Show HN: WorkBill – Modern Alternative to QuickBooks

demo.workbill.co

2 points

7 months ago

Hi HN, I am Aswin Mohan(https://aswinmohan.me), a full-stack mobile/web developer. I have been working on WorkBill (https://workbill.co) for the past 6 weeks on the side and wanted to share it here.

demo: https://demo.workbill.co/inbox (no signup needed) video-demo: https://www.loom.com/share/9775811960ad47d7ada89007d8169d90

WorkBill is the modern, flexible accounting platform for small businesses. It is based on BeanCount(https://github.com/beancount/beancount). You can can add entries, see the chart of accounts, parse bank statements, see the balance sheet and income statement and reconcile transactions manually. We currently only support USD.

Unlike traditional accounting software where you assign a category to a transaction, WorkBill enables you to create nested accounts (Expense:Payroll:Engineering) and represent the transaction as movement of money between these accounts. This enables us to model complex transactions easily, even when we do not have explicit support for them in our platform. This also gives us richer context about each transaction that we can use to do automate most of the grunt-work associated with accounting.

I had been using Beancount to track my personal finances for over 3 years and loved how flexible it was compared to others on the market. I loved it so much that I built a personal finance app based on these principles (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42256125). When I started a Private Limited in India, I looked around for an accounting software, found everything to be lacking or in-flexible and ended up with Beancount again. That is when I decided to build out WorkBill. I have been using it for bookeeping at my own company.

The tech stack is Elixir, Phoenix combined with Inertia JS and React with help from ShadCN and TailwindCSS. It has been an incredibly productive framework. I have not used any AI tools, coded mostly in Zed with little help from ChatGPT.

We are getting started with WorkBill. With a stable accounting core, we can add invoices, bills, AR/AP automation to build the all-in-one financial stack for small businesses.

The grand idea of WorkBill is to build a world where accounting and bookkeeping mostly run on autopilot with accountants stepping in for strategic advice, planning and improving the business. if you would like to be part of that future, I are raising a small pre-seed round as well. You can ping me at [email protected] for more info.

If you would like an invite, please email [email protected]. Excited to hear your feedback!