Tuesday, May 23, 2017

lino@ria

Today Tonis and I (mostly I) talked one hour about Lino to about 15 employees of the RIA (Information System Authority of Estonia which “coordinates the development and administration of the state’s information system, organises activities related to information security, and handles the security incidents that have occurred in Estonian computer networks.”, more on their website)

The RIA is not planning any Lino project and there was no concrete goal behind that talk, but I hope that the attendees remember Lino if they hear about some possible partner, and that they understood a bit more why free software is so important.

Lino and accounting stuff

We also had a meeting with Taavi from Kuldpliiats, an accountant service provider.

Currently I do myself all the accounting work of Rumma & Ko (sales, purchase, bank statements, tax and wages declarations, annual tax report), and I still use TIM for this work. And it is time to convert to Lino Così. But I don’t want to do this alone. I want to find an accountant who is able and motivated to provide accounting service to Rumma & Ko using this database.

Taavi confirmed what I knew before: from an investor’s point of view the Lino Così project doesn’t make sense. It is a crazy project. Especially in Estonia where they have e-arveldaja (an almost free accounting application for small enterprise) and at least 10 good accounting applications. In order to have a chance in Estonia we would need to add specific features like sending and receiving invoices using a standard which is going to become mandatory in a few years, or the digital data transfer of wages and tax declarations.

This meeting seems to tell me that I should give up doing accounting myself. Buying this as a service will cost me maybe 200 € per year and will save me at least 10 hours of work.

I agree that accounting stuff would be quite a challenge for Tonis. He has no experience on the field, and from my own experience I can say that it took me at least five years before I started to love accounting.

But I don’t like the idea of giving this up. Accounting stuff isn’t actually that difficult. I reviewed the following documents:

• Guidelines for Description of Estonian Electronic Invoice.

• E-arved ja DVK

All this is so easy! At least technically. Yes of course the devil is in the details, and of course it will cost much more than a few hundred euro if Taavi (or some other accounting professional) is going to do our accounting with Lino. But I continue to believe that it is worth a try. Eat your own dogfood.

Another question is whether Taavi is the right partner. He seems competent, but we need somebody who believes at least a bit in this project and who is ready to invest some time to explain to Tonis what needs to be done.

Next step is to install a plain Lino Così production site for our accounting, import accounts chart and initial balances. That’s a work which I must do. And then show it to Taavi and ask him again whether he feels able to provide accounting service to Rumma & Ko using this database. It is normal that he couldn’t answer that question because he didn’t see any data. And if Taavi says no, then I can reuse the site for asking other candidates.

IOW: No, I don’t give up accounting stuff.