I think building a superior product would be trivial and profitable for a reasonably funded, small team of developers. Most of the accounting profession uses to

I think building a superior product would be trivial and profitable for a reasonably funded, small team of developers. Most of the accounting profession uses tools that are from the 80s and 90s, so the user experience is horrible for staff accountants. The main problem is that selling to accounting firms is difficult because procurement usually goes through partners. At the firms I worked for, our procurement process required buy-in from a majority of the partners and the product would require serious security features that are beyond my current abilities, so those two facts deterred me from pursuing that route. The real future is integrating audit software with financial bookkeeping. This is one area where I think blockchain/smart contracts actually could be utilized to ensure audit quality. Auditors essentially look at a small portion of the transactions made by a company during a year, so software could monitor it in parallel. You’d still need an audit team to review the findings and ensure the software was working properly, but the cost would be a fraction of what it takes to audit a company by hand today. Thank you for asking — it’s been a while since I’ve been able to geek out like this! One day I’d like to build those tools, but in the meantime I’m working on a personal finance product. It’s almost done, so hopefully you’ll see it when I submit it to HN to get dragged across the coals.