Does Bubble Work for this bookkeeping project?

I thought I was going to jump in and learn Bubble to develop my Bookkeeping project, to do small business accounting for my accounting firm and maybe provide it to other firms. Basically I want to replace something we already do in a spreadsheet with a more friendly & efficient UI wrapper of Bubble. But there are some concerns I have researching Bubble limitations. Looking for input from other Bubble developers…would you do this project in Bubble considering…

  1. Printing, I need the functionality to print reports, some of them with variable formatting options that get built as I print. I don’t want to rely on a 3rd party API that is eventually not going to work. I’ve seen a “fix” to create some invisible clickable code over a button to print from the browser, but I think that inherently has it’s own limitations. Maybe I am just missing something?

  2. Pricing, this is a data heavy application. I’m concerned the amount of data used to do regular accounting functions may be cost prohibitive. Every time someone runs a General Ledger report for example, … the math based off the WU looks scary, ie 100-200 records with 200-300 characters each. And that’s just one of many reports we would have to run frequently. Not to mention entering all that data and WU that creates those Ledgers. And these are just my known WU, I’m more concerned about the WU that I don’t have the ability to account for before I spend a tone of time creating the app in Bubble. Like the WU required for it to calculate balances and create a balance sheet which hits every record for a business to calculate.

Any feedback on this would be appreciated.

We have built an accounting application on bubble. I built it for my business and now trying to release it for other businesses soon.

Have a look at it @ www.easyaccounting.io

It’s hard to answer your questions unless you give details on the reports you want to create and the kind of daily entries you do. Maybe upload photos of the spreadsheet or reports. Without the specifics, it’s hard to say anything about WU and printing of reports.

Cheers

Your App doesn’t seem to load.

Try now

I like you design, very intuitive to find the things I expected to locate. Some Questions & Insight from an accountants perspective below.

  1. Doesn’t look like you have figured out the print problem, didn’t see anywhere to print the reports and printing from the browser does not look good.

  2. Have any data running? I’m curious how much workload it takes to load your account pop ups and generate your reports after you have a couple years of data. Especially curious on the CSV upload average WU.

  3. These items are more from an accountants perspective (My IRL job)

  • No Reconciliation method I could locate, maybe I just missed it?
  • No Chart of accounts to manage?
  • No way to do an adjusting entry?
  • Can’t view the entire GL, just one account at a time. The pop up probably isn’t ideal as it’s not uncommon for accounts to have 100s of transactions.
  • Some of those account names (From a US Tax Preparer perspective) are not ideal. Again, maybe I just missed where you would change the names of accounts.
  • Reporting may be missing important sub accounts/breakdowns, IE Equity accounts, which looks like you just have 1 input for called Capital.

Happy to give feedback on the accounting, you can give me feedback on the Print & WUs :slight_smile:

Apologies for the late reply and thank you for the detailed feedback.

The App is made from a certain user’s perspective (mine) and I’m looking for customers of the same segment. So this is not from the perspective of an Accountant although we might later on needs to include it but at this time the App only does the things are required by a certain segment of users. So this is why none of the features are available that you listed.

We are currently making the reporting side of things and preparing for a soft launch with a few users. For printing, we are using PDF generation via the zero-code plugin. No report printing has been looked into.

For the WUs, I think it is doable to make an application that has optimal WUs. But then again, it depends upon the features, the kind of reports you are generating. But you will never know the answer to this question until you start developing in the bubble and there is a significant learning curve although in the beginning, everything looks very simple. So if you are taking on this effort on a part-time, be mindful that it is going to take many months instead of a couple.

Thanks again for your feedback and my apologies for the late reply and also that I can’t give you a concrete answer to the print and WUs issue. But once we launch the App, then my team might have enough time to make another version of it from your perspective and can discuss it in more detail.

Cheers
Azm

Thanks for the update, I have jumped into the deep end on Bubble working on my application. It’s quite apparent I will likely have to do a rebuild just for WU optimization alone in the future if I don’t graduate from Bubble MVP to a Full Stack build before then. Opting to use “Printer Friendly” views instead of the plugins currently.

Boy is that an understatement… so many small nuance things that are not apparent or in the knowledge base. I’m utilizing a “Coach” to assist me. Haven’t had much luck on the Forums.

Did you succeed in making an accounting app?