Abdullah Alam

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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