Looking for general small business accounting system

[Tony Gravagno]

I'm looking for a new accounting system for my small businesses, preferably MV, the platform is not important. Our needs are very modest : We have normal A/R, A/P, and G/L requirements for a very small business, with a virtual software Inventory.

Quite frankly, I'm cheap, poor, at capacity for subscription licensing, and I'm looking for partnerships rather than a vendor/client relationship. My ideal situation situation would be as follows:

1) Start with an existing, small, but competent package, with a colleague who is looking to breathe new life into their application.

2) Retrofit the app for "headless" usage (web service, mobile, GUI, CLI, character, etc).

3) Create a new GUI for the app, initially suitable for my own purposes. ( I already have the GUI platform )

4) Maybe collaborate to FOSS the platform and collaborate to offer for-fee customizations.

5) Continue to enhance the GUI to sell the application to a broader audience.

6) Offer the software as online SaaS for other businesses with similarly modest needs.

7) Help the owner to do more with it, market, sell, support, etc.

Does anyone here have both software and the inclination to collaborate like this?

I'm guessing that most existing packages would be over-qualified for this challenge, that we'd need to scale it down into smaller modules with disabled functionality for the needs of a tiny business. Consider - there are a LOT of businesses with such modest needs that you are not selling to because your software does too much and costs too much. You could get a lot more users with a simpler offering that can scale up. And that would be the "phase 2" goal of this project, enabling features that already exist, where the rest of the world offering SaaS doesn't have the depth of features that most of you do, and for them every new feature is a big new project.

At its simplest, it would help me to make an agreement where I have access to software and do all of the work, and return a modernized offering with some kind of support agreement. We don't need to collaborate on sales, ongoing maintenance, etc, but I think that would be mutually beneficial. The concept of FOSS is just a secondary idea which could be terrifying to someone who doesn't recognize the implications or quite alluring to someone who does.

I actually did start to work with one of our colleagues on this. His software is tried and true like much in this industry, but we didn't really get off the ground. He's more inclined to retire than to start a new endeavor, his app code is "normal Pick BASIC" (respectfully nuff said), and there's very little documentation. In short, we're a very close but not quite perfect match. I highlight this because I'm sure there could be many similiar scenarios and I'm looking for more synergy.

I could look to Quickbooks (image of finger and throat available if required) or get into some FOSS using non-MV tools. But there's no fun in that.

Let's build something together. Let's rejuvenate some software that deserves it. Let's earn some money. Let's have some fun. Let's shake up the industry a little.

Any takers?

Thanks!

T

[Kevin Powick]

The small business accounting market is a vertical already dominated by sophisticated and inexpensive solutions such as FreshBooks, QuickBooks Online, etc.  Such offerings make their money from the volume of the SaaS model.  I really doubt there is money to be made selling general accounting packages built on MV to small businesses. For the price small businesses, such as yours, are willing to pay for software, how could a MV solution from an independent vendor possibly compete? 

Personally, I don't even touch accounting anymore in the MV world.  Instead, I pass along this aspect of business to well established vendors/solutions/packages.  For MV clients, the focus then becomes integration with those solutions, which is often quite easy.  The offerings from the market leaders are feature rich, supported, accepted by accounting firms, and offer loads of 3rd party integrations.

Considering you mention financial motives, remember to value your time in your action plan.  Homegrown accounting packages are "Free" only if your time is worthless. ;)

--

Kevin Powick

[Steve Trimble]

Got just what u want. Call Monday at ur convenience.

Take care,

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[Tony Gravagno]

I can't disagree with any of your points. Here are some of my motivations, real or imaginary or irrational, as one might have for any business decision or purchase.

There is a wealth of good business rules built into solid MV apps. I have the unshakable impression that off-the-shelf apps lack some of these nuances, forcing businesses to simply do without, or use addons as described below. Maybe that's a fairy tale we keep telling ourselves to keep the faith in MV. But the renegade in me has a strong dislike for software that tells me how to do business when real business doesn't always work within the confines that they've defined.

One of these missing nuances, easily customizable in MV, might be available as a free or for-fee addon to a popular package. Addons/Plugins are often provided by individuals who may lose interest later. That's the woe of FOSS plugins and commercial plugins and another example of how "Free" often costs us more in the long run.

To be more concrete about "missing nuances", as simple examples:

- We were using Quicken last year and it had a problem linking to some bank accounts and not others.

- Many of our business partners are "entities", both clients and vendors. Most of these systems do not relate the two.

- We get frequent requests to add or remove licenses from existing installations and we need to track server IDs, renewal dates, and other metadata for each license.

- We need to support international currency and transactions.

Even if using one of these popular packages, if a desired function is found to be missing, we can create our own supplemental rules. That means extra work for me to support my accounting processes. Ideally there might be an MV module that could be called to provide the functionality. Rather than writing this myself it would be better to be able to reach into an existing application that already does it. Yes, there are a Lot of assumptions there, that a desired feature is actually in whatever MV software I have, and that I can somehow abstract the functionality out of the integrated MV app so that it can be used externally. I've already ruled out the likelihood that this ideal fantasy could be realized, but without a package to start with, we simply don't know. More likely, in this scenario I might write my own rules using the tools of the software, and could even sell the new functionality in their addon store, earning more with this side project than any prior MV endeavor in my lifetime. *Slap! Wake Up!*

Seriously, my point is that I don't want to do without functionality, I don't want to have to pay for a lot of addons that ultimately inflate the cost of this small business app beyond "reasonable value", and I don't want to have to spend time to write my own rules (as time=money). This thinking has all lead me back to "hey, I wonder if there is already a great MV app out there that might do the job.

I have another motivation, which is that we have a new offering coming up, a GUI development platform which has been created to fill a niche in this industry where other products are either too complex or too expensive. This platform has already been used successfully to create new applications and to augment a couple strong vertical apps. But we do not yet have a GAAP-compliant package in our showcase. I'd really like to go through the process of starting with a clean MV app with a good base of rules, retrofit this with a GUI, and then sell it for fun and profit. Eating my own dogfood will be a great exercise toward learning where this GUI software needs improvement before we make a public offering.

I also don't like the idea of rolling over and dying in the face of other offerings. We could do this with the MV database as a whole - why bother with Oracle and MySQL and Mongo and so many other databases? Why bother to work on another accounting system when there are so many out there? Hell, we could apply that to almost anything we do. Yes, I work on truly unique offerings that have little or no competition too. (Actually I believe competition validates an offering and not having competition can be bad, but that's another thread.) But I'm thinking about people who already have an accounting system and they are afraid that retirement will come before they can extract full value from their accounting software creations. Given my needs and desires I'm thinking there is plenty of opportunity to dove-tail with someone else for comon good.

Or that last point stated differently: You could easily convince ME that it's not a good business venture to try to offer accounting software in the modern world. But tell that to some MV developer who Has a rich MV application that they need to sell in order to stay alive. They might not have a choice. It's sell their own software or worry dreadfully about retirement. Many MV people have already given up, taken jobs, done something completely different to plan for the future. Many have not. This is my way of reaching out to someone who may be in that position with at least an opportunity to try something different.

Oh, and I did mention fun. With my dusty rosie glasses I can see a FOSS project with a rich MV accounting system being adopted by people who have never heard of MV before. The allure of the simplicity of BASIC may compel people to check it out, use it, and contribute. I can see the original owner getting a second life as a support provider for their own application, selling time for education and custimizations. I see this aspect of the endeavor as a way to showcase MV for all of us, and perhaps with this and other projects serving as ambassadors to the non-MV world that can lead to new sales of DBMS licenses, and opportunities for all in this industry who provide tools and services. *Slap! Wake Up!* Hey, I dunno about you folks, but this all sounds like fun to me.

At a higher level, yeah, being a luddite here, my wife who does our accounting, and I are not keen on putting every detail of our accounting into the cloud system of some company who faces daily hack attacks. In my quest to learn modernization well enough to provide it competently, I've learned that we cannot trust anyone else's security efforts. Utimately many of them fail. Anything we post online is quite likely to be compromised and as a rule we assume that anything we put online Will be compromised. For that reason we are extremely reluctant (in the current cloud climate) to put even our uninteresting details into the server of one of those big accounting software companies.

Again, real or imaginary or irrational, that's most of what prompted this thread.

Thanks!

T

[Tony Gravagno]

Will do, bud! Thanks!!

T

[Steve Trimble]

Computerized Data Mgmt Inc

Steve Trimble

501.615.8674

Sorry realized my phone did not send my signature

[Peter McMurray]

Hi TG

Thanks for the explanation. There are a plethora of accounting packages - some with big sales and major faults such as MYOB. It relies on the transaction date rather than the relevant period. A late invoice comes in and it races off to redo the BAS statement that has already been submitted - not legal.

However your mention of Quicken raises another issue - the poor purchase. Quicken has always been a personal finance package i.e. cash in cash out. It never claimed to be a debtors and creditors system; The latest iteration has moved to the cloud at user request - I agree with you that is a bad idea. 

People using XERO should read the rules about who owns the data more closely as far as the cloud angle is concerned. 

A significant factor in the small user market is the lack of accounting knowledge of the user. Any better package requires setup whereas many smaller users want press and go.

The topic reminds me of a laugh/cry moment back about 1979 at AWA. I was working quietly on the Reality as a young lady programmer did the final presentation of her general ledger attempt to the clients. They became increasingly nervous until one said what about year end. She blithely replied "Oh! that's no problem the system date changes automatically". OOPS! programmers need to understand the job before design and implementation.