The only thing I hate more is MYOB. Go on, press the escape key just once too often and you’ll lose everything it took you so long to figure out in the data-entry page that just disappeared. These 2 piles of steaming shit are only written to keep accountants (big buddy customers of both these shysters) in easy money. This sort of trivial stuff is their version of Hello World. Surely it annoys them even more than it annoys me.

C’mon folks – this is a no-brainer. Tax works in a very predictable, rule-driven manner. All we need is someone who understands these rules and workflows to code them up into a workflow so I don’t have to do it step by bloody step.

User Requirement: I don’t want to learn a complicated mechanism for something that should take less than 1% of my time and headspace. I also want it to be transparent and tell me what it is doing in a simple, no accountancy degree required manner.

ForExampleInstance – I buy a laptop for $2000. I already told my software I’m on the Simplified Tax System / Small Business Entities Provisions so it knows how to deal with an assett.

1. Ask me what percentage I use it for business. Why, all of it, Sir (wink)
2. Apportion the GST as per my answer in step 1. Remember this for my BAS
3. Add it to to my short-term asset pool because it cost me more than $1000. If it cost less than a grand the write the whole lot off right now – but you’ll still need to remember it’s an asset in case I sell it.
4. Create a fixed-asset sub-account for the new asset to track its value
5. Create a fixed asset sub-account to track the depreciation for both the business and personal portions.
6. Do other weird bean-county shit
7. Automagically create the depreciation transactions on the last day of the financial year for 15% for the 1st year and 30% every year thereafter. Set & forget.
8. If I sell it, drop it or whatever, remove it from the asset account and record the income from the sale, or my misery at the pile of broken plastic.

For me, the user, all I want to do is click “I bought someting”, pick a category, type in a few details from the invoice / receipt and click ok. I don’t want to got to the Chart of Accounts and frig with registers or whatever the hell they call it. Can you guess how easy it is for me to totally fuck that up ?

I am not an accountant – I am a human being (in my best John Merrick voice with apologies to the accountants out there). I don’t want to be an accountant and I don’t want to pay an accountant to do such boring, trivial CRUD. Accountants should be paid for their expertise and advice, not for deciphering inevitable user-error in counter-intuitive, 3rd rate BookKeeping software. No, I don’t want to pay a bookkeeper for something that should be really easy to do myself … point and click.

So, here is your challenge today – Break the duopoly! Make bookkeeping a pleasant User eXperience. I will pay you. I’ll even pay every year. Tax rules change & so does your config file. That means a software assurance subscription. Just don’t try to extort hundreds of dollars for it – or not.

I already linked to it (duopoly) but this article is an interesting read too.

Somebody – Help!