
Building (yet another) accounting software. Bad idea?
Posting here to get some validation (and criticism) for a product idea, but not sure if it's too niche or too technical - it's coming from a personal need so it's hard to validate it objectively. Feel free to criticize or suggest things; would love to hear feedback from this community!
Core Product:
An accounting software that let's you have multiple journals, which are stored in local files, with non-proprietary formats.
Therefore, everything you do is local-first and extremely fast.
Also lets you backup/restore your files however you like, and sync them across devices with stuff like Dropbox or Syncthing or whatever you like to use.
Double-entry bookkeeping with multiple-entry transactions.
Multiple commodities/currencies supported; you can add manual conversion rates, or let it figure it out implicitly (like ledger-cli, if you've ever used that).
Custom charts and reports builder (line charts with multiple lines, pie charts, etc).
Desktop app, works on Windows, Linux and Mac. (Android and iOS apps on the roadmap).
Private - does not phone home, does not show ads, does not track usage.
Budgeting and envelopes.
Keyboard-friendly UI: almost all of the UI can be navigated with keyboard shortcuts.
Cloud subscription
An optional $3/m cloud subscription let's you support the project and gives you extra features...
Cross platform sync - sync unlimited number of journals across unlimited devices.
Preload popular world currencies and automatically update exchange rates.
Manage your accounts through a web-app. Will sync to your local files.
Future Roadmap
Android and iOS apps (also offline first, full feature parity)
Public API on the web-app so you can write custom scripts or connect other programs to your accounts.
Invoicing.
Sending payments manually/periodically (useful for payroll etc).
Python/Go/JS libraries to directly, programmatically manage your finances.
I've tried a bunch of different programs (YNAB, Beancount, ledger, GNUCash, custom spreadsheet, etc) to manage my finances, and they all had a subset of these features, but lacked enough of these for me to not continue using any. So I felt like making my own.
But I do realize not everyone wants all of this. And that there's a billion other accounting softwares out there. And that it's not a sexy sounding disruptive AI SaaS.
What do you guys think? Would you use something like this?
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