Well it pains me both financially and philosophically to have to start writing this blog but I need to do it so that someone else doesn’t end up in my situation.
I made the choice to leave Quickbooks about 1 year ago today to https://akaunting.com/ . It is a very nice GUI and to be honest, it’s amazing… except for one major thing. I realized really, really late, that my Trial Balance wasn’t balancing. This is also a good lesson to hire a book keeper, I guess, because I’m guessing that running a trial balance would be a habitual exercise?
In either case, the software should never be allowed to have an unbalanced trial balance – that’s the nature of accounting.
After investing many thousands of dollars and untold number of hours to book keep two businesses, I discovered that somehow data was being entered (or not entered) mysteriously into the database.
If I run a trial balance for, say, Dec 20th, 2021 there would be $8.45 extra on the credit side. So, the first thing I did was run a general ledger (GL) report to see what happened that day – and here comes the scary part – there was no item matching that amount sometimes!
On one occasion, I was lucky. The amount ‘out’ was, for example $100.00 and I was able to find an invoice matching that amount. When I found the suspect invoice, I deleted it completely, re-entered it exactly as I did, and boom. The Trial Balance matched again. Scary. That means that for some unknown reason, that invoice registered ‘in the system’ but not in the Trial Balance report and there was no explainable reason why. If there was, this would be easy.
Then, in another case the Akaunting Tech support found a bill that had been accidentally input as a bill but in fact should have been an invoice. I had obviously deleted the bill when I noticed the error and re-entered it as an invoice. However…somehow or another, this original bill was still registering in the Trial balance and messing everything up! So even a deleted bill was ‘still there’.
Very scary.
So, at this point, I sadly have to consider leaving Akaunting and, until this major issue is explained or resolved, recommend that everyone very, very carefully proceed.
For now I sadly have to go back to one of the terrible accounting systems that I was hoping to avoid 🙁
I hope that Akaunting and the team is able to figure out what this is so that they can continue as one of the best options I had found. I will be sure to update / edit this post with joy if the story gets better….
Anyone else, please share your feedback on the Akaunting story. Perhaps there are others with this same bug, or perhaps you can figure out what tech support could not. I hope a bright future for open source alternatives to these terrible monopolies like QB…
