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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?"
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.
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!
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.
Lacking any traditional desktop software packages, you could always use web-based commercial products like QuickBooks for the Web or Oracle Small Business Suite.
-Entropy [think outside the system]
Our company uses BillMax, but my personal view is that the system was cobbled together without much thought on scalability and is missing a lot of features. We are currently porting the system over to an in-house PHP application.
I suggest staying away from BillMax unless you really want to adapt your company to it instead of the other way around (as it should be)
Anonymous for a reason.
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!
He who knows not what his nose knows......
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.
mySAP has been running on ;-).
Linux for quite some time now.
But perhaps that's nothing for small businesses
-- www.linux-laser.org - Open Source Laser Show Software for Linux
Nathan.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
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.
If you were starting your own business and standardized on Linux as a platform, what accounting package would you use and why?
You want my honest opinion? (And I know I'm going to get flamed for saying this.) I wouldn't use Linux at all.
Don't get me wrong--I'm not anti-Linux by any means. Linux remains an important learning tool for CompSci students and others interested in learning about hacking together an operation system from scratch. But I can't recommend Linux for business use.
Here's my experience. I run a fairly successful business with a mid-sized accounting department. My employees have years of experience with Windows and Windows-based accounting software. It would simply not make sense to re-train them to use Linux.
The same goes for someone starting a business. Don't ignore basic business sense. There are more potential employees out there who are already trained with Windows. If you do decide to go with Linux, whether out of short-sighted greed or out of the desire to support some vaguely defined set of principles, prepare to spend righteously on your training budget. Linux still has a long ways to go, as far as usability.
--
I support a US first strike
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*/
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.
You may want to take a look at Hansa Financials, which is now available on Linux. We were looking at it a few years ago as a back-end to integrate with an e-commerc product (never happened).
The nice parts are that the system has a documented client/server protocol (which they call "Open TCP/IP" for no good reason). Can run on Windows, Mac and Linux. Fairly sensible licensing, from memory. Nice people.
From my limited experience (I'm no accountant), it did what you'd expect, but you saw a lot more of the database directly than you do with Sage Line 50 (the other package I know a bit about).
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Check out the WyattERP project. It is an Open Source ERP for Linux. There is already at least one medium-sized company that runs nothing but WyattERP for all its needs - from the receptionist to invoicing to HR.
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 don't live in the US, and I never will. But from what I have heard, AccPac performs the same role (ubiquitous SME accounting software) that MYOB does in my own beautiful country, Australia.
AccPac have a Linux port.
* It seems to be software you can get competant accountant with many years experience using, minimising training costs and staff overtime while necessary to move to a new system
* It has a fairly good reputation and large amounts of existing systems
* it can import data in a wide variety of formats from its competitors.
It's not Open Source, but it might be the best tool for the job, which should be any competant technical persons criteria for selecting software.
From the posts, SQL-Ledger uses a pgsql backend and NOLA uses a MySQL backend.
I'm not sure what others think, but I for one would be very scared about using MySQL as a mission-critical backend.
Several articles comparing the two (a good one here) have come up with the same basic complaints, MySQL might be fast in overall, but it fails 3 out of 4 of the basic ACID tests (Consistency, Isolation, and Durability). So it's extremely fault intolerent.
PostgreSQL is fully ACID compliant and is thus a more reliable backend.
Yes, there are plug-in table managers for MySQL that are ACID compliant, but it's nicer to know that the core product already meets these basic requirements for a robust database.
So be sure you take a look at technology behind the systems before committing your critical systems to them.
passetspike!
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.
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.
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
As others have pointed out, SQL ledger is really quite nice but you need to be able to "plug it in" to the other business applications that are being used.
So you either write SQL ledger modules for *everything* or you use some sort of middleware. I have a short document which describes why you need middleware:
http://www.yelm.freeserve.co.uk/middleware/
There's lots of very expensive and proprietary middleware systems from such companies as IBM and WebMethods. Something open would be handy.
Deleted
I agree with one other poster who mentioned Compiere. It is a very complete, robust, and *awesome* ERP/CRM system. http://www.compiere.org
Daniel
Know nothing about it, but looked it up on Google. Might as well share my research:
SQL Ledger
Christopher Browne's List of Free Software for Business Accounting
Mini review of SQL Ledger
Short discussion of SQL Ledger from GNU.ORG
AllCommerce, an ecommerce and fulfillment system
GNU Enterprise
Linux-Kontor is a free ERP (enterprise resource planning) software suite.
Bush's education improvements were
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.
It has been designed by people who really do know what they are doing and quite a lot of effort has gone into it recently.