Readit NewsAs far as integrations, GNU cash lets you import from various formats like quicken while beancount has lots of plugins from the community like importers for various banks. I don’t believe either offer invoicing but you could integrate it yourself or just manually record.
IMO, the hardest part of keeping your own books is learning double entry accounting.
First major disconnect is that not every country uses invoices, but may use receipts instead. This is true for the USA for example, so many US devs (for example: Stripe in the early days) are not familiar with the concept of invoicing. Technically there is no difference between receipts and invoices, so if you're not familiar with the concept of invoicing, just read this post with /s/invoice/receipt in mind.
The point about invoicing is to act as a non-mutable entry into the ledgers of both parties (seller and buyer). In most countries (especially EU) invoices are mandated by law for B2B transactions, and so is keeping accounts (aka bookkeeping). So for invoicing to be practical it needs to be tied to your books/accounts. Because of this, any business will use some bookkeeping/accounting software, which will have invoicing capabilities built-in. Invoicing as a standalone product doesn't make sense if you have to import it all into your ledgers later.
Then there is the 'design' trap, which many invoicing startups seem to fall for. Invoices are weird things. They are basically very, very inefficient artefacts from the past. An invoice is just a very little amount of transaction data exchanged between buyer and seller. In the days of physical bookkeeping (actual paper books) paper invoices made sense, but nowadays it is all done digitally. So the invoice is effectively a machine-2-machine interface, but for all sorts of legacy reasons we still wrap them in PDF with a fancy design that looks great for humans, but it effectively impossible for machines to read.
There are all sorts of attempts made to improve upon this situation (like OCR, and nowadays AI to extract data from PDF invoices). There are open structured data formats such as UBL to replace / augment PDF invoices, but due to all sorts of politics and lobbying the open standards have been doomed from the beginning. There is a lot of money made in accounting software, and they all rely on vendor lock-in. The major accounting software vendors have very strong incentives to keep us from adopting UBL et al, and most of the established accounting product suck, but you can't easily migrate so you'll be stuck with it.
If you run or own a business, treat your books as an asset of your business, a very important asset for that matter. Books are kept in accounting software, which is typically part of a larger software suite which also features tax filing, HRM, asset management, invoicing, etc. In fancy business terms this is often called ERP. But think of ERP as just your central database, or your 'books'.
Choosing your accounting software an important decision. Choose accounting software that allows exporting your data (very important!), that has an API (also very important), and preferably a web interface. It should be always available, so on-premise software is out. For entrepreneurs: choose your own accounting software, do not be tempted to hire an external bookkeeper that keeps the books in 'their' systems (accountant lock-in). Don't let an accountant recommend your software either, they get huge kickbacks from the software vendors (vendor lock-in). Every sale—whether this being PoS, invoicing, or a payment integration like Stripe—should automatically registered as a ledger entry in the books, preferably with an invoice document attached. Here you can see why an accountant who keeps your books in their systems won't work, you don't want to be stuck having to periodically send an email (or shoebox) filled with invoices for them to process. Your books should be owned by the business, should be automated (at least for the receivable side), and always be up-to-date. You can then give an(y) accountant access to your books for them to do audits, tax filings, etc. For a business, the books are the central database of the business, everything else revolves around it. Do not be tempted to write your own, instead integrate with existing solutions while avoiding vendor lock-in as much as possible.
Integrating your business with the accounting software is an ever-ongoing part of your software development efforts, so not underestimate it. Accepting payments is hard, making sure it is well registered in your books is equally hard. It takes _much_ more time than you'd think (most first-time entrepreneurs actually don't consider it at all). There are no silver bullets here.
I am just starting my journey into entrepreneurship, and have yet to choose a bank or accounting software, and would appreciate guidance. I am based in the UK, and will only be conducting business in the UK to start off with.
To quickly find text, select some text and press ⌘E followed by ⌘G.
In save dialogs, press ⌘= to switch between the compact and expanded layout.
In save dialogs, press ~ to open a Go To File dialog prefilled with the home directory. Press / to open it prefilled with the root directory.
Hold Option while opening the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth menus to access extra options.
After copying a file, press ⌥⌘V to move the file instead of pasting a copy of it.
Terminal:
Press ⇧⌘A to select the output from the previous command.
Press ⌘L to clear the output from the previous command.
Press ⌃⌘V to paste and format text that is properly escaped for the shell.
Press ⌃T while a command is executing to view runtime statistics about the execution so far.
What I'm hoping for is an easily reproducible dev environments with common-sense images that can be maintained and edited in the cloud, almost like Docker images, with all that stuff preconfigured... the latest interpreters, node, yarn, xdebug, webpack, blah blah all just preconfigured and ready to go. Next.js does some of that, the dev tool Lando tries to do that (but is pretty buggy), but all of it still requires a lot of manual configuration. And coding across platforms (like Windows desktop + Mac laptop) is still a huge PITA even though it all gets deployed to bog-standard LEMP stacks in the end.
It's just such a far cry from, say, being able to seamlessly use the Adobe Suite or Slack or Zoom or Microsoft Office across platforms and projects. I guess it's a bit unfair to compare first-party vendor software to messy open-source ecosystems, but that's what I'm ultimately griping about... I don't want to spend time doing devops instead of coding visitor-facing features. Some companies have dedicated people for that; our org can't afford that, so I just have to figure it out as I go, doing a piss-poor job most of the time. Wish there was a vendor + service to take care of that, and present just a usable IDE in the end, with all the internals abstracted away and maintained in the cloud. Ideally it would be a thin local client with native GUI but offloaded processing, vs a laggy screenshare.
I haven't tried Cloud9 in particular but have tried other cloud IDEs, which just felt like remote desktops running on someone else's machine that I still have to do all the same tooling and maintenance for myself. If Cloud9 or others DOES do what I want and I just missed it, please let me know.
shrug Maybe I'm just getting too old for this stuff. I miss the simple jQuery days when there was the DOM and that was it, not a bazillion layers of tooling and the super complex packagers and containers and other enterprise tech required to support them.
I also use JetBrains’s products extensively. I used to have on intellij settings repository for all products (PHPStorm, PyCharm, Webstorm), but I found the same issue that the settings wouldn’t sync in the way I wanted. I now have separate settings repositories for each product. This seems to be working better, although, it does require copying new shortcuts to each product.
I haven’t tried solely using IntelliJ Ultimate, so maybe I will see if I can configure that to work for different programming languages. I have been reluctant to do so, because the appeal of IntelliJ for me is that it makes it easy to work with a programming language. I don’t want to have to configure IntelliJ Ultimate when I want to use Kotlin or want to use Python. Maybe it has a nice way of handling that?