[mdlug] Open Source accounting software

[Drew]

I rather had the impression that spreadsheets were originally 
designed for financial related work,
like accounting. Never mind the fact that I have also found them 
useful for engineering work. In
Open Office I count roughly 60 functions in the Financial category. 
If there's accounting work to
do, Open Office should be suitable. (Printing checks is another 
matter, but I'm sure that can be
programmed.)

At 08:48 PM 1/28/10, Michael Corral wrote:

>So you've gone from paying a person $150 to do what you could do yourself,
>to paying $50 for software to do what you could do yourself.
>
>I've got that beat. I also use the full 1040 form, but I pay $0 and do
>it all - get this! - *by hand*, with no software. Crazy, ain't it? :)

That's the way I have done it, except one year that I used Online 
TurboTimmy, er, Tax (sorry,
too much Tickerforum) in the hope of getting a check from the State 
sooner, which failed miserably
due at least in part to there being no provision for providing 
supporting documents with the online
filing. I never saw what it was about a 1040, even with Schedule A 
and B, that required "professional"
help, though maybe it would be different if I were running a 
business? It's all addition and subtraction
with some multiplication after all, which even if they stopped 
teaching it in elementary school,
calculators can now be bought for one dollar. (Three orders of 
magnitude cheaper than the first one
I laid eyes on, in nominal dollars!)

I never took "accounting" - sounded boring and uninteresting, so 
maybe there's something esoteric
about it that I missed. Would it really be that difficult for someone 
used to, say, calculus and
geometry?

And I also fix my own car whenever possible. It has not been easy for 
me during my life to convince
people to hand money over to me, so I'm generally loathe to hand it 
to other people unnecessarily.


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- Drew.