[mattbrewsbytes]

I don't understand the problem this solves. It appears this is for a business to track project expenses? Don't businesses use actual accounting software to track expenses, etc.? How does this reflect or compete with that?

I don't think this makes any sense for personal finance.

[datavirtue]

My guess is that they were trying to address the collaboration aspect of budgeting. It is usually a fairly large group planning effort where the budget starts out looking a certain way and is iterated on rather quickly (hopefully, and herein lies the problem) as input is reconciled and ideas are explored.

However, this product seems to use a planning and collaboration methodology to track actual money movement. Something that might work for personal use but has little-to-no place in a company.

[Closi]

While invoices will get tracked to a cost-center in the accounting package, usually project managers won't access this directly and will have their own spreadsheets to the side to manage plan vs actual (i.e. they may also need to think about spending, and will update the sheet as their estimated costs change, do baselines etc).

[throwaway11460]

Actual accounting software doesn't care about projects. You get a $10k invoice - now the question is what projects is it related to, what amounts...

[ska]

Actual accounting software is double entry. You’ll move that invoice through AP, and the balancing transactions will be split by project/type/etc by a combination of accounts and perhaps labels/tags.

[sdf4j]

that’s not true. Serious accounting software let you assign an invoice to a project, program, cost center, groups… you can even do that on at the invoice item level.

[steve1977]

Actual accounting software can certainly care about that. This is called operational or cost accounting (vs financial accounting, which would be accounts payable etc.)