Comments on: Open source billing applications

By: Ken McNees, CPA

Ken McNees, CPA — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 19:37:52 +0000

First of all, not sure who said that Quickbooks owns the market, but I totally disagree with this.

Second, there are a number of exceedingly good replacements out there. Do not ‘give up’ just because someone says the interface is ‘clunky’ or ‘gee they use Postgress”. Boink!

If you are in business, you are expected to ‘grow’. If you do not ‘grow’ it means that a competitor will soon be eating your lunch. So why think small? Why limit yourself to some little check register program. And why get totally roped into Intuit’s offerings (which are pretty stale nowadays)?

Do seriously consider moving off the Wintel platform. Big business does not run serious accounting on Windows2003. Medium sizes business’ do, but they soon get frustrated. Why go through all that?, and pay hefty licenses besides. And don’t forget all the trouble with viruses. These little buggers – which target Wintel – are expensive.

Do what smart, forward thinking business people do. Use Unix. Think Oracle runs on Win2003? Yes it does, but nobody uses it on that platform. Too many security issues, too expensive, too slow, and too unreliable.

Want to run Unix, but don’t have a clue? Try ubuntu. It’s Linux, a close relative of unix, and it will take you where you want to go. Once you try it, you will not, repeat, you will not, go back to Windows. There is simply no comparison.

If you are serious about your business, and want a serious accounting program, there’s good news! There are some really good accounting packages out there, and they are free or really inexpensive.

DO check out SQL-Ledger. This is a serious ERP for ‘growing’ companies. Your investment in time will be paid back many many times over. (And whoever was complaining about the developer selling the manuals to earn a living – give me a break. If you can’t afford to buy a manual then you are really kidding yourself. Profit (and it’s inexpensive anyway) is not a dirty word. Dieter does a really great job. Look at his ‘what is new’ on his web site.

If you have a small business, and figure you may never move beyond that – perhaps because you like small, and many do, then check out MoneyDance.

Both of these are excellent products, and there are many many more.

Good Luck.

By: Ned Lilly

Ned Lilly — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:32:26 +0000

I agree with Bill McGonigle – the “web-only” requirement is somewhat out of step with real-world usage of accounting software. The PostBooks Edition of xTuple ERP is a GUI client (runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux) that connects to a PostgreSQL database (and I’d echo Martyn’s praise of PostgreSQL as well).

There’s an easy, all-in-one installer available for free download, and there are dozens of how-to videos as well. There’s more at http://www.xtuple.com and http://www.xtuple.org.

By: Jim Salter

Jim Salter — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:38:34 +0000

Thank you for this – you lead me to Bamboo, which wasn’t enough for you but was EXACTLY what my small business needed!

By: Jon Silver

Jon Silver — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 05:08:14 +0000

Frustrating, isn’t it. Back in the mid 90s I did a big group software review for Personal Computer World magazine and found all the available accounting packages on the market were sadly lacking. The only ones with redeeming features were Quicken (Intuit’s sadly dumped “personal finance” software which could even handle VAT on cash accounting or accrual basis) and TAS Books.
Sad to see that very little has changed, except perhaps that one of my old front-runners is defunct. If I didn’t really need an online solution I’d even look as TAS Books again.

By: Martyn

Martyn — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:37:18 +0000

BTW just re-read your comments on some of the others

Postgresql is easy to install nowadays, don’t let that put you off any pgsql system.

Plus it is WAY WAY WAY better than mysql for mission critical data (which accounting data is) IMHO.

Martyn

By: Bill McGonigle

Bill McGonigle — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:15:50 +0000

Most Quickbooks users run the native client (I know they also have a web version but it’s not nearly as popular). So to discount an app that requires a client would seem to be an easy win for Quickbooks, as they have a native advantage in your comparison. Note, for the apps that require things like perl or PostgreSQL you might try using a linux distribution like Fedora or Ubuntu which make those trivial to install, or have them pre-installed. PostgreSQL is the most robust open source database, so it’s expected that would be a requirement for many of the apps.