It can create invoices and receive payments.<p>Not quite production ready, yet.<p>Only need PostgreSQL installed to try.<p>I will add support to choose SQLite when they add native support for geography types.
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...<p>I am not a fan of <i>"Qwakbooks"</i> 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.<p>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. <a href="https://developer.intuit.com/app/developer/qbo/docs/api/accounting/all-entities/journalentry" rel="nofollow">https://developer.intuit.com/app/developer/qbo/docs/api/acco...</a><p>So yes, this is a well structured database for an accounting system but beyond that there isn't much here.<p>Some other points:<p><i>"Due to its wide scope, the system is designed to be incomplete, allowing organizations to finalize the implementation."</i> 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)<p><i>"Companies that adopt my system are far less likely to get audited..."</i> 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.<p>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.
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...<p>I will say this is by far the most passionate README.md I've ever seen, lol;<p><pre><code> 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 *****.
</code></pre>
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>P.S. "Truck drivers of the office"...?
>GAAP and IFRS compliant implementation of a forward-only double-entry accounting method<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>Without those the software is dead in the water.
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.
Wow, this is really neat. Congrats on the launch. Are you seeking or accepting contributors? I’ll be installing it today.<p>I’ve unintentionally worked with and helped implement systemization and automation over a dozen different accounting systems and ERPs. They blur together.<p>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.<p>A few questions:<p>- 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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
If you think Intuit is accounting than you don't really know what accounting is.<p>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.<p>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.<p>And no, as is this program couldn't be used to run a bodega, let alone an aircraft carrier.
An extraordinarily arrogant approach to presenting a project.<p>The TEXT datatype is deprecated in most RDBMSs. A minor and insignificant point but following the 'remove the brown M&Ms' rider principle, it makes me question the integrity of everything else, especially given the insults in the readme and lack of professionalism throughout.
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.
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.
To the author: What are your thoughts on tiger Beetle? I think it provides most of the primitives that you mention in a highly optimized package (except hierarchical relationships).
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<p>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...
I'm doing a little detective work here.<p>1. A posting like this appeared on [Reddit](
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1e79xoz/creating_an_all_in_one_farming_application_in_c/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1e79xoz/creati...</a>) two months ago. This repo started two months ago. The user [ApexProgrammer](<a href="https://github.com/ApexProgrammer">https://github.com/ApexProgrammer</a>) has one repo under their account.<p>2. These repos' first commits happened around July 12th, 2024, and July 9th, 2024.<p>3. One reference "Farm Manager," and another reference "Farm to Market."<p>Questions:<p>- Are these artifacts from a school project?
- Are these AI-driven code repositories bent on world domination?
- Are these questions to remain unanswered?
It looks like a great product. I have to be honest though, I didn't read too much in detail - and this was the colour scheme seemed to "scream" at me. There is too much high-contrast colours (deep reds, etc.)<p>Just my humble opinion. Which I am allowed to have :)
Nice start!<p>There are a few other OSS implementations, a list on Wikipedia: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_accounting_software" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_accounting_softw...</a><p>As someone who has helped write and manage one used internally at a thousands of active employee organization I have some thoughts:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>why</i>, that also never erases information.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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 <i>AND</i> their world-view in our PostgreSQL database, we can replicate any previous state(due to keeping both world-views and precise auditing).
Some big claims in that readme for a project with no tests :)<p>Lots of C# repo's here demonstrating unit/integration/acceptance testing within dockerised containers if you need some examples
<a href="https://github.com/PeterKneale?tab=repositories">https://github.com/PeterKneale?tab=repositories</a>
Hahaha, this is the most aggressive readme ever.<p>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 .