[VonGuard]

It's great for personal or very small businesses but god help you if you are building a real startup with GNUCash. I am speaking from experience here, GNUCash zealotry is a plague. I honestly wish this project basically did not exist, because the business world despises GNUCash, ONLY cares about QuickBooks, and using anything else is a giant waste of everyone's time. Believe me, I have been fighting this fight in non-profits and startups since the early 2000's. It's not a fight ANYONE should ever have. I USED TO BE THE "WE MUST USE GNUCASH" GUY!

Now, in a perfect world, yes, GNUCash and literally ANYTHING other than Quickbooks would be an option for small business accounting. But we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world where Intuit has fought VERY hard to make damn sure no one can use anything but Quickbooks, and their iron fist is clad in very specific APIs and file formats.

If you do not use Quickbooks:

* Your bank will hate you.

* Your investors will hate you.

* Your payroll system won't work.

* Your tax systems won't work.

* Your accountant won't work.

* Grants are even off the table in some cases.

* Some places won't audit without Quickbooks.

I constantly run into well intentioned open source zealots who demand the use of GNUCash. This is terrible. Don't be that person.

The world has chosen QuickBooks. This choice was made under duress and with corrupt power brokering. But the decision has been made. Maybe there are some OK SaaS options, but they only exist as long as Intuit allows them to exist. Anything competing with Quickbooks is going to be bought and killed by Intuit, so you're going into a dead-end alley. I know that leaves GNUCash on the table, but...

Please, do not make the mistake my many non-profits and businesses have repeatedly made when I was not paying enough attention to scream bloody murder about it. I turn my back for one minute, and engineers are installing GNUCash on the accountant's Mac Laptop.

It's 100% always come back to bite us in the ass, as we've had to change platforms on-demand in order to meet a funding deadline, a bank requirement, a loan ask, or a grant application. And it's ALWAYS the accountant in the org that gets saddled with the 60+ hour work weeks it takes to redo everything. If I was an acocuntant, I'd quit if told to use GNUCash, but most of them kinda don't know any better because, hey, why not try some thing the techies are all excited about!

GNUCash is a wonderful project. I wish we could all use it. But we cannot. Not for real business. And honestly, this is only for contrived, arbitrary reasons. But these reasons exist. The world is 100% built to prevent people from not using Quickbooks at every turn, and you only harm yourself by demanding open source software for accounting. As I said to the director of my most recent non-profit: "You would not tolerate the accountant coming in here and demanding you use NetBeans. Please, give them the same courtesy you'd expect them to give you on tool choice."

[skissane]

> We live in a world where Intuit has fought VERY hard to make damn sure no one can use anything but Quickbooks

It depends on geography. According to Codat's 2021 report [0] on SME accounting market share:

- In the US, QuickBooks is the clear market leader, with 75.7% combined market share across their three main offerings (QB Online, QB SE and QB Desktop). FreshBooks is in second place at 4.5%, and Wave and Xero equal third at 3.5% each

- In the UK, Sage is the market leader, with a combined market share of 28.8% across their three main UK products (Sage 50/50 Cloud, Sage Accounting, and Sage 200cloud); QuickBooks combined market share (Online+Desktop+SE) is closely behind, in second place at 26.2%; and Xero is in third place at 24%

- In Australia + New Zealand, Xero is in first place at 49.4% market share, MYOB in second place at 33.8%, QuickBooks comes third at 11.2%

- In Canada, QuickBooks is the clear market leader with a combined market share of 68.2%; FreshBooks is in second place at 6.9%; while Sage at 6.4% is in third place. Kashoo comes fourth at 4.3%, and Wave, Xero and Logiciel Actiff are equal fifth at 3.8% each.

So, it is really only in North America that "no one can use anything but Quickbooks" is remotely true – and even there, close to 25% of US SMEs and over 30% of Canadian SMEs are successfully using "something other than Quickbooks".

But I agree it is likely true, that for the vast majority of US small-to-medium businesses, GNUCash is not a realistic alternative to Quickbooks. But what about FreshBooks or Wave or Xero? Or the dozen other commercial accounting software vendors with some presence in the US market?

[0] https://www.codat.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Codat_Global...

[atemerev]

Come on, of course Hacker News is a local Bay Area forum, nothing happens beyond Bay Area ever. /s

And even this post only lists English-speaking countries, as the Babylonian barrier is impenetrable. Who knows what happens in these strange places where people communicate in unknowable sigils?

[Saigonautica]

Ah, I live in one of those impenetrable realms, and have made some progress deciphering their arcane glyphs. I can tell you that here in Viet Nam, accounting is almost entirely done in spreadsheets. I've mostly seen similar in nearby countries.

Also your accountant will universally have a bizarre custom font for Vietnamese characters, that they downloaded ten years ago from a now-defunct forum. It will never correctly transcribe into any other font, and they don't know how to change it. If I switch accountants, it's always a different cursed font. This is a great and enduring mystery.

So I keep a second set of books -- GnuCash is fantastic for this, but I've also used QuickBooks sometimes. Then I use that to make sure the accountant is producing something that at is at least adjacent to reality. I'm audited by law every year (at my own expense), and they only support spreadsheets.

Surely one day soon this will change (except the font thing I bet), but for now I thought you might get a laugh out of this little slice of my life :)

[fuzztester]

India had / has a bunch of indie vendors of small financial accounting packages (that's what it is called here), some years back and for quite a while before that. When a new Indian software product company starts up, this is often the field they enter first, partly because the domain knowledge is widely available via chartered accountants and is fairly standardized, I think. Not an expert in the field myself.

I don't know how many there are nowadays, but my guess is that they must be at least a few of them, still, if not many.

Tally was one of the more successful ones and is still around. I heard someone talk about it the other day.

I am talking about the small businesses sector.

Larger companies tend to use ERPs, either commercial or home-grown. There are even some indie vendors in this sector.

[unmole]

> When a new Indian software product company starts up, this is often the field they enter first

This doesn't ring true to me. It's almost impossible for a new accounting suite to find traction because Tally is the defacto standard. The only successful newcomer I can think of is Zoho.

[fuzztester]

Maybe I was thinking about the situation of some years ago.

I've heard Zoho is successful, though.

[elric]

> Your bank will hate you

Why? Surely all US banks use open, standardized data formats to export financial statements and to execute transactions in bulk? Or are you thinking of another reason?

US banking is a shitshow which is decades European banking, addressing that would benefit everyone.

> Your investors will hate you

Why? Surely your investors are interested in accurate accounting? Can gnucash not generate some kind of report they need? If so, that should be a trivial fix.

> Some places won't audit without Quickbook

That is an impressive shitshow of a situation.

[cweagans]

> US banking is a shitshow which is decades European banking, addressing that would benefit everyone.

The problem that I (and many business owners) are solving for right now is not one of federal policy, but rather an economic one: I like to have food on the table to eat. I care very little about whether or not I'm doing that in a way that satisfies open source zealots.

If there's an open source option that lets me do what I need to do in an equal or better way, then sure: happy to go that route. But I'm not doing something in a clunky, nonstandard way just for the lulz.

[freedomben]

I actually have had an accountant come into engineering and tell me I had to use netbeans!

Just kidding of course. Thank you for your post. I had considered using gnu cash many times in this situation and I'm likely to have done it. Luckily someone else handled the accounting portion for the last gig.

I badly want gnu cash to be a thing. I really hate into it. And I want them to fail. I would love if gnu cash is what made them fail. But it sounds like it's going to take a whole lot more than just a few sacrifices like us. We'll just go through misery, and nothing will be affected cuz we'll end up stuck on QuickBooks anyway.

[human_llm]

We used GNUCash for a few years for small business accounting. After a while we migrated to Quickbooks Online as it has some features that GNUCash was missing, e.g., automatically pulling in PayPal and bank transactions and inventory management. This turned out to be a very frustrating experience. Due to the following:

- The price increased every year. We started at about $60/month and after a few years it $80/month. Today the same plan is $99/month.

- The PayPal integration randomly stopped working and was missing transactions. QB customer support was completely useless and we spent hours searching and manually adding transactions. The bank integration (via Plaid) was also not reliable.

- The inventory management is very limited. E.g. you can't repack/combine items without using weird hacks.

So, after a few years I got very frustrated and ended up moving to ERPNext. Migrating all the data was quite a bit of work and involved a number of Python scripts to pull out the data from QB and re-create it in ERPNext, but after about a week we had 5 years of data migrated.

ERPNext is not perfect, but works quite well for us. A big difference to QB is that it supports inventory and manufacturing operations. It also has an API that is fairly easy to use and we use it to get transaction data from PayPal and Stripe.

[unmole]

> ERPNext is not perfect, but works quite well

This. ERPNext can be quirky and annoying at times. But it is still better than dealing with the ever-changing quriks and annoyances of an online suite that you have not control over.

[notpushkin]

I’m pretty sure it is 100% gonna bite you, yes. (In a large part of ex-USSR countries, we had the same problem with 1C – it’s less of a pain to use other options now, I think, but it’s still bad.)

But the only way to hopefully get to a world where you don’t need Quickbooks anymore is to fight back, not for them. And like you said, Intuit can buy off startups, so this leaves us with free open source systems... like GnuCash.

[rtpg]

Serious question: is it not possible to export/import into Quickbooks for example? I agree with the principle of letting the accountant choose, just wondering if there's any way at all to "fight back", for lack of a better word.

[bdjsiqoocwk]

I would like to learn more about this. Why is it that those things won't work with GnuCash?

A lot of other people seem interested, if you have a blog this would be a great post.

[127]

The situation seems quite dire.

[salawat]

>The world has chosen QuickBooks. This choice was made under duress and with corrupt power brokering.

And yet knowing this has gone on, you refuse to continue to fight the good fight even still? Sounds like you're part of the problem my man.

I'm so fucking tired of corporate apologists/appeasers.

[keepamovin]

We're aligned, you didn't get the sarcasm. :)