Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

It's a start. The world needs a better way to handle bookkeeping, and the existing tools sure aren't cutting it.

Bookkeeping for my small business runs into the tens of thousands of dollars every year, and the amount of human error associated with processing assorted ecommerce and other transactions is astounding, even after extensive planning and SOPs.

The other pain point is Quickbooks. The tool is so sprawling and complex that half the time support agents can't figure out what's wrong. The fact that Intuit jacks up the price every year for this POS is very irritating. They get away with it because they are practically a monopoly, with most small business CPAs locked into their ecosystem.

Hope your team can work out the performance issues. Alternatives to the current bookkeeping options are sorely needed.

View on HN

> It's a start. The world needs a better way to handle bookkeeping, and the existing tools sure aren't cutting it.

God, please, no. Non-deterministic language models aren't the solution to improve bookkeeping.

Well I've seen worse bookkeepers. "You know, you approved of the budget, but where are our customers payments in the balance sheets? We can't find them!" - "Uhm..."

Sure, let's compare an almost global failure mode with the worst examples of knowledge workers. ffs.

I’m coming back from my accountant right now. He uses winbooks and has interns doing the books. I have no tooling to do it for him, and I’m seeing absurdities such as a 4000 usd refund being processed as cashback, and simple typos not being caught. I wish I was working with an AI instead of this nonsense. It’d be far more accurate.

Humans (accountants) are non-deterministic, so unsure if an LLM would be better or worse if we threw more effort at the problem.

But in general, I tend to side with the "lets leave the math to purpose built models/applications" instead of generalized LLMS. LLMs are great if you are just aiming for "good enough to get through next quarter" type results. If you need 100% accuracy, an LLM isn't going to cut it.

Human accountants also have a very important property: liability.

If a certified accountant told me to do X, I'm covered (at least to the point they would assist in recovering, or I can get compensation through their insurance). If LLM tells me, I'm in a bigger problem.

Most small businesses cannot afford CPAs for everyday tasks. At best a CPA signs off on the annual summaries. Most day to day work is done by bookkeepers who are not CPAs.

In my area (Vermont) the going rate for a good CPA is $200/hr. Bookkeepers are $20-30/hr.

Most small businesses also cant afford the risk of current LLMs putting garbage in their books that, in the best case, has to be cleaned up or redone, or, in the worst case, gets the IRS up your ass

Tuned LLMs will become more accurate than bookkeepers for most day-to-day small business transactions. I think you underestimate the amount of errors that normal bookkeepers tend to make.

There is "LLM misinformation" insurance, a very new branch of cyber insurance.

How small is your small business? My book keeping expenses are $120 a year, the cost of excellent saas software. I’ve found double entry books one of the most beautifully simple, yet powerful ideas I’ve ever come across. It’s hard to imagine how a balance sheet could be improved or disrupted. The balance sheet for my small business is the same as Apple and Alphabet’s and that still blows my mind.

I wonder if parent post is alluding to the number of hours spent bookkeeping? As a percentage of somebody's time, I could see that getting reasonably expensive.

With no context of what your business is, I hated QuickBooks, love Xero though.

There's some other alternatives too, Zoho, freshbooks.

Really depends what you do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com