
Free, Modern Desktop Accounting for Small Businesses
Everything you need from a small, simple small business accounting tool. Billing, Payments, Ledgers, Invoices, Reporting. A fully featured replacement for tools like GNU Cash and Tally.
I'll admit I've been a little depressed about the state of open-source software lately - especially when it comes to GPL licensed projects.
So to see a new project like this - one that isn't just developer tooling or bleeding edge new-tech experimentation for nerds - it's refreshing! There's nothing wrong with the other sorts of projects - but good GPL software that is actually useful out of the box to average people - that's the dream. At least that's the dream that drove me into this industry in the first place. Thanks for creating and sharing your work.
Yeah, from the looks of it, one or two decades more and some flavor of Linux will be the only surviving major GPL software.
https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/t...
From the same people who also made ERPNext, "the world's best 100% open source ERP" which was built in their own (open source) web framework called ... Frappe https://frappe.io/frappe
We have been doing ERPNext for 10 years now and a lot of what we did with Frappe Books is based on that learning.
I just opened a new entity and was looking for an accounting package that was not Quickbooks. It turns out the hardest integration for accounting software isn't some file format or API - its accountants. In the US at least, Quickbooks is the defacto standard, and I've had a terrible time trying to find somebody that is willing to deviate from it.
That said I am open and eager to try something new. I really respect the Frappe and ERPNext team, and enjoyed this home page a lot so I downloaded it to my Linux box. I had some really odd UI glitches from the start, mostly just with electron window management (setup screen is not resizeable, then I accidentally resized the main window to 1 px wide). I found that the date picker was hilariously wrong - it would show 30 or 31 for all dates of the month except for the first row, then jump back to the prior month every time I selected a date. I could not remedy this with manually typing in a date entry. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/7XjT9i3
Other little issues: - no app icon on Ubuntu (gnome) desktop - I wish the account names were 'frozen' to the left side of the P&L and Balance Sheet reports. I have to scroll left and right to read the reports. - I kind of need a description line on my invoice line items, or I'm going to need to make a ton of items, which will kind of mess up reporting. - Some of the UI and language isn't really customized for US norms. Its not a big issue but sometimes feels awkward.
I hope this is helpful feedback. I'm going to talk with my accountant soon and see if they would be open to trying something new, but until then I'm stuck with Quickbooks. I just can't stand paying for a product that is chock full of ads for other products, and which walls off competitors by design.
I do love the stack, and would like to be able to just keep the sqlite.db in Dropbox and share with my other machine and accountant.
Best of luck. I could definitely see myself paying for this in the future, preferably one time or annually.
As an accountant (working on becoming a software developer), I've started to develop a reluctance to working with different tools because there are so many bad ones out there. Sometimes clients don't realize how bad they are, because they don't use it as much as accountants do, or they don't use the same parts of the software that accountants do (for example, bookkeeper uses data entry side, client uses report reading side) so they aren't bothered by the same issues that really slow you down when you're spending all day working with a tool.
I'd be open to working with an open source tool, but it sounds like some of the little issues you already noticed imply there'd be a lot more issues with smooth usability.
Odoo is also an open source accounting program, that's been around for awhile, aimed more at ERP side.
Thanks for the feedback. Will take it and improve it. You can also file the bugs at https://github.com/frappe/books