When Will OSS Financial Apps Catch Up?

RomulusNR asks: "One sticking issue preventing small groups such as small business and nonprofits from wholly migrating to Linux, or even open-source application software, is the sub-adequate feature scope of accounting applications. QuickBooks is the standard, easier for non-technical people to learn, and is free or extremely cheap for nonprofits, and comes built-in with nearly every tax form and chartered accounting reports imaginable. Open source software seems like a natural fit for nonprofits, but if they can't fulfill their legal financial obligations with it, it's a non-starter. Add to that the fact that most people are not terribly tech savvy, and some have spent a lot of time learning the few aspects of QuickBooks that are most relevant to them; retraining on a totally different app is not a practical endeavor. Is there any hope that the field of OSS accounting apps will catch up to the practical needs of those who would theoretically best benefit from them?" The linked article is from Newsforge which, like Slashdot, is owned by OSTG.

Comments

Probably never.

[ThousandStars]

I say "probably never" not because I'm a troll, but rather because you have to consider the nature of financial applications: they're difficult to write and require innumerable persnickety design detail to get right. These days Quicken has the "network effect" of many users, meaning that most banks offer downloads for Quicken. That's brutally hard to overcome, as the OO.org people know. In terms of taxes, one can now file online in the US if you're using the 1040EZ, I believe, and maybe even the regular 1040. So web apps may make that point moot. Even if they don't, tax information has to be updated every year. Who among developers wants this thankless job with no pay?

Financial apps are also not of major interest to developers - not only they require the attention to detail noted above, but attention to boring detail. Most developers are interested in development, not the nuts and bolts of small business accounting or something similar. As a result, I think it will be a very long time, if ever, before Linux "catches up." Of course, if more people were writing these apps instead of waiting for others to write them or writing about why others haven't written them, the choices would be much better.

When working on tax software becomes interesting

[bunions]

I can see it now:

"Well, I'm really interested in starting an open-source project. A game? Naaah ... maybe some cool drawing software? Or security tools to keep out hax0rz? No, no ... wait, I've got it! Accounting!"

I always thought it was one of the acknowledged shortcomings of open source stuff that it concentrated all the work in the high-profile, high-geek-factor areas?

Never.

[CliffSpradlin]

Open source software will likely never catch up to Quicken / Quickbooks / MS Money.

Even if the basic software functionality was created, you still won't be able to connect with your bank via the software. You won't be able to download cancelled checks, write new ones/pay bills, or any of these other functionalities. You won't be able to because the bank gets a nice kickback from the financial software publishers to open their systems up to them, and the bank has essentially no incentive to work to open it up.

Publishers now have online collaboration tools for this stuff.. open source never will catch up. At most it'll be useful for low-complexity personal accounting, nothing on the scale that satifies enterprise needs.

-Cliff

Re:What about crossover office

[Eightyford]

I think the author was asking about free open source accounting programs, not ways to run commercial apps on linux.

Re:Financial Applications aren't fun to write

[invisage01]

I write an accounting application for some Australian industries. It's my day job - and i don't think it could get any more boring as far as development goes. Essential to business - hence there is a great deal of $$$ in it. This makes the boring task worthwhile - asking someone to do this boring task for no $$$ benefit is a HUGE ask. I often daydream of what i could be developing rather than accounting software - my work is mindnumbing and to businesses who use our software it is mission critical - so if things go wrong there is a great deal of abuse. For these reasons i don't think the OSS accounting packages are going to be available any time soon.

Legal Problems?

[miyako]

I know that as an OSS developer there are a few reasons that I wouldn't start up or contribute to an open source financial program. The most obvious, and perhaps the most common reason is that accounting software isn't really fun to write- or perhaps its less fun to wright than other things. It's not as though you can really write a new algorithm to figgure up taxes- it's pretty much just the way the IRS wants to do it.
Related to this last point is that there is a lot of obligation related to writing financial software and as a free software developer I really don't want that hanging over my head. Even with the standard "not fit for any purpose" disclaimer, I would be afraid that I would have someone coming after me if some bug in some code I wrote meant that each company paid a few million less in taxes than they were supposed to.
The thing is, the code isn't the hard part of writing financial software, it's dealing with all of the law code stuff.
I think that the best way to bring this sort of software to Linux is to focus on getting companies to port their software, or getting Wine to support it.
Even moreso than with other sorts of software, I don't think that web applications are viable because of security reasons.

Re:There are Solid F/OSS Accounting packages

[RomulusNR]

alternative software usually doesn't mean cloned software

I realize that, of course; but an OSS app that is to QuickBooks what Gimp is to Photoshop, or what OOo is to MSO, would be about the desired neighborhood of similarity. It doesn't have to clone, but it can't be so arcane, esoteric, or alien that the user has to be entirely retrained on how to navigate to everything they need. I figure it takes a person who knows Word maybe half an hour to understand their most commonly used functions OOo Writer.

A CPA's Perspective

[rmjohnso]

I'm a CPA who works in IT auditing. From an accounting and tax perspective, US-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and the tax code can be very complex. On top of that, there is a GAAP for every country, and there is even an attempt to create international standards. In addition, there are specifics for non-profits and government entities (government accounting is very backwards compared to private business accounting).

I doubt there is a volunteer group with enough programming and accounting skills to write OSS accounting and tax software. I have dabbled in programming and tax is definitely not my strong suit. Remember too that for the big companies, they use systems like Oracle Financials, SAP, etc. Many of these run on Linux or in some sort of *NIX environment. Tons of companies also still keep their General Ledger (G/L) on internally developed mainframe or AS/400 style systems. As other posters have said, there is a lot of money to be made writing a good system and selling it. The flip-side to that coin is that the end-user customer/business has a lot to lose (money, non-compliance with regulations, other reporting requirements, etc.) from having something half-way put together or something that is entirely wrong.

Two words:

[RingDev]

'Mono' and 'Java'.

There is your key for getting application penetration on Linux and Windows.

-Rick

Re:The blurb is incredibly deceptive NO ITS NOT.

[Kadin2048]

Actually, I agree with this.

At least as I see it, unless a piece of software interfaces with my bank, it's not worth anything. Once you've used software that just sucks the transactional data directly from your bank and dumps it into your ledger, does all your reconciliation automatically, etc., etc., you can never go back. Ever.

It's the sort of thing that's valuable enough that it would be worth keeping a dedicated PC sitting around to do nothing else, if I had to use computers that couldn't run the package that did it.

From a small-business perspective, it saves hours of work a week, and in some cases might be the difference between just having the business owner do all the books themselves and hiring someone to keep track of receipts/bills/whatever (or perhaps more likely, hiring another regular employee so that they can devote their time to keeping track of the books).

As I understand it, GNUCash will download bank transactions from banks in Europe, because they use a standardized protocol for it. But here in the U.S., the de facto standard is the system used by Quicken, and it's all proprietary or similarly hobbled, thus no Free solutions that will do it. If anyone else can substantiate what the story is, I'd be interested.

But anyway, I agree -- a "general ledger" program that requires the user to input every transaction is not going to satisfy most people anymore. That might have been impressive 10 or 20 years ago, but what most people who use Quicken or Quickbooks want and expect is something that will integrate with their bank, get all their data, and do the balancing/reconciliation/reporting/tax-preparation for them. If you can't do that, IMO you're a non-starter.

That said, I don't think it's what's keeping people from transitioning to Linux: keeping Quicken going requires that you have ONE Windows PC, somewhere in a corner someplace. It's not the sort of thing that stops you from migrating a business, if you really wanted to switch. (How many businesses only have one computer? Not very many, and the ones that do, aren't very significant.) What I think is keeping people on Windows is inertia, pure and simple. Linux is different, people hate things that are different. You could have replacements for every application on the entire Windows platform and people would still find SOMETHING to keep them from switching, in order to rationalize their basic fear of leaving their comfort zone. The problem isn't that Linux doesn't have application x, the "problem," to a lot of people, is that Linux is not Windows. As long as Linux is not Windows, they will always find reasons not to switch to it. I call these people idiots, but they're a large percentage of the population.

Re:GNUCash is rewriting

[micheas]

They're (GNUCash) retooling their backend as SQL . . .

It would be really cool if SQL-Ledger could share the same database as GNUCash.

This would be ideal for Small businesses and small NGO/NPO's that need to outsource accounting but spend a healthy fraction of their money for accountants on travel time.

Integration with CiviCRM, SugarCRM, Vtiger, OSCommerce, and VirtueMart and you would have a compelling package.

Re:GnuCash tutorial teaches accounting: try it!

[jawtheshark]

think whoever wrote the GnuCash docs deserves kudos. Wait, lemme see ...

And then you thank them by publishing their emails on a public forum, ready for spambots to catch them. That is really so nice of you....

Re:GNUCash exists...

[mrchaotica]

My biggest concern is that I have several years worth of financial data stored in MS Money (version 4) that I don't want to lose.

If you think about it, that's actually a good reason to switch to GNUCash! Think what would happen if MS Money stopped working -- you'd be screwed because all your important data is in a proprietary format. And the longer you keep using MS Money, the more data will be lost when that happens. Just like with the government and OpenOffice, you should switch to GNUCash ASAP to preserve your records in an open format.