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I use puzzle.io

I have a very small business so can't say how it compares to running a bigger business on qb