Cloud Money

In 1998 I stopped getting paid to be an Accountant. I came to the conclusion that being a scorekeeper wasn’t satisfying enough for me, I want to be kicking goals, not cheering from the sideline. I called it – Getting in touch with my inner salesman.

I said “stopped getting paid” rather than “stopped working” as I always seem to be keeping a closer eye on finances than anyone else, and always end up being company secretary in my ventures. So as part of my “Moving into the cloud” project, I took a particular interest in the accounting system I was going to use.

Because I am a tightarese, I looked decided to take a look at open source offerings. I started my search at www.osalt.com which is a nice website that offers up open source alternatives to commercial software. The software available seemed to be : Grisbi, jGnash, GnuCash & GFP. All of them nice packages, but much more along the lines of personal finance managers, not accounting packages. Apart from that they were all designed to run on your desktop, not on the web,

Next off to Freshmeat where a search on accounting came up with 208 hits. A closer look brought up 2 candidates: Accounting & GnuCash. Both of which were just personal financial managers Damn.

Finally over to Sourceforge. I tend to search Sourcforge last for software because you have to really know what you want before you get there. With 135,000 Projects registered, its easy to get bogged down. Under Financial | Accounting Systems there was over 1200 projects. Flicking through (90 pages) I came across some interesting prospects such as WebERP which runs in the envirnoment I want and does everything I want plus a whole lot more. A google search for “WebERP Crap” came up with some interesting comments on it though. But at the end of the day, I didn’t like its usability as you need to to do an awful lot of configuration work before you could make anything happen.

SQL Ledger also looked promising, but after having a closer look I decided my bookkeeper would absolutely hate it and be massively inefficient for the first couple of months.

Time to broaden the search and just have a look around the web. And that’s where I ran into SAASU. SAASU is an Australian (tick) Web based system with lots of users (tick). It has a nice interface (tick) and comes preconfigured (tick). It also has some nice features such as auto generating invoices as PDF’s and emailing them off (tick). You can use it for free if your doing under 15 transactions per month, or have the unlimited versions is $59 a quarter. I went with SAASU as it was an easy choice. And now I don’t have to fart about emailing the myob files over to the bookkeeper and holding off invoicing until I get them back.

I also got to configure the chart of accounts so that I could get really useful information out of the system (people who don’t customize their chart of accounts drive me mad).

I didn’t end up getting a free a solution, but close to it. My banking and accounting now all happens online. My finances are in the cloud.

Life is good.

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