Its all the new fangled dumbed-down, web-ui's that is sheer crap and leaves your head scratching.

Well..the old UI's were coded by old-school, C programmers who started their career in the 70s and 80s. They even wrote a multi-process Erlang style kernel to back the application programming. Performance came naturally from their gut.

Nowadays, we get Electron and congratulate ourselves.

But almost no one is fast with a mouse based GUI

Indeed.

I had to work in the store for a month and got good feed back from the workers there.

We try the smooth the user experience with web apps for tasks that are done often so it's not to confusing.

But the impotent data entry task like order entry and so on are done the old interface because it's more efficient.

Almost certainly most operations accounts and tax filings could be fully auto generated from their bookkeeping - if the bookkeeping was good enough.

You could do that by constraining the bookkeeping and adding some intelligence to the reporting.

So why do bookkeeping firms like Xero stop at basic bookkeeping? Because they sell via accountants - who make a lot of money piping data from one computer system into another to change the format a bit.

Enabling certain people to maintain their mystique is lower hanging fruit than pushing for full automation.

Plus who wants to program accounts systems...

I firmly disagree. I am supposed to be reviewing accounts right now....accruals, prepayments, deferred income, the difference between capital and expense, capital allowances, R&D allowances, dividends vs salaries, consolidation of groups. The average bookkeeper is not expected to work at this level. That all requires judgement and experience and expertise. That is why Xero stop at the easy bit

This is such a typical dismissive reaction by a person who has ZERO insights into the domain.

If it is so trivial, why don't you do it and disrupt the market? Some very trivial millions are waiting for you to just come and get them, what's holding you back?

Half of it is just the business & people skills to extract the necessary information. Harder than you'd think, and that's just asking people for stuff!

For complex accounting and analysis you still need accountants and business analysts. It's a different type of job in that case though: instead of handling the common cases, you handle the edge cases that the software is unable to deal with.

It's not that it couldn't be done, but it's very much a moon shot and it's not going to happen without someone charismatic and experienced driving it and selling it.

Specific niche feature SAP-a-likes are more plausible on a smaller scale, but sales and marketing will always be the real challenge.

Which is exactly what SFDC, NetSuite, etc have done. There's definitely room here.

I can only imagine that if you create any tool worth competing with SAP, your customers also have to be huge companies.

We lost some customers to SAP later on because they become bigger and "consultants" told them that they should switch to SAP because, you know, all big companies use SAP. I haven't heard of any success stories from those customers yet (this is not entirely SAP's fault though).