[GNC] Integration between Freshbooks and Gnucash?

Jim DeLaHunt list+gnucash at jdlh.com
Tue May 17 18:32:45 EDT 2022


Michael:

Since you ask,

On 2022-05-17 7:16 a.m., Michael or Penny Novack wrote:
> … These [business system] components would communicate to each other, 
> send "feeds" of "transactions" to each other…. One of the BIG 
> decisions when putting pieces together is where are the best places 
> for the division of labor. So I will ask Jim, have you carefully 
> considered that "right place" because this can have a huge affect on 
> the amount of "duplicate work".…

The answer to your question is "no". I have not carefully considered the 
"right place" for a FreshBooks-GnuCash integration.

I imagine that FreshBooks sets its scope by what it thinks will make 
profitable business for its target market: small businesses with no 
internal financial app development. That led it to start with invoicing, 
expand to time tracking, then later to accounting, and recently to 
API-level integration with other apps. I imagine that GnuCash sets its 
scope by what the volunteers contributing to it judge to be sensible and 
achievable given the resources available. It seems that led them to 
start with bookkeeping, and put a toe into the water of invoicing. I use 
each of them because it is expedient. I don't imagine that it is easy to 
turn these two apps into modules of a coherent architecture of the sort 
you describe.

> I don't know more about FreshBooks besides it being able to do hours 
> invoicing and accounting but you want the main accounting to be in 
> gnucash. But in deciding the dividing point, maybe you want more of 
> the accounting in FreshBooks and less in gnucash. In other words, move 
> SUMMARY data from FreshBooks to gnucash, not each transaction. Jim, in 
> the old days one of the simplifications of bookkeeping was "cashbook 
> accounting" where the majority of transactions were entered directly 
> into a journal-less mini-ledger and then once every so often (daily, 
> weekly, quarterly, etc.) a normal transaction transferring the TOTALS 
> (of this mini -ledger) to the main books. Meanwhile any transactions 
> that didn't qualify for the "cashbook" were entered normally into the 
> main books. So if in the period, the number of transactions entered 
> into the cashbook was C and the number entered directly into the main 
> books was M, the number of transactions entered into the main books 
> would be M+1 instead of M+C << when this method was used, it was 
> because C was ten times to a hundred times larger than M >>
>
> Could something like this help your work flow?

Well, I understand that this can be a solution to some sets of problems 
in general, but it is not the solution I prefer to my personal 
situation. I don't have many invoices, so the effort of duplicate data 
entry is low, and the savings from a software integration between 
Freshbooks and GnuCash is low. I see value in having the main accounting 
in GnuCash, because that way my data is under my control even after I 
stop paying Freshbooks their annual feed, and because it is simpler to 
generate reports when my data is all in one place. So maybe the answer 
to your question is "yes". Duplication of invoice data entry is the 
"right place" for my manual "integration".

My primary goal in starting this thread was to make other users of both 
FreshBooks and GnuCash aware of a new potential for ad hoc integration 
in their workflows. I just used my workflow as an example. But, if 
someone happens to have an integration which I can re-use, I am happy to 
know about it.

Best regards,
      —Jim DeLaHunt




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