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."
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.sql-ledger.com
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.
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.
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.
Your internal IT should never ever never be a gating item for letting your business department do what it needs to do. If the chairman of the board likes MS Word and just doesn't "get" Open Office, then the amount of his and your time that you burn trying to show him the light will forever outweigh the cost you would have paid to get him a Crossover license and a copy of Word and keep him happy and concentrating on what he is supposed to be doing.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
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.
It is a closed source general accounting software, but it runs on Linux, and the clients are linux too.
It takes off where Great Plains Classic left, when it got shut down by microsoft in favor of MS Dynamics, and i think its great, rock solid stuff. (passport, not Dynamics)
Also, it is written in COBOL, and uses ACUCORP's ACUCOBOL runtime, for which you need a license. Finally, ACUCORP provides an ODBC driver that works pretty nicely with PHP for web frontends and reporting, and also runs on Linux.
The only gripe I have, is terminal emulation in Konsole, 'cuz the graphics characters come out as A-umlauts and what have you, and i cant seem to find documentation for that issue anywhere.. suggestions?
*shower*
It costs you a couple of bucks to buy Starbucks coffee for all your employees. In the grand scheme of your business, it is an insignificant cost.
It is also a business expense which makes it tax-deductible, so the actual cost is even lower than the price you pay up front for coffee.
Suck it up and join the rest of the business world.
i love trolls
True, very true. However if you have let's say an IT budget of only $5000 and you have to get enough machines for 4 people, what then? True you can "suck it up" and purchase a machine with windows installed, but if you choose to use linux as we all know that saves you a few bucks now. Writeoffs only happen at tax time, not at startup.
---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
You're not really asking for a flame, but I think you're disinsightful.
Open Source developers do business as well. Many developers run their business of OSS, or create OSS outside of their work time. Of course, when someone CREATE a business package, they'll have to know what to do with it. But I would agree that in some cases, the searching user would need some insight in what a product needs to offer.
What would customers know? Do you advertise on your enterprise site that you use this-and-that Inc. Accounting Software? Besides, OSS isn't insecure by default, by all means. And, in many countries, like Norway (mine), you own your own information. If a business f**ks up handling your information, they're up in their knees in lawsuits in no time, if users want that.
Bottom line, Open Source is Open Development, not Open Access.
Simple answer: what you are looking for does not (yet) exist.
There are a lot of fancy applications on the net, none of them any usefull for your purposes (and please prove me wrong, I'd though I had been pretty thorough)
Having looked at the same problem for my own small business I'd say that if your business is essential to you, you either start asking for quotations for companies that can deliver a solution to fits your purposes or find a stock application that does most of what you need. (and does it in a way that most members of staff understand it)
Look at the price, and see if its matches your needs and budget.
As you are setting up your own business, you should NOT be fooling around trying to recreate the wheel; you will need al your energy to focus on your business and hope that it doesn't go belly up.
One sure way of doing that is having a dozen incompatible systems hide all your major business information from you, your customers, and your staff.
I was recently asking this same question, albeit for a home-based consulting business.
The solution that I found was SQL-Ledger. While it is overkill for my needs, I think it might fit your criteria quite well.
The parent should not have been modded flamebait.
Are you running a business to make money, or just to say you used OSS? It seems pretty clear that you don't have a business plan, because if you did, the cost of licensing v. cost of finding something that might work would have become apparent, and you wouldn't have had to ask this question. Forget about technology for a sec, get out your favorite spreadsheet and crunch your finances. Get your priorities in order. Don't make the same mistakes my former associates and I did
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
That was my last purchase from Intuit. I have removed it from my system and it sits on a shelf.
Don't count on a "web interface" equalling "will run on any platform". I've lost count of the number of "web enabled" applications that only work in I.E. Some vendors seem to think the purpose of a web interface is so you don't have to install new software on your Windows PC (giving them the benefit of the doubt vs just plain laziness/poor qa), whereas it _should_ mean it's platform and browser independent.
Personally, if it will only run on I.E. in Windows (wine/xover office notwithstanding), what's the point - may as well run a Windows app.
If a company goes to the trouble of making a web interface, it ought to be done "right", so any web browser that follows http/html standards can run it. It's not _that_ hard to do.
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.
You will likely need windows for some things, unfortunatly. Fortunatly Wine works very well for a lot of window programs, and since you are looking for which one you use, you can demand Wine compatability from the start.
Don't be a jerk instisting on all open source, you have a buisness to run, and that means spending money once in a while. Don't waste your money (except by sending it to me....), but don't be too frugal either. If you can only get what you need from a pay software, buy it and get on with your buieness.
P.S. buy Crossover as your wine implimentation, those guys put a lot of support into wine and should be helped. (Or alternativly you can get WineX, but they focus on games so I doupt you care about their advantages)
It's not the first $780 he's worried about, but the the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.
You're running a business. Get over the idealism and focus on what you _need_.
.7 version borked the checks and you've upgraded to .8 and that borked the witholding info so now you need to rebuild it -- that's unacceptable. Bite the bullet and focus on your business needs.
You need an accounting system that an auditor from a public firm will write an unqualified opinion on. In general this is going to mean a commercial product -- Solomon, Great Plains, Quickbooks, etc.
You need a payroll system that always works. Flawlessly. Many companies outsource this. Explaining to folks that the
You need a business plan that the investors technical people will sign off on. Betting everything on untried and little-used systems isn't going to get you there.
So for a lot of things: buckle down and do what needs to be done.
For the other 90% -- use open office, linux or bsd desktops, open groupware or even openexchange (suse). There are plenty of Linux/BSD/Apache/whatever storefront systems. Work on it. For the accounting/finance/etc folks -- get a windows terminal server and use rdesktop for those windows apps.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
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.
I played with it for a while but the bosses where I work went with anther, Windows-based management system, that has as yet proven too difficult and unstable to actually put into production.
I can tell you that there are problems you may encounter at the moment trying to get all your needs met and integrated in the way you want. At best, you can probably buy a license for some components that are not yet available via OSS.
Here is what HERMES offers at the moment:
Web based CRM including appointments and tasks for customers.
Features that should be out within another month or 2 include:
internal communications system (i.e. communications not involving customers)
Interal appointment handling (i.e. appointments not involving customers)
Appointment and task delegation.
In the mid range, I will offer UI independence via SOAP, LDAP, POP3, SMTP, and IMAP.
In the long run, we want to offer most of what you are looking for. Please understand though, that I have been unable to find any open source packages for handling credit card transactions, so you would probably need to pay for an (expensive) license for such a component.
Subscription management etc. is not a problem-- there are OSS solutions that could be modified to do this with a trivial amount of work.
Anyway, Hope this helps.
I have heard good things about SQLledger, but IIRC, it runs on MySQL, which has a nasty habit of truncating large numbers, so I am not sure if I would trust it. It should be easy to port to PostgreSQL though, I would think.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
When I started at my current employer we were an all Windows NT 4 company. Our embedded devices used Dos as well. After discussing the benefits of Linux vs. Windows CE/Pocket PC my manager decided we should write our new software for Linux. Although our software isn't open source, it's a minor step forward (in my opinion). One of our former employees who was incharge of shipping wrote all the databases in Access, which up until now has been a pain in the butt to find an alternative. If you have the time using Apache+PHP+MySQL is a great way to integrate a database for general purposes however it's fairly time consuming. Another alternative is using Open Office's data sources functionality and creating your own forms within the documents. It's similar to Access from what I've played with it, but I'm no Access expert. I do know that you access DBase, MySQL, and several other database types and since OpenOffice is available for Windows/Linux it's something to consider. I haven't found anything good as of yet and the accounting department is pretty reluctant to hand over their software for me to test in Wine. =D
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
"Give away the stone, let the oceans take and transmutate this cold and faded anchor." - Maynard James Keenan
... and get together with an MBA, and write the killer app for OS. Put together a modular business package, customizable for a variety of businesses (that's where you make the money). Look at ACC-PAC for inspiration. Most businesses need :
:)
Accounts Receivable/Customer relations
Accounts Payable/Supplier relations
Inventory
Payroll/ HR management
This ain't rocket surgery. It is painfully dull, boring and potentially stupidly lucrative.
As one person I suggested it to said: "Thom, that would be great but involves two things that geeks hate: writing accounting software, and cold calling."
Most businesses that need this desperately are small to medium sized businesses that are currently using a few thousand dollars worth of computer hardware exactly the same way they would use a two hundred dollar typewriter.
When I started where I work, inventory was typed out in MS Word, and printed out once a year, with additions hand written throughout the year. We're currently paying someone several thousand dollars to write an inventory database for us in Filemaker. Why wasn't this done years ago? THEY DIDN'T KNOW IT COULD BE DONE!!! If you want to make a good living, and can write accounting software, cold call businesses in your area, and tell them:
"I can make the computer work the way YOU want it to work, not make you work the way that off the shelf software wants you to work."
You will make the sale, and you can reuse your code on the next project.
Why don't I do it? I have a job I like more, that pays enough to keep me in all the toys I want.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
...but don't handicap your business' already statistically slim chances for success by not using a platform most of your customers will!
While it is certainly true that you want to support the platform most of your clients have (English), the converse of deliberately turning away everyone else (Spanish) is false.
Let's say you 5% of your potential customer base will use something other than Windows. You have 10,000 customers this year. By requiring your customers to use Windows, you've just lost 500 customers. You've also lost 500 others that they recommended to your competitors instead. If that lost revenue is greater than the cost difference of support their systems, you're stupid.
Frankly, in this day and age, with well defined HTML, CSS and ECMA standards, requiring your customers to use Internet Explorer is insane.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
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
http://www.invisik.com
IMO, browser-based interfaces lack in the usability front. They are simply not rich enough.
They work fine on the web because they are a compromise: I give you a site with a rather dull interface , but you get to it without installing custom software AND ALSO you are presented with a familiar and simple user interface (click links, scroll pages, fill up form fields, submit info), so you can catch on quickly with my site, because it work quite similarly to other sites you have visited before (an important aspect that some flash-based and some overworked DHTML-based sites seem to overlook).
Of course, the software used internally in a business has both more demands and less limitations.
It has less limitations because you can install wathever software you want (you have tech support, and don't depend on the end user failing to install the latest plugin). You don't have severe bandwidth limitations. You can standarize on a single platform for your clients, and on a single screen resolution (or, if it is not single, at least can be a known and definite set). You don't need to engineer your application to be run in a restrictive security sandbox, so you can have full control of the devices attached to your computer. For instance, you can make the application print an invoice as part of a transaction, without explicit user intervention (no "print" dialog), automatically selecting certain parameters (paper size, margins, resolution), not allowing the user to mess with them. The application you build can also have a steeper learning curve, because you won't have casual users (potential customers that have to figure out how things work on their own, and that you'll loose if they get annoyed), but permanent users that are your employees and can be trained.
The user interface of business software has higher demands too. If you fill in an online purchase form twice a week, you can put up with a clumsy user interface. But if that is your job, and you process purchase orders from 9 to 5, you'll need something better than the average HTML form. For instance, when a customer tells their name over the phone, you type the first three letters and a list of those customers that meet the citeria is instantly displayed for an easier selection. Also, you might want your text to be spell checked as you type when fou fill a text area. If you have used both SQL-Ledger and GNU cash, or PhpMyAdmin and mysqlcc, or any web-mail and any mail program, or groups.google.com and any newsreader then you should know what I'm talking about: even the best engineered web application falls short to almost all rich GUI applications.
Of course, in the future web interfaces might evolve to become richer (XForms, for intance), but until then, selecting a web-based architecture for internal business use certainly can hurt productivity.
Having said all this, I must also point out that it depends on what you call "a Browser-based application". I have taken for granted that the original poster meant a HTML-based application as opposed to, say, an application consisting in a single page containing a java applet or ActiveX control.
Let's look at the situation.
You're not qualified to administer a Linux environment. You probably don't want to bet a business on it without additional training or help.
But you do have experience with running a Windows environment. So you'll be able to handle that. Your choice will be pretty easy to make.
Of course - plenty of buisnesses consist of people without any IT experience on any platform. These folks will either need training or hire help. And in this day and age, finding help with Linux is not so hard.
The pitfall small businesses run in to is thinking that since they've used Windows at home, they can also manage to run a reliable Windows-based infrastructure at work. And sure - they may get it running at first. But they inevitably run in to a situation where they need to hire help. So much for avoiding the cost of hiring IT experience. This is the scenario that I have personally experienced (and been hired to handle) numerous times.
It's not about the $780 per desktop. Even Microsoft will happily tell you that the licensing fees are a drop in the ocean. However, there are serious cost issues involved with supporting Windows desktops, and anyone that tells you differently is selling something.
That's especially true of a business (like this one) where a large percentage of the employees are going to be doing customer service. They don't need full fledged desktops. A thin client connecting via X to an application server would be far less expensive and far easier to support. A single Linux server (given enough memory) will happily support over a hundred thin clients if those thin clients are just doing order entry and light office tasks.
Not only does the business save a considerable amount of money on software licensing, but they end up with a architecture that is far less expensive to maintain. Software and hardware upgrades are a snap and maintenance is essentially non-existant. If a monitor or thin client fails you simply replace it. Instead of Windows PC technicians you only need a monkey that can be taught which cords plug in where.
On the other hand, it also is possible to mix in a few Citrix servers for those Windows applications that are needed for specialized desktops, so it shouldn't be that critical if there isn't Linux software for everything.
What sort of needs does a big business have? Well, they all need to manage human resources. Most need to track items in their warehouses and perhaps training for their employees. The industrial sector will have many additional needs to track equipment, schedule resources, control work authorizations, and safely take equipment in and out of service. Running an enterprise call system also takes more than a PHP app.
There are dozens of other highly generic needs that I haven't mentioned, but all take extensive effort to set up, customize, and integrate into a business environment. And these things are *mission critical*: millions of dollars can ride on the availability of the software. Open source can eventually get here, but it will have to (first) be written, (second) creep up through small business, and (third) be vetted and pushed by consultants who can make money from long-standing service contracts.
I'm not trying to be pessimistic about open source, but there are many unmet needs here. Don't expect to run a serious business without proprietary software. In fact, be as objective as possible when evaluating software needs for your business... pretend that you have to defend every decision in front of someone who doesn't care about the distiction b/t free and non-free software. Someone who only thinks in terms of money, growth potiential, implementation schedules, and risk. If OSS can't stand its ground here (even with the price advantage), drop it. Don't jeporadize your business, and (if you're working for someone else) don't give your boss a bad taste of what OSS is all about.
Stallman--as much as I support the guy--completely misses the real world when he says that "any business based on proprietary software deserves to fail". Deserving or not, any medium or large business that is not based on proprietary software will fail.
I hope open source can one day address these needs, especially for small businesses and start-ups, but I'm not too worried even if it can't. If Linux becomes good enough in other aspects, these proprietary apps will be made to run on Linux too (and some of them already do). "Mostly" free is good enough for me.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Has anyone here tried GnuCash?
[Raises hand]
I don't have accounting complicated enough make it worthwhile using accounting software, but I do wonder how it stacks up compared to Quicken
GnuCash is hands down better for a business than Quicken. IMO, it looks much better for business work than Quicken's big brother, QuickBooks. I have some experience setting up QuickBooks and Peachtree accounting systems for mom & pop businesses, and I've run my personal accounting on one version or another of Quickbooks for about 10 years now. I've just changed over to GnuCash at the beginning of the year, as I'm migrating to Linux.
GnuCash is a full-fledged double-entry accounting system with good audit capability (burn a standard General Ledger to CD every end of month, etc), good report features, and by reputation good A/R, A/P, tax, and payroll capabilities (It pleases me that I don't have to explore those myself.) Also by reputation, its customer and vendor tracking is pretty thorough. It also has very good support for online banking and highly regarded multi-currency handling. And since it is GPL, if extensions are needed you could hire a tame programmer to do them (and use the world to beta test his product).
I'd suggest thoroughly exploring GnuCash and using it as a standard to measure other possible accounting systems against. I think it likely that you'd end up choosing GnuCash when all is said and done.
You'd need another database for the non-financial aspects of tending your customers. There are advantages in keeping technical support history, etc, separate from the financial history. At a WAG, I'd bet that one of the Help Desk packages would handle all of the most important parts of this for a VoIP provider. I haven't explored OS Help Desk databases, but I would think there would be some good ones available now.
I think OOo, GnuCash, and some GPL'd Help Desk database would cover most of your software needs. And in Linux, to boot. That will carve your potential licensing and support costs down quite a bit.
Whatever you do in the end, don't make the same mistake that tech-oriented people always make. Namely, putting the technology ahead of the business. There is no point of using OSS just because you want to. What comes first is the business. What is best for the business? If it is Windows, that's what you should go with. If OSS works out better, that's what you should use. Also, don't forget that you can have a mix. For example, you can use some Windows software for the business process tasks (say CRM or something) but use linux (openoffice,etc) for basic desktop use. Depending on what you need, you can pull your customer data from the Windows database (say MySQL, or MS SQL Server, or Oracle) into a linux application (this depends on what your final business software allows).
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places