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by joshuakelly 2440 days ago
I actually submitted a YC application for the upcoming batch to work, more-or-less, on exactly this idea - a double entry accounting service for developers.
1 comments

This sounds like something internal...I don't think developers or typical small businesses need (or would want to!) to store their double-entry accounting database in shards across Google Cloud Spanner & Kubernetes clusters...

Good luck with your application -- I, for one, think there's a need for it. I've wished for years that someone would put something like a secure, web-based Gnucash out into the world.

Doesn't necessarily need to be hosted, although given that people are fine with running Quickbooks or any other SaaS it's hard to see why they wouldn't be fine with ledger SaaS.

Can still make a case for licensing, though, depending on the features.

We built this for our internal accounting, it's a ledger service that enforced immutable double entry rules and can run as a container with a Postgres DB configured. https://github.com/realimage/qledger

Yeah, people have been using things like Mint for ages, too, and it's not like professional accountants hosting Quickbooks on their ancient Windows boxen is any less terrifying from a security perspective than a ledger SaaS startup...

Personally, I'm likely to stick with Gnucash until or unless it becomes completely unsupported, but Intuit needs some real competition and it would be great to have more choice available.

gledger looks like a neat project, will check it out!

do you also have some kind of frontend for it? how do you see what's the flow of money and reporting? does it work with kibana out of the box?
Each reporting system / products does its own reporting, and no plans of adding ELK integration right now, although we are moving to the ELK stack so it might happen.

We think of it more as a database++ with financial primitives baked in, so we want to keep it very simple and dumb. It’s not a complete solution - it’s a book to write in, and you need another service that decides what and how to write and writes it (we call it the bank or teller service, and it’s all business logic for our business). Each product has its own bank to teller service, but they all use the same ledger underneath.

Got an interview email tonight, wish me luck!