Accounting Systems on Linux?

cuebei asks: "OK, Slashdotters - let's talk accounting systems for small-mid sized businesses. With the popularity of Linux servers running various e-business services such as web, directory, mail, commerce, etc, it only makes sense for Linux to become a more mainstream platform in the business world. One of the areas where I can foresee Linux being used extensively is in the area of accounting. Linux is both reliable and scalable, two key requirements for any accounting package. So who uses Linux for HR/Accounting? What options are out there? Open-source or commercial? If you were starting your own business and standardized on Linux as a platform, what accounting package would you use and why?"

Comments

SQL Ledger

[_ivan]

GPL'd, web-based, double entry accounting system
for businesses. Full internationalization support
for several languages, currencies and chart of
accounts, written in Perl. Good stuff.
Webpage here

GNUCash is *not* a business accounting system.
It is a *personal* accounting system.

Re:SQL Ledger

[Nate Fox]

Funny, I just had one of my clients want to test this out, so he gave me one of his servers to set this up on. He wanted me to install both SQL-Ledger and NOLA. Preliminary results as far as a sysadmin is concerned:

SQL-Ledger: Rocks. VERY easy to set up, documentation is complete, and from what my client tells me, theres more modules available than most of the commercial stuff he's looked at. Its running on a Debian Potato system, and almost everything is stock (read: stable). All I added was a source install of pgsql, and added the couple of Perl modules via the CPAN perl shell. I think I had the entire thing runnin in less than an hour, from poppin in the 2.2r4 cd to firing up Moz on my other box.

NOLA: An absolute bitch to set up. Not only does all the documentation end in .doc (with .pdf's on the web...no text/html that I could find), but its EXTREMELY incomplete. It doesnt say what needs to be compiled with PHP (thats my biggest complaint - took me about 6 recompiles to figure out wtf it wanted in PHP). It dynamically generates most of its buttons via libgd, and they dont even look that good. Its got a lot of wizbang stuff, but they haven't worked on the actual use of it much. Not to mention it suggests using the absolute latest libs for things. I'd rather a production system not rely on the bleeding edge. I suggest staying away from it for a while till it matures.

Welp, there's my $0.02. Like I said..I'm the admin who's settin it all up...I haven't really used either of them, but a lot of times you can tell how good of a project it is by how easy it is to set up (ie: how good the documentation is).

Re:SQL Ledger

[larsu]

Disclaimer: I work for Noguska, the main company behind NOLA.

Installing solely from the source tarball is currently much more difficult than need be. We do however provide an iso image file in our downloads section with a complete installer for Apache/PHP/MySQL for both Windows and Linux/Unix servers.

Also, our UI is currently undergoing extensive changes, and things are changing nightly.

Thanks for checking it out!

Accounting and HR on Linux? Yikes.

[muonzoo]

It might just be me, but in my former experience being a SysAdmin for several junior oil companies, one thing really stood out in the IT and infrastructure areas: These people were extra conservative.

Whereas the exploration group was running on really nice (for the time) new SGI machines, the production group was being more reserved with Sparc/SUN solutions and the accounting department was positively in the dark ages with an old AS/400 mainframe. It was considered quite radical when they migrated to a bunch of AIX boxes and they were terrified to do it.

Don't misunderstand me, I'd love to see the adoption of linux and open-source solutions in this arena, but I feel that this is likely an area that will meet with substantial resistance.

Go all the way with ERP

[swizkid]

An "accounting" package is not enough these days. Lets face it, developing relationships with customers is what it's all about. Which means that getting information in and out of your systems in the quickest possible manner is what will win in the face of competition. Enterprise Resource Planning systems from the likes of SAP and Oracle are what give big business the edge. Sure you don't have $250K to spend on solutions from these guys but Appgen, Compiere, and GNU Enterprise are bringing these kind of systems to the masses. The most promising at the moment seems to be Compiere but it does require some up-front costs - (nothing a small business could'nt handle if they were planning on a Windows deployment anyway). Check them out!

What about SAP ?

[Afrob]

mySAP has been running on
Linux for quite some time now.
But perhaps that's nothing for small businesses ;-).

SQL Ledger and Security.

[autrijus]

I've been using and localizing sql-ledger for a while now, and it's definitely a very extensible and easy-to-use package.

However, please Do Not use it as a remote administration / accounting tool that serves over the internet. Its place is inside the firewall.

The reasons is that it doesn't have a session control-related audits. Any user that types in http://hostname/sql-ledger/ir.pl?login=admin&path= bin/mozilla could get into the syste under the name 'admin', given the attacker knows the username "admin" (not hard), and regardless of that account's permission. indeed the same scheme is workable on any other .pl program.

You can apply This patch to fix it, if you don't worry about shared proxies.

And yes, this patch has been sent to the author. His comment was more along the line of accountants are not script kiddies, so we don't need to worry too much. That is probably reasonable, too.