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Ask HN: What simple finance tool for a small business?
Can you recommend an online finance tool that would help me track the ins and outs of my (business) finances. I'm looking for something simple, I'm not incorporated in US so I do not need accounting or payroll or to charge people through that tool, but multi currency would be highly desirable (as I'm invoicing in both USD and EUR). Just to be aware of where I am financially.
Apart from ins and outs, a nice feature would be to be able to write down my invoices and be able to track paid ones by a simple checkbox or similar and, therefore, have an overview of the unpaid ones.
Everything I have found so far is either full of features I don't need or way too simple (and made for personal finance).
Any idea, is something there that I have missed? Thanks!
- brudgers 10y agoMy take is that such software needs to follow double entry principles and part of that is that the system is based on human attention to detail to at least some minimum degree. It also means that the software requires minimal domain knowledge. GnuCash might be an alternative: https://www.gnucash.org/ https://www.gnucash.org/ Ledger is another: http://www.ledger-cli.org/ http://www.ledger-cli.org/
- illuminated 10y agoThanks brudgers! I know already of both these applications. I probably wasn't clear enough in the original post - I'm looking for something online so all the partners would have access to all the data and be able to manage it. Or, a desktop solution with shared data...
- brudgers 10y agoI see. I think it might be helpful to distinguish between financial accounting and managerial accounting. Financial accounting is the primary role of a tool like GnuCash. It is focused on accurately and precisely recording transactions in detail and creating reports against external standards. There is an expectation that financial accounting data and reports are subject to audit. Managerial accounting is for the businesses' operational decision making process. It will rely on financial accounting data for historical trends within the business but can use arbitrary sources for projecting the future course of the business. From a financial accounting standpoint 'managing the data' is somewhere along the path to 'cooking the books' because the expectation of standardization and consistency. On the managerial accounting side, it's more a matter of slicing and dicing the financial data and spicing it up with data from other sources. What the partners need is 'read only' access to the financial data and the historical method is via reports and this can be CSV fed into Excel or R or whatever else meets the business needs. The important thing here are flexible tools for analysis relevant to the specific business at a specific moment in time. My advice is that any system designed around financial accounting is unlikely to be very flexible for analytics because financial accounting has a rigid set of abstractions. It's perhaps better to think in terms of a data pipeline and running tools over the output of the financial accounting data.