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How long did it take you to "roll your own"? QuickBooks pro was $199. Based on the time you spent rolling your own, how much is an hour of your time worth?

• patio11 18y ago
  Joel, 99.96% of the time I would agree with you here. However, I've got some weird requirements that I was already doing development for. The big one was producing charts for my website. For the last 2.5 years I've been pretty free with my financial stats. I enjoy doing that and I think it contributes to the success of my business -- for example, one of the reasons I'm a moderator on your forum is that I'm pretty open about things that did work and didn't. However, compiling financial stats every month took a lot of time -- between bookkeeping and posting them to the blog, that was 2 hours I was spending a month that wasn't directly selling software. That makes it a compelling candidate for automation. So about a year ago, I had the website start automatically tracking sales (this required a quick extension to my IPN code that already maintained customer records for me -- about 2 hours). Then, some months ago, I was getting ready for 2008 tax time and figured, since I can already get the sales stats for 2008 with a mouse click, if I just tracked expenses as well then I'd be done. It took about 3 hours to implement in Rails, and another 3 hours to hook that into its own charts on my website, and about 4 hours to do 2.5 years worth of data entry for expenses (which I was going to have to do no matter what software I used). But yeah, if I hadn't had the requirement "webify all of this" and didn't have the pre-existing customer records, I would have picked up QB and called it a day.