5 ms·

Show HN: Bigcapital - A open-source alternative to QuickBooks

93 points by abouolia 3y ago

deepak_sozial 3y ago
We have been using wave apps for the last couple of years. Do you have a comparison page?
- aetherspawn 3y ago
  Wave looks really nice, though it’s a shame they only support US tax. For Australians the accounting package has to support “STP2” which is the governments API for reporting payroll and super, otherwise it’s borderline illegal to use.
candiddevmike 3y ago
I tried to evaluate Bigcapital but it's kind of a mess to deploy via self hosting. The docker-compose setup is really hard to break apart, the stack is bizarre (mongo, multiple myql databases, and redis), and the way you do upgrades and migrations left me feeling very uneasy. Additionally, my accountant wouldn't use anything this thing exports from what I can tell. For now I'm sticking with GnuCash, but I have my eye on some open source ERP systems--they're extremely complex though, with every screen being customizable. All I want are HR and finance functions in one place without having a dozen Google Docs and Sheets floating around. I couldn't care less about the level of customization most ERPs provide.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  What's the most important features in an accounting system in your opinion? Are they of a kind, or are there some killer features on expensive commercial tools that the free fare can't match?
  - barryrandall 3y ago
    The biggest barrier to adoption that all new entrants to this market must overcome is finding finance and accounting professionals willing to use their product. The second is finding banks, auditors, and investors willing to use statements from an accounting package they've never heard of.
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      Thanks. What do you mean by "finding banks, auditors, and investors willing to use statements from an accounting package they've never heard of." ? Is that a file compatibility issue. Are there not standard file formats for exchange of data in the financial industry? Don't people, as a last resort maybe, just send a csv, or print the ledgers out on paper?
      - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
        There are a few different standards. The problem with the generic csv is that headers still need to be specified. Otherwise, the person doing the importing has to specify/confirm what each column means.
      - dboreham 3y ago
        The standard file format is "Quick books backup".
  - dboreham 3y ago
    Payroll.
  - daft_pink 3y ago
    A big problem is the differences between each countries needs. Securely connecting to your banking and payroll and also the difference needs between different countries tax systems. Europe needs lots of currencies and vat tracking vs USA needs doesn’t usually want all that. I would say that many businesses just want a desktop based system and web based has security and maintenance requirements they just aren’t interested in.
- abouolia 3y ago
  The deployment is really easy to do and well documented with some FAQs you may face, yes there were some issues in setup before couple of months ago but we fixed them even the database migration now is automated. that is acceptable especially when you use a new technology. you can join to our Discord and the team will help you to deploy it on your machine.
  - _joel 3y ago
    > that is acceptable especially when you use a new technology Not really when it's accounting software.
  - xoa 3y ago
    >The deployment is really easy to do I mean, fwiw here's what we do to deploy QuickBooks: double click on image or CD, drag/double click icon, follow any prompts, now it's done. Click on icon in dock to launch QB thereafter. There was no need to read any FAQS, join a Discord or even send an email. That would be my definition of "easy". I suppose "here is a VM image ready to go, download and click button/run command" wouldn't be terrible though still already a massive leap in needs over QuickBooks. >that is acceptable especially when you use a new technology QuickBooks had its first release 31 years ago. Like others say I'm sure there are reasons for the explosion in nested stacks upon stacks of complexity, but I'll admit I still find myself pretty befuddled about how we ended up here. I guess it looks like from the docs the goal is exclusively compete with the QB Cloud Service specifically so that takes a bigger stack, like you're building for B2B. But kind of feels like it's an odd choice of targeting here. QB was always aimed heavily at small, and eventually medium-small businesses. Huge places used other stuff. Small end of the scale are also the ones who face the most pain from the shift to subscription-only if you didn't snag a last physical copy. The docs say >Bigcapital is built with a multi-tenancy architecture that allows multiple organizations to use the same software while keeping their data separate from each other Is this actually something in demand here? Why wouldn't each one run their own, or if not just pay Intuit? Is the idea that various companies will offer Bigcapital services for sale? And it says "keeping data separate" but I don't see anything about E2EE in the docs or FAQ, though maybe it's buried somewhere. If the data is only separate based on user permissions what orgs are going to trust something as sensitive as business financial data to a multi-tenant situation for something unproven? I don't find it promising that the (incredibly sparse) docs have this to say about signups: >The environment variable SIGNUP_DISABLED should be set to true to disable the signing up of new users. When set, the following facts hold: So, does that imply that by default it's just open to the world and anyone can sign up? In 2023? I guess I'll watch the project if only because subscription-only for QB sucks and I'm sure will be a problem eventually, but... I dunno. This isn't what I would have immediately thought of for "An open-source alternative to QuickBooks" in terms of approach.
- bibstha 3y ago
  I second this to how difficult it is to deploy the app. My feature request is to be able to deploy sth like this on heroku or other paas and to string all of the dependencies with env variables.
- badrequest 3y ago
  Anecdotally, we've seen a number of larger "open-source alternative to X" projects posted on HN of late that are technically self-deployable, but require so much up-front knowledge that it's not actually accessible to those who might truly be liberated by such software. I mean no slander or disrespect to anyone involved, but there was a DataDog alternative posted sometime in the last few weeks that had a docker-compose with like 15 containers in it. Required running a few different Typescript servers, a Clickhouse instance, Redis, MySQL, the lot of it. I'm sure it was a fully-featured service that made adequate use of those resources, but it also reminded me of why people pay out the wazoo for DataDog: nobody wants to manage all that stuff! EDIT: the repo linked in the GP contains 3 instances of what you could call databases: MariaDB, Mongo, and Redis. There doesn't appear to be any explanation in the deployment docs for why all three are necessary.
  - abouolia 3y ago
    Totally agree, nobody can manage that amount of containers, it doesn't mean if it was self-hosted would excuse the deployment is not necessary to be easy, always the deployment of self-hosted should be easy with sample CLIs. and also providing pre-configured instances on the most popular cloud services like on DigitalOcean to deploy the app with sample clicks (instead of CLIs) that would great additional for non-techincal people and that's what we're seeking for, in terms of 3 instance actually we used Mongo for Agenda.js but we want to get rid of it ASAP.
  - KronisLV 3y ago
    > I mean no slander or disrespect to anyone involved, but there was a DataDog alternative posted sometime in the last few weeks that had a docker-compose with like 15 containers in it. Reminds me of Sentry: https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/ https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/ This is their example docker-compose for self-hosting: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-compose.yml https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-... It has: - exim4 (smtp) - memcached - Redis - PostgreSQL - Zookeeper - Kafka - Clickhouse - geoipupdate - 18 containers for something called snuba (integrates with Clickhouse?) - 2 symbolicator containers - web app - cron - 18 other utility containers - Nginx - relay - 2 vroom containers Meanwhile, as far as the other options in the APM space go, this is how Apache Skywalking looks like: - web app - back end API - database (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL or something else) I'm glad that generally it's good enough for my needs, because I can't imagine actually having to self-host Sentry. Then again, something like Graylog does log shipping better and without a doubt Sentry has lots of nice features... as long as you don't have to run it yourself, because many people out there won't realistically be able to do so. > EDIT: the repo linked in the GP contains 3 instances of what you could call databases: MariaDB, Mongo, and Redis. That's not too bad, though, but seems like an interesting choice (both a regular RDBMS and a NoSQL one; Redis would probably be useful for caching etc. for either).
- lovasoa 3y ago
  When I come across this scenario, I often ponder whether it's part of the business strategy for those who offer open-source software for free alongside a paid hosted version. There seems to be a conflict of interest at play here: the more user-friendly the software becomes in terms of installation and operation, the less appealing the hosted version appears. I'm currently working on an open-source software project with a hosted version of my own (https://sql.ophir.dev https://sql.ophir.dev). It's a website builder, and my aim is to turn the ease of deployment and operation into a competitive advantage, which is prominently highlighted on the homepage. However, I recognize that it might be overly idealistic to expect the same from others. My target audience mainly consists of individuals who will need to manage the software themselves. In contrast, in many other domains, the decision-makers selecting the software and the individuals responsible for its operation are not one and the same.
  - cortesoft 3y ago
    Even if it isn't as cynical as doing it on purpose, you can still end up with this scenario because the company is simply not ever going to prioritize making the self hosting option easy.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hk__2 3y ago
Previous threads (all created by the same OP): * May 29, 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36114095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36114095 * May 29, 2023 (2): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36118990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36118990 * July 2, 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36566556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36566556
- dang 3y ago
  Yes, since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36118990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36118990 in particular got significant attention (200+ comments and 17 hours on the front page), this repost counts as a dupe.
RagnarD 3y ago
It may be in there somewhere but I don't see a mechanism for talking to banks using standard protocols to at least retrieve bank transactions. Without that, an accounting system is an unusable toy.
- Tokumei-no-hito 3y ago
  I’ve seen some tools with plaid integration. Idk how plaid cornered the market but it seems to be the only option available for oauth with banks.
  - woleium 3y ago
    There is also yodlee https://www.yodlee.com/open-banking https://www.yodlee.com/open-banking
chromaton 3y ago
I ran a business successfully for many years with GnuCash. I only switched because I wanted to offload bookkeeping to a professional for a couple hundred bucks a month, and she was only familiar with QuickBooks.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
daft_pink 3y ago
We desperately need an alternative to qb

93 points by abouolia 3y ago

deepak_sozial 3y ago

We have been using wave apps for the last couple of years. Do you have a comparison page?

aetherspawn 3y ago
Wave looks really nice, though it’s a shame they only support US tax. For Australians the accounting package has to support “STP2” which is the governments API for reporting payroll and super, otherwise it’s borderline illegal to use.

candiddevmike 3y ago

I tried to evaluate Bigcapital but it's kind of a mess to deploy via self hosting. The docker-compose setup is really hard to break apart, the stack is bizarre (mongo, multiple myql databases, and redis), and the way you do upgrades and migrations left me feeling very uneasy. Additionally, my accountant wouldn't use anything this thing exports from what I can tell. For now I'm sticking with GnuCash, but I have my eye on some open source ERP systems--they're extremely complex though, with every screen being customizable. All I want are HR and finance functions in one place without having a dozen Google Docs and Sheets floating around. I couldn't care less about the level of customization most ERPs provide.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
What's the most important features in an accounting system in your opinion? Are they of a kind, or are there some killer features on expensive commercial tools that the free fare can't match?
- barryrandall 3y ago
  The biggest barrier to adoption that all new entrants to this market must overcome is finding finance and accounting professionals willing to use their product. The second is finding banks, auditors, and investors willing to use statements from an accounting package they've never heard of.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    Thanks. What do you mean by "finding banks, auditors, and investors willing to use statements from an accounting package they've never heard of." ? Is that a file compatibility issue. Are there not standard file formats for exchange of data in the financial industry? Don't people, as a last resort maybe, just send a csv, or print the ledgers out on paper?
    - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
      There are a few different standards. The problem with the generic csv is that headers still need to be specified. Otherwise, the person doing the importing has to specify/confirm what each column means.
    - dboreham 3y ago
      The standard file format is "Quick books backup".
- dboreham 3y ago
  Payroll.
- daft_pink 3y ago
  A big problem is the differences between each countries needs. Securely connecting to your banking and payroll and also the difference needs between different countries tax systems. Europe needs lots of currencies and vat tracking vs USA needs doesn’t usually want all that. I would say that many businesses just want a desktop based system and web based has security and maintenance requirements they just aren’t interested in.
abouolia 3y ago
The deployment is really easy to do and well documented with some FAQs you may face, yes there were some issues in setup before couple of months ago but we fixed them even the database migration now is automated. that is acceptable especially when you use a new technology. you can join to our Discord and the team will help you to deploy it on your machine.
- _joel 3y ago
  > that is acceptable especially when you use a new technology Not really when it's accounting software.
- xoa 3y ago
  >The deployment is really easy to do I mean, fwiw here's what we do to deploy QuickBooks: double click on image or CD, drag/double click icon, follow any prompts, now it's done. Click on icon in dock to launch QB thereafter. There was no need to read any FAQS, join a Discord or even send an email. That would be my definition of "easy". I suppose "here is a VM image ready to go, download and click button/run command" wouldn't be terrible though still already a massive leap in needs over QuickBooks. >that is acceptable especially when you use a new technology QuickBooks had its first release 31 years ago. Like others say I'm sure there are reasons for the explosion in nested stacks upon stacks of complexity, but I'll admit I still find myself pretty befuddled about how we ended up here. I guess it looks like from the docs the goal is exclusively compete with the QB Cloud Service specifically so that takes a bigger stack, like you're building for B2B. But kind of feels like it's an odd choice of targeting here. QB was always aimed heavily at small, and eventually medium-small businesses. Huge places used other stuff. Small end of the scale are also the ones who face the most pain from the shift to subscription-only if you didn't snag a last physical copy. The docs say >Bigcapital is built with a multi-tenancy architecture that allows multiple organizations to use the same software while keeping their data separate from each other Is this actually something in demand here? Why wouldn't each one run their own, or if not just pay Intuit? Is the idea that various companies will offer Bigcapital services for sale? And it says "keeping data separate" but I don't see anything about E2EE in the docs or FAQ, though maybe it's buried somewhere. If the data is only separate based on user permissions what orgs are going to trust something as sensitive as business financial data to a multi-tenant situation for something unproven? I don't find it promising that the (incredibly sparse) docs have this to say about signups: >The environment variable SIGNUP_DISABLED should be set to true to disable the signing up of new users. When set, the following facts hold: So, does that imply that by default it's just open to the world and anyone can sign up? In 2023? I guess I'll watch the project if only because subscription-only for QB sucks and I'm sure will be a problem eventually, but... I dunno. This isn't what I would have immediately thought of for "An open-source alternative to QuickBooks" in terms of approach.
bibstha 3y ago
I second this to how difficult it is to deploy the app. My feature request is to be able to deploy sth like this on heroku or other paas and to string all of the dependencies with env variables.
badrequest 3y ago
Anecdotally, we've seen a number of larger "open-source alternative to X" projects posted on HN of late that are technically self-deployable, but require so much up-front knowledge that it's not actually accessible to those who might truly be liberated by such software. I mean no slander or disrespect to anyone involved, but there was a DataDog alternative posted sometime in the last few weeks that had a docker-compose with like 15 containers in it. Required running a few different Typescript servers, a Clickhouse instance, Redis, MySQL, the lot of it. I'm sure it was a fully-featured service that made adequate use of those resources, but it also reminded me of why people pay out the wazoo for DataDog: nobody wants to manage all that stuff! EDIT: the repo linked in the GP contains 3 instances of what you could call databases: MariaDB, Mongo, and Redis. There doesn't appear to be any explanation in the deployment docs for why all three are necessary.
- abouolia 3y ago
  Totally agree, nobody can manage that amount of containers, it doesn't mean if it was self-hosted would excuse the deployment is not necessary to be easy, always the deployment of self-hosted should be easy with sample CLIs. and also providing pre-configured instances on the most popular cloud services like on DigitalOcean to deploy the app with sample clicks (instead of CLIs) that would great additional for non-techincal people and that's what we're seeking for, in terms of 3 instance actually we used Mongo for Agenda.js but we want to get rid of it ASAP.
- KronisLV 3y ago
  > I mean no slander or disrespect to anyone involved, but there was a DataDog alternative posted sometime in the last few weeks that had a docker-compose with like 15 containers in it. Reminds me of Sentry: https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/ https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/ This is their example docker-compose for self-hosting: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-compose.yml https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-... It has: - exim4 (smtp) - memcached - Redis - PostgreSQL - Zookeeper - Kafka - Clickhouse - geoipupdate - 18 containers for something called snuba (integrates with Clickhouse?) - 2 symbolicator containers - web app - cron - 18 other utility containers - Nginx - relay - 2 vroom containers Meanwhile, as far as the other options in the APM space go, this is how Apache Skywalking looks like: - web app - back end API - database (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL or something else) I'm glad that generally it's good enough for my needs, because I can't imagine actually having to self-host Sentry. Then again, something like Graylog does log shipping better and without a doubt Sentry has lots of nice features... as long as you don't have to run it yourself, because many people out there won't realistically be able to do so. > EDIT: the repo linked in the GP contains 3 instances of what you could call databases: MariaDB, Mongo, and Redis. That's not too bad, though, but seems like an interesting choice (both a regular RDBMS and a NoSQL one; Redis would probably be useful for caching etc. for either).
lovasoa 3y ago
When I come across this scenario, I often ponder whether it's part of the business strategy for those who offer open-source software for free alongside a paid hosted version. There seems to be a conflict of interest at play here: the more user-friendly the software becomes in terms of installation and operation, the less appealing the hosted version appears. I'm currently working on an open-source software project with a hosted version of my own (https://sql.ophir.dev https://sql.ophir.dev). It's a website builder, and my aim is to turn the ease of deployment and operation into a competitive advantage, which is prominently highlighted on the homepage. However, I recognize that it might be overly idealistic to expect the same from others. My target audience mainly consists of individuals who will need to manage the software themselves. In contrast, in many other domains, the decision-makers selecting the software and the individuals responsible for its operation are not one and the same.
- cortesoft 3y ago
  Even if it isn't as cynical as doing it on purpose, you can still end up with this scenario because the company is simply not ever going to prioritize making the self hosting option easy.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

hk__2 3y ago

Previous threads (all created by the same OP): * May 29, 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36114095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36114095 * May 29, 2023 (2): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36118990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36118990 * July 2, 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36566556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36566556

dang 3y ago
Yes, since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36118990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36118990 in particular got significant attention (200+ comments and 17 hours on the front page), this repost counts as a dupe.

RagnarD 3y ago

It may be in there somewhere but I don't see a mechanism for talking to banks using standard protocols to at least retrieve bank transactions. Without that, an accounting system is an unusable toy.

Tokumei-no-hito 3y ago
I’ve seen some tools with plaid integration. Idk how plaid cornered the market but it seems to be the only option available for oauth with banks.
- woleium 3y ago
  There is also yodlee https://www.yodlee.com/open-banking https://www.yodlee.com/open-banking

chromaton 3y ago

I ran a business successfully for many years with GnuCash. I only switched because I wanted to offload bookkeeping to a professional for a couple hundred bucks a month, and she was only familiar with QuickBooks.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

daft_pink 3y ago

We desperately need an alternative to qb