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

What about crossover office

[PB_TPU_40]

My fiance and I use crossover office with quicken. To me it shouldn't be that hard, another option is wine. Yes you could write a finacial app, but migrating books from exsisting apps would be a bear as well. There are options, its just none are for the non tech savvy. Maybe in the near future? :D

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?

When? Here's a hint...

[dereference]

Look at the dateline of the NewsForge article:

Quickbooks: the missing link for small business Linux
Thursday December 16, 2004 (01:34 PM GMT)
By: Robin 'Roblimo' Miller

So it's been 18 months already, and the arguably nothing has changed.

The blurb is incredibly deceptive

[Arker]

However, if you read the linked article you'll see that there are actually several good accounting programs available, including some "just as good as -- or possibly better than -- QuickBooks."

It's not about lack of software, it's about "network affects" and the irrationally high premium many people but on avoiding change.

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.

There are Solid F/OSS Accounting packages

[Noksagt]

I maintain a FAQ on a financial forum about open source financial applications. It is mostly geared towards personal users, but there are links and information to business-focused applications as well. There are non-profits & small businesses who do use F/OSS!

There isn't an open source QuickBooks clone. But many F/OSS applications do have features which QuickBooks lack (and vice versa, of course). Rather than looking for a "clone," one should clearly define their requirements & look for the app or apps that may fit those needs. If some are "close," money and/or labor can be spent refining the F/OSS applications. If all are far from your requirements (such as a requirement like "I need software which does exactly what QuickBooks does & has the exact same interface"), then suck it up & purchase QuickBooks. It doesn't cost an arm and a leg! If you find your organization doing this a lot, then re-evaluate your software selection practices--alternative software usually doesn't mean cloned software (whether F/OSS or proprietary) & you will never be able to benefit from very good software which is monetarily cheaper, uses open formats, and is functional.

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.

GnuCash tutorial teaches accounting: try it!

[KWTm]

What got me started using GnuCash was the documentation. No kidding. I was absolutely bored on a flight with a Windows laptop, and decided to boot Knoppix just to fiddle around. Discovered GnuCash and started reading what I thought was just a help file or some tutorial on using the software. Wow, it taught me how to use the double-entry accounting system, the difference between Assets, Liabilities and Equity, and organized my thinking in how to think about money. I think whoever wrote the GnuCash docs deserves kudos. Wait, lemme see ...

Here we go:
Carol Champagne
Email: carol@io.com

Chris Lyttle
Affiliation: GnuCash Documentation Team
Email: chris@wilddev.net

Jon Lapham
Affiliation: GnuCash Documentation Team
Email: lapham@extracta.com.br

Many thanks, Carol, Chris and Jon.

If you haven't tried tracking your own finances, give it a whirl. I found, to my surprise, that it not only gave me a sense of power to know everything about my money (I learned a few surprising things about my spending), but it actually made it enjoyable to be stingy. The less I splurged, the better I felt because I could see the effect of my money being saved. It sure beats seeing how much disk space I saved by compressing my files.

I did end up having to spend about 20-30 hours writing a Python program to help massage my GnuCash files; thank goodness GnuCash uses a completely transparent XML format. (A true geek would probably have been able to do it in half the time.) This is because, I have to admit, I use GnuCash the lazy way.

What's supposed to happen is that, every day before I climb into bed, I enter all the transactions I made that day: $1.49 for the hamburger, $35.18 for the book I bought, $999.99 for the tank of gasoline, etc. Later that month, I download my bank statement and credit card statement from my bank's web site (QFX/OFX format), and import it into GnuCash. GnuCash checks that the statement matches with what I've entered, and marks each entry as reconciled.

Well, I have better things to do than to enter transactions every day. So, instead, I just let GnuCash do it for me by importing my bank statements and credit card statements. GnuCash says for each transaction: "What's this?? $1.49 from 'MCDONALDS FOODLIKE SUBSTANCE CORP'? I never saw this entry before!" and so on for each entry. My Python program looks at the entry description to figure out where it should be categorized; e.g. if it matches "(?i).*mcdonald'*s.*", then it classifies it under the "fast food, unhealthy" account. And so I can see exactly how much I've spent for groceries, transportation, entertainment, etc.

I did try KMyMoney, since I am a KDE fan (thank you to KStrauser for pointing it out), but I found GnuCash to be a more mature application. Incidentally, my wife bought Microsoft Money, tried it out but found it confusing, couldn't think of a good reason why that program kept wanting to connect to the Internet (blocked by ZoneAlarm), and decided not to trust it.

I agree with my sibling poster that Mandrake is no longer a great distro to use. I used it previously, and have switched to Ubuntu Dapper where I happily compute away, really using the desktop rather than having to tinker with it. So, load up your k/Ubuntu (it's a live CD now, for those of you clinging to Windows) and give GnuCash a whirl.

Umm... did I go a bit off topic?

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.