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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?"
I know that there are several accounting packages out there that support Linux (Computron being one) but they are mostly expensive.
The one problem with an open-source accounting package is that accounting standards are constantly changing and the software would often have to be changed to reflect new standards. Anyone working on such a project would have to be well-versed in each of the new SFAS (Statements of Financial Accounting Standards) as they come out. That's not a fun project for a CPA let alone a layperson.
I spent a lot of time last year looking for open source accounting software. I'm not happy about it, but I would not recommend open source enterprise accounting to anyone who wants to keep their job/business.
Cost: Yes, commercial accounting systems are incredibly expensive. Unfortunately, fucking up your financials is far, far more expensive than investing money in good, supported software. Call a few lawyers and accountings who do auditing and ask for quotes on hourly rates if you're not sure. Bad accounting will ruin a business very, very quickly.
Reliability: I believe in the basic cathedral/bazaar theory, but there just aren't enough people writing and using open source enterprise accounting packages for the theory to apply. Unless there are tens of thousands of users, I have to assume that there are bugs in the system and I don't know where they are. See costs, above.
Personnel: if I need to hire someone from a temp agency to sit at a workstation and do AR for a few days, I don't want to spend half the time I'm paying an outrageous fee training them on an obscure system or how to use their damn operating system. If I need to have someone set up the system (as I am not an accountant), and pay truly outrageous amounts for their time, I sure don't want to spend thousands of dollars getting them familiarized with the system. Especially when they will still be punting on decisions that can affect the system years later.
Everything that I've said isn't true if there's an open source solution that becomes widely used...but accounting is really the last area of your business where you want to be on the bleeding edge of software development. In other areas, the bleeding edge might give you a competitive advantage, but in accounting, you will just plain bleed.
Yes thats correct but you CANNOT compare SAP to open source - it runs on linux because they promote it as multi platform but it is so commercially protected and copyrighted that never in a million years could it be open source.
We are in phase 2 of an SAP Enterprise Implementations and FI, HR and CRM modules live, it's cost us approx $21million AU to get to this point and we run everything on SCO UNIX for stability - im sorry guys never in a million years would a company spend 17-20 million and then put it all on Linux to save some money.
HR / Corp Finance are governance and control systems and as such they are not the sort of thing a large corporate would ever consider replacing with open source products - even less likely when you consider the fights, schisms and almost religious wars fought amongst the cogniscenti. Companies need legally to have stable systems that work in these areas and a clear and responsible vendor who owns the system (someone to sue if it all goes down).
The area open source can thrive in is Small Business/ Home office - but i warn you that it means developing open source software for a windows platform as well as linux as you cannot simply expect everyone to use linux (lets be realistic here ok !)
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
A prime problem with GnuCash vis-a-vis trying to get the "bleeding edge" functionality is that it is an absolute pain to get compiled. The functionality may be worth it, but if it's daunting to build, that's a problem.
In exactly the same manner, there are all sorts of projects out there to build some really cool JavaEnterprize-Foo-Beans- Coffee-Espresso-Transactional- EE goodness; if it takes someone who's an expert in all of:
Excuse me if I don't jump up and down cheering at the vast complexity of this.
In contrast, SQL-Ledger is indeed quite straightforward to set up. A bit more manually-involved than I'd like, but certainly not badly so.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
The same fucking person you sue when your closed-source app running on Windows fails: NOBODY. Jesus, have you ever read a EULA? You sue absolutely NOBODY. This comment needs to be rated -1 Troll or -1 Total Idiot immediately.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
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.
Sorry, but I have to disagree. Accountants are worse than script kiddies. When they go bad they know exactly what they're looking for, and they know how to manipulate the data to hide any unusual transactions. Maybe the mythical bad accountant doesn't personally have the skillz to crack a system, but -- I assure you -- they are more than capable of finding a partner to help them.
I've been doing SAP R/3 security for a handful of years, and I could tell stories that would make every CFO in the world crap their pants.
You have to realize that we're talking about being able to manipulate real money. You can't treat it like monopoly money because it's just a bunch of numbers on a UI. You need to control (and be able to audit) access to an enterprise accounting system just like you would protect and audit access to a giant pile of dollar bills that is equivalent to your company's net worth. You've also got to realize that admin-style access to an accounting system means that you can make changes to things that happened in the past. So I could go back two months ago and insert a bogus purchase order for $99.00 (or any other small amount that misses the executive-approval-radar). Then, this month, I could pay it -- to that anonymous bank account I have. I could do this over and over with multiple fake purchase orders for months and months. And since no one could audit the transactions, they would only know that they were missing an ass-load of $99.00 transactions. (The real-world implementation is a bit more complicated, but you get the idea).
If your company has $500,000 of revenue a year, and the two accounting people are personal friends, you probably don't need to worry about embezzelment, fraud, fake purchase orders, etc. (I personally would worry about them, but I'm a paranoid security guy).
If your company is pulling in a few million dollars a year, and you hire random accounting people then, yes, you need to be able to audit their activities.