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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?"
In my experience (manufacturing, specifcially chemcial manufacturing), the accounting software is almost irrelevant. The trick is finding a suitable manufacturing package and then you just use whatever accounting package that works with it.
That being said I'd be ecstatic if there was good process manufacturing software available for Linux! But the gamut of features would be rather daunting- solid flexible modules for inventory with lot tracking, formulations, hazmat and environmental reporting as well as MSDS and labelling, production BOM, scheduling, heck throw in HR...and of course the mentioned accounting package.
Heh, give me all of this and our company switches to Linux!
Nathan.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
I work for a small software company that has a windows based accounting package specificaly written for the hospitality industry. We have several linux server installations and have found them to be faster and more stable than the windows equivilant. We use Progress RDBMS as our backend and have had great results. With a samba share setup it looks the same to our support as well as our customers as a NT installation and it saves the customers a great deal on the up front costs. I am pushing to move towards a server appliance that can just be snapped onto a network but we are not there yet mainly due to the fact that we are unsure as of yet if the market would be interested.
One very very important thing that commercial vendors "get" is the fact that a user of such a package is probably NOT accountant, and needs extensive hand-holding when dealing with accounting matters which often have legal implications.
Commercial packages understand this. QB will offer to set up a chart of accounts based on 'interview'. QB will warn you if you are entering things that don't make sense from accounting standpoint.
Writing a ledger app is very easy. Writing an easy-to-use app which provides assistance at every step of the way is not.
This is probably the only case where I think that hand-holding is essential for a product, and why QB is still the only commercial software I use now.
Actually, now that I have acquired more familiarity with accounting concepts, I may migrate to SQL-Ledger, however, these are things that matter for me:
a) Payroll. Its a real pain to compute all the various taxes by hand. Its a real pain to track all changes to tax law for your state to be in full compliance. Now, if sql-ledger guys wanted to do payroll, they'd need to track law changes across all 50 states. Somehow, I don't think it'll ever happen.
b) Compliance (which relates to payroll). Certain reports (941,W2,940, state forms,etc) have to be _right_. Most of them are payroll-tax-related. The penalties are severe and "your honour/officer, my linux software made a mistake" does not cut it.
Agreed, SQL Ledger is great. Personally I like the fact that since it is web based (and uses a real database) that it only needs to be installed on one machine but can be accessed by any machine you've given permissions to.
There are a couple of open source apps on slashdot, and Linux already runs commercial db products such as those based on Oracle,DB2 or Progress. The problem for an open source project is that every country has different mandatory and/or statutory accounting rules that need to be followed, so in order to gain the cross-national critical mass that an open source accounting project would need, it would have to recruit experienced accountancy/ERP/CRM programmers from a multitude of different countries, with a project leader from each country assuring that his/her countries requirements are not ignored. This could be the biggest sourceforge project of all time!
DISCLAIMER: I'm not trying to sell this program, just sharing info on a product I am currently working with.
,"Linux".
I've been setting up Appgen's beancounter software. Can't say much about it, because I'm currently installing, importing files, and configuring it (I'm working on a client/server version), but the client can run on Win**, Mac, Linux, and Unix (*BSD, Solaris, SCO. YMMV). The server program runs on *nix (even on things like AIX, RS/6000, AT&T, and NCR) and NT/2000. If you want to run it just on one workstation, you can do that too. The Linux server program is not the prettiest thing (vt100 based), but it takes up very little of your precious resources. The Linux client program for KDE and Gnome is *VERY* nice looking and easy to work with (though I don't know squat about accounting). It could convince people that Linux might just have a place on a non-tech's desktop. I was impressed and I'm not very easily impressed.
It's not open source in the GNU sense, but it does come with the full sources and a C tool kit. I didn't have to sign an NDA, so make of it what you will.
Check out http://www.appgen.com. They're a *very* Linux friendly company and actually have tech support that doesn't freak out when you say
btw, It's not nearly as expensive as some beancounter programs I've seen out there.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
When we started our ISP seven years ago we almost died in the first few months because we couldn't get the bills out -- off the shelf software was not setup to handle recurring billing models.
What we ended up doing was writting a custom web-based billing system that is now in its third iteration all in PERL and Postgresql
Its like George Clason extolled through his protagonist "Arkad" in the Richest Man in Babylon -- pay yourself
If you cannot bill your clients accurately and timely, you cannot make payroll
Look at how McLeodUSA is dying a horrible (and well deserved) nasty death -- ever since they took over Ovation here locally in the Twin Cities, they have yet to get a single invoice correct -- its so bad we had to switch to another provider in order to get their attention.
The Last impression is often a lasting impression -- your billing is an almost free marketing channel to your clients
Make it work for you
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
I'm going to reply to your comment before you have the misfortune of being modded down into oblivion as a troll (and I don't think you are.)
.5% of the features of their operating system. That is, they each have very little investment in learned skills. Each person knows the bare basics of what it takes to accomplish their job -- the sales guys know how to send, receive and sort email; the secretary knows how to work Excel and Dynacom, and so on, and so on. The upshot is this: All a replacement platform needs in order to be 'drop-in' is a precise rendition of the basic features of Word, Outlook and so forth. Due to the recent TCO explosion in the use of MS products (virii, worms, IE holes, subscription fees....), I've been given the green light to migrate everyone to linux. Initially, I was sceptical. although I'm willing to loudly advocate linux at the drop of a hat for (especially Internet-facing) servers, I was afraid of the headaches that would emerge when I had to field complaints. However, as it turns out, using a windows-like WM (for instance, icewm) and Abiword, Gnumeric, and Evolution works great. Although none of these packages is perfect, they're all 'good enough' simply because the skill set of each employee is typcially so narrow. It's actually the power users that put up the most resistance, and they can usually be assauged by giving them a full GNOME desktop (panel applets and Nautilus are like Jesus for winning them over.) Although KDE works great too, and in fact is what I regard as the superior overall desktop, Abiword and Gnumeric and Evolution and Opera win the vote for Gnome; they're (generally speaking) more well-rounded and more user-friendly than their KDE cognates . Especially important is the degree of browser/filemanager compatibility; as much as I love Konq, it frequently butchers IE-philic web sites (little ?-marks instead em-dashes, for instance), and that makes it very confusing for newbies.
First off, some background: I'm currently working as a network admin (and jr. sw/ engineer) for a small (~10peep) company that has a small quotient of (extremely) technically-proficient people and a lot of very wonderful people whose expertise is in other fields. I mean, *really* *way* other fields. No offense -- these people are all great -- but they have the combined computer know-how of my cat. I mean, some of these people get confused when they accidentally collapse one of the 'folder-branches' in Outlook ("hey! I can't find my inbox!") These people have a hard time using Windows, let alone using linux. However -- and this is the important bit -- they only use about
- undoware.ca
The one problem with SAP-DB at this point, from the "can we make it ubiquitous" perspective, is that it's a real pain to compile.
It was coded on mainframes, and the suite of compilation tools are based on that approach. Thus the code base (and compile process) is "cryptic upper-case 8 character names everywhere."
It's a desparate pain to try to compile it, so it has not quickly moved towards being ubiquitously available. Red Hat doesn't include it in trivially-installable manner in the manner of MySQL or PostgreSQL. Debian folk can't do apt-get install sapdb .
Give it some more time, and get some more public input, and it'll get more attention.
Of course, that would merely bring us to the point where it would start being an interesting "data storage" substrate for an accounting application. Then comes the 'real" work of determining what tables, fields, relationships, and such exist, and how to manage UIs...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I am a CPA in private practice, and for many years I sold accounting software to small and medium sized businesses. At the risk of trolling for flames, I would have to STRONGLY suggest that you not use Linux for accounting in a small to medium sized business environment. (Note: This is defined a company up to $50,000,000 U.S. in revenue) Why?
1. Unless you are blessed with outside accountants like me who read Slashdot and know the difference between Debian and Mandrake, your choice may create significant problems at month/year end when one of my many slightly to nearmost completely computer illiterate colleagues tries to either download/extract your data or wants you to generate a file that to import into either Excel or their audit/trial balance package. Reason: 99.9999% of tax programs/CPA audit software/CPA trial balance software is written in Windows, and all of it takes an Excel file. (Hint: Not being able to do this quickly/easily = higher costs (annually)).
2. Your CFO/controller will have a lot easier time finding people who can work in the Windows environment to do the basic grunt work of entering invoices, bills, and time so the system can print checks (including your own paycheck). In some 15 years in public accounting, highly computer literate, easily trained, low cost clerks are about as easy to find as naturally occurring penguins in the Sahara. Not everybody runs (or wants to run Linux). Most everybody knows Windows, and your clerks will also know some Excel and at least one or two Windows accounting packages.
3. As much value as I see in open source, I would have a very hard time accepting an open source accounting solution as a CPA auditing a set of books. Unless the company is one of the Generals (Foods, Tire, Motors) or equivalent and possesses the internal programming staff and the full time accounting staff to verify that the stuff works right, it's not worth the risk to be a beta site and discover the bugs. Folks, were talking about real money here, and most of my colleagues would be real skittish about any system that "somebody downloaded from the Internet" (It's bad enough to do that with established, old-line accounting sofware companies, and I've got the scars to prove it.) And if you can't convince us that the books aren't bogus (intentionally or otherwise), good luck with the banker.
In short, yes, accountants are conservative and prefer things that we KNOW will work consistently and correctly all of the time. We also like things that have a low total cost of ownership, and unfortunately, Linux and accounting packages don't have it right now. My "as close as I'm gonna get to a professional recommendation without sending a bill" is live with an off-the-shelf, low cost, Windows (there, I've said it) package such as DacEasy, Best BusinessWorks, or Peachtree. Just promise me no QuickBooks, OK?
I'm not really a CPA, I just play one on TV
While your theory that users don't need much functionality may work in theory... it doesn't hold in practice.
The instance Joe from accounting asks his buddy Bob who works at Company X how he does something, and Bob sends him a sample Excel spreadsheet that doesn't work on Joe's computer... someone is going to ask "Why aren't we using standard software?"
For a company I worked at back in 1996 that was standardized on OS/2 and Lotus Smartsuite, this is what pushed them into migration to NT4 with Office 97.
That and the HR people had a hard time finding people trained in AmiPro, but no problem finding people already trained in Word.
Good luck with your migration plan, but I hope you have a backout strategy already devised.
Unix accounting software is far more mature and feature complete then this group seems to know. It has been in wide deployment longer then any Windows accounting software. A quick search on google shows many professional and mature Unix accounting/bookkeeping packages that will run on linux. This was one of the areas of initial application development that occurred in the 1970s. Many/Many companies developed internal accounting packages that were made into commercial products. Windows is the newcomer to this...IMIO
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