Hey, that’s the same way my company wrote a ton of code in the past.

I have colleagues still running on this code

What will be alternative and not-so-expensive solution? Is there a lot of easy to install, support, customize solutions, cheap to use oriented on a small businesses?

Wave (https://www.waveapps.com/) works well for me. Admittedly, I have not explored things like accrual accounting (I just do everything on a cash basis), so I don’t know how well this is supported, and I’m perplexed that there is no easy way to generate EBITDA reports from within Wave itself, but basic tracking of expenses and transfers across multiple vendors and accounts works smoothly.

[Edit] Also, most CPAs I have talked with know and can integrate with Wave.

GNUCash would be a step in the right direction.

... I'll add reasonably user friendly to OP's requirements.

It's not THAT bad. I'd argue that if after watching a few tutorials on Youtube and playing a bit with the software, someone is not able to grasp the concepts, it's a strong indication that this person shouldn't be responsible the accounting of a small business.

Round here it seems like Quickbooks is the default. They even advertise on TV.

Sadly, that's an Intuit product.

and one that's filled with years of cruft with a subscription service tacked on but they don't really do anything and just milk it.

Definitely the “IBM” of small business though, as in you’ll never get fired for choosing it. (Although AWS took over that title for enterprise)

Maybe Notion, Airtable, nocodb

Large/medium businesses, too. In finance, we receive countless reports from 3rd parties. I can't tell you how many of them still rely on person A to manually log into our FTP server at a specific time every day and drop an Excel file into a folder. Sometimes it goes on like this for years. I always wonder if that person ever gets sick.. goes on vacation..

A long ago company I worked for that subsequently went through a couple of acquisitions still basically had one person in finance somewhere who was basically who you contacted for anything related to our defined benefit pension. I assume the bus factor wasn't literally one as there were legally required annual statements etc. but I assume there would have been some manner of chaos if this person from a no longer existing company wasn't there one day. (About 7 years ago, the benefit administration--now a responsibility of Dell's--transitioned to one of the big benefit administration companies; OI expect the person who had been handling it retired.)

I remember a friend whose company allegedly was putting money from their paycheck into some kind of retirement plan, but there was never any documentation showing where that money went. It was skettttttch

A scary amount of the finance world runs on batched csv and whatever those || column deliminited files are called, just being FTPd around, processed in batches. Which then trigger more FTP and more file processing.

Yeah, I've seen stuff like that in my role as a system integrator. We've built all these automated processes for transforming and moving data from system A to system B, but occasionally we learn about other teams who are using excel and VBA for everything. It's very strange.

I consulted for a Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliate (big health insurance group for our non-US readers) that used Excel spreadsheets for managing all their plans and driving their claims processing. This was a company that did 2+ billion dollars a year in business back in 2007.

It was mind-boggling. They had a team of 20 people updating spreadsheets. Hopefully they've gotten their stuff together by now - but I doubt it. We tried to get them to buy a product data management suite (they were bad at building software in-house)...they finally agreed...then the recession hit, and they reversed course.

I can relate. I was building a new kind of data management system when I approached a small mortgage company to be one of my first customers. Startups will bend over backwards to get those first few customers on board, so I worked closely with them to show how my software could make their business run much smoother.

They had a separate spreadsheet for every state (all 50 of them). Some states just had a small number of customers in them (e.g. Wyoming). Others had large numbers of customers (e.g. California).

Their support team could only update one spreadsheet at a time. So adding a customer in Texas required locking that spreadsheet until the transaction was complete. Doing reports required compiling data from all the relevant spreadsheets. Queries that could be done on a relational database in under a second, took many minutes (or hours).

I tried to show them how my system could easily load all their data and make everything work much more smoothly (and saving them hundreds of man-hours); but they just couldn't see the value of spending a few hundred dollars a year for a license for my software.

I wonder if it wasn't the value (people-hours aren't hard to calculate) but a risk assessment. If their system has been working just fine, but the new system entailed major risks (startup going out of business, hosted off-site, backups not in their control, PII / security issues) the calculation gets a lot worse.

I can confirm a large retail company in the US ran all of their inventory purchasing through an Excel file that was managed by a small (<10 people) group.

They were bought out by an even bigger company a few years back, but they were managing to chug along until the mid 2010's at least.

I suppose this makes me feel better about the clunky “enterprise” stuff that my former employer (another national retailer) used. I mean, at least it wasn’t just spreadsheets emailed around!