Running a Business on Open Source Software?

Graabein asks: "I'm part of an effort to startup a VoIP provider. We've decided to use Open Source Software wherever possible. Production is not a problem, we can handle the VoIP network itself, POTS termination, web sites, email systems, all the usual stuff. The business side of things is another matter entirely. We need to be able to handle Customer Relationship data, manage subscriptions, handle invoicing and accounts, have a web shop of sorts, online billing, credit card transactions, and more. Whatever system we use has to be able to handle national standards for accounting, or at least be possible to modify to do so. We've looked at Compiere, but our business types are not impressed. Neither am I, for that matter. Requiring an Oracle license is one thing (database independence is 'in development', but it has been for a long time, with no discernable progress), not working properly with Mozilla is another (you need IE to use it fully in HTML mode). What other options are there?"

"Our business types are full of suggestions for supposedly excellent and well suited systems, however they all have in common that they require Windows on the client. If we choose one of those systems our OSS policy is pretty much moot and OSS has been relegated to (some) servers in the computer room and that's about it. I don't mind running these business functions on a Windows server if that is the best system for the job, but having to run Windows on every client in order to access the data is simply not acceptable.

We want Linux and OpenOffice on every desktop. We want to be able to access customer data from a variety of clients, even including Windows. The same goes for Accounting data, HR data, QA data, you name it. Do we have to write our own system from scratch? I'm not sure that is very realistic."

Comments

SQL-Ledger of course !

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.sql-ledger.com

Re:SQL-Ledger of course !

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be a little more reassured if they didn't use floats to store amounts.

And making the bookkeeper do data entry in a web form with no client side scripting to help (ie: for immediate validation, incremental lookup fields, adding rows to data entry tables)? Ugh.

Re:SQL-Ledger of course !

[cHBs]

There are other FOSS financial accounting software. I have created the list Open and Free Financial Accounting System of the ones I found. I hope some of you can use it. The most enjoyable greetings

Some things to try

[ptaff]

You might want to peek at OpenGroupware. My colleagues and I have skimmed though what was available and it seems to be the most impressive for at least the customer management side. Though the look of the web interface will not amaze your artist friends, it seems to work well. You can interoperate with Evolution, Mozilla Calendar and some other programs - even Outlook should you want to buy the driver.

I'd strongly suggest not to be impressed by eGroupWare's feature list and cute themes (I know WE've been fooled). Seems like these guys, though talented, are not really working towards stabilizing the tree, so you see frightening changelogs - like code rewrites between 1.0RC2 and 1.0RC3. They forked from phpGroupWare lately but I can't tell if it's a more serious project.

One of my friends is completely sold to the Horde Project so you might want to try it.

All of these will not solve all your issues but no application does and as these three above are open source, you can do the linking as you like.

Look at freshmeat.net

[BeBoxer]

Have you looked around on freshmeat.net? There are quite a few people providing some sort of business management package. A quick search for "billing invoicing" turned up the Trabas VoIP Billing package as the first hit. Probably a good place to start. I'm sure there is plenty of stuff that will do most of what you want. Is your company comfortable with doing some minor coding on an existing project to get exactly what you want? If so, there are a lot more options.

A common problem I think, not easy to solve

[dot-magnon]

I think this is a common problem. I run a business myself, with two friends. We've just started, but we're looking into getting things like customer related software in order before doing anything serious about ourselves. I've worked voluntary with organisations and economy before, and I know things screw up if things are not kept track of.

I think your questions are hard to answer, and even though I have searched a lot for software (not online shopping/CC, we send invoice by mail since we're only doing business inside Norway) I have yet to find anything free and useful.

We've really considered doing it ourselves, making a simpe customer registration and management system with a web frontend. Using f.i. perl modules, you can create Excel documents with tabular data, and such. So that might be a thing to do. If you accept a tiny bit of manual work, that is. Of course, that tiny bit isn't that tiny after you've got hundred customers to bill.

But at least, I know that GnuCash has some functions regarding invoicing and customer registry, but I haven't really had the time to try it out. The rest of GnuCash is good, though, so there should be a hope. So far we can keep track of our economy, and if it works, GnuCash might do our customers as well, even generating invoices.

Good luck, and I hope this post will create some feedback for myself as well. Feel free to email me if you want to discuss, by the way.

We use the following:

[dskoll]

For CRM, we use TUTOS.

For accounting, it's SQL-Ledger. Both the CRM and accounting apps are backed by PostgreSQL.

For office suites, OpenOffice.

Web browsing is Mozilla; e-mail is whatever our employees prefer (Mozilla, Kmail, Evolution, Pine, Mutt, whatever...)

We are completely MSFT-free and intend to stay that way.

Quickbooks Pro 2000 was my last Intuit purchase

[originalhack]

I started using Intuit products with Quicken 2.0 and Quit after buying Quickbooks Pro 2000. It deliberately disables many obvious features in attempts to sell add-ons and internet services. It has a very heavy-handed registration process and contacts Intuit's servers later without asking. And worst, it has essentially no open interfaces so it traps your data within itself and refuses to allow itself to integrate with other applications.

That was my last purchase from Intuit. I have removed it from my system and it sits on a shelf.

Not necessarily

[HPNpilot]

Some net apps require Microsoft extensions or are written using proprietary IE calls and absolutely MUST be run on IE. And don't tell me changing the browser id string will make it work. That will eliminate the warning messages but not make things work. I am having to deal with this issue right at this moment.

Open source credit card processing

[witten]

You mentioned that you needed to process credit cards. Check out my employer, TrustCommerce, which offers a completely open source credit card processing API for connecting to our payment gateway. It compiles on tons of platforms (including Linux), and we have versions for many programming languages: C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, ColdFusion, Lisp, etc. All code is GPL.

Re:Try a Mix

[SwansonMarpalum]

Your opinion comes from a demonstrably spurious source.

MySQL and ReiserFS are both made available under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

The GPL allows people to do absolutely whatever they want with software obtained under it, including using it to run their business in a commercial environment. The GPL does not allow one to distribute the product which was obtained through the GPL in a non-GPLed product, or to distribute products which contain GPLed products under a non-GPL license.

MySQL AB and Hans Reiser make their money by offering alternative commercial licenses which will allow you to distribute the work you derive from their work under a non-GPL license. This only means you have to pay them if you want to release software which links to the code they wrote

A few things to consider

[invisik]

I am a consultant that started my own thing just about a year ago. I do a lot of day-to-day Windows stuff, but internally run SUSE on just about everything and my wife has a Powerbook.

We use Quickbooks 2003 for accounting. Works well, fairly easy to use for my non-accounting brain. What I did to accomplish this was to run a Windows 2000 Server basically as a terminal server to allow either one of us to use Quickbooks on our boxes. I had the firewall forwarded so my accountant could get into it as well. They key is not to use the box for anything else, no web browsing, no e-mail, no nothing. Keep it patched, toss on a copy of Symantec antivirus, install the free version of SFU and you can back it up over the network on yer linux box. Seems to be the best way to "Windows-enable" your linux network.

I also run Mozilla mail against SUSE OpenExchange Server with great success and happiness. OpenExchange has an excellent web interface to mail as well as document management (with revision control), knowledgebase, contacts with contact history type functionality, job and project tracking (admittedly difficult to use), and internal instant messaging. Can sync yer Palm to it as well, or toss on Outlook with IMAP if you really have to. It's quite an excellent product and the pricing is quite reasonable considering what it can do. Doesn't need huge system resources either. I run it on dual a PIII-866 with 256MB right now--512MB would be quite sufficient. (swaps a bit with 256)

OpenOffice.Org runs on the SUSE desktops and the PowerBook has genuine MS Office X. She gets into some complex Excel formulas and macros so decided to go MS on that one. I have NO problem recommending OpenOffice.Org to anyone doing office tasks. If you gotta have support, go StarOffice from Sun--just as good, only a few bucks.

I haven't really gotten into any of the PHPProjekt-type wares. Seem to be a lot of functionality, but not much of it done up really well, and much less of it useful in and office setting. That groupware "killer app" is still lurking out there somewhere, if it's not the SUSE product.

Linux on the desktop is definately do-able. I do it here. My wife's old PC with XP crashed a few months ago--bought her the PowerBook and never thought about the Windows box again. All of your major tasks can be done on linux. I have an IBM X31 laptop and SUSE Pro 9.0 support all my hardware, including wireless network card and even some funky IBM stuff. I'm sure RedHat would be fine as well, especially on desktop systems--your preference.

The community will get better with accounting-type programs. I think it will probably still be a few years until something surfaces. The Win 2000 as terminal server should suffice until then, and it's not too expensive.

Good luck in your efforts, let us all know how you end up!

-m