The Grumpy Editor's next project

Chances are, however, that many of those companies share the one exception which can be found here at LWN: our business accounting is done using a well-known, proprietary, small business bookkeeping tool. It has all the problems associated with such tools: it holds our company data in an opaque, proprietary format, it does not interoperate with the rest of our operation, it does not work as reliably as we would like, and it occasionally forces an expensive upgrade to a new version for no clear reason. Plus there's that proprietary operating system that the bookkeeping application depends on.

Various attempts to replace this application have failed to take off. It's hard to replace a functioning, important business subsystem, and, frankly, free alternatives in the business accounting area have been slow to reach a mature state. Your editor has recently become determined to change this situation, though. Enough is enough.

A new accounting system will have to meet a number of needs. To begin with, it must be able to import accounts and historical data from the proprietary application. It should operate in a multi-user, network-friendly manner. We need all of the usual accounting functions, from double-entry bookkeeping to easy export of data to our accountant to the creation of the occasional pie chart. And we would really like the ability to integrate it with the LWN site code, since so much of our commerce goes through that code.

There are numerous projects in this space. Your editor's list of candidates at the moment includes (in no particular order):

• GnuCash: this application is mostly aimed at personal finance (see this review from 2005), but it does have some business features built into it as well.

• SQL-Ledger: a longstanding web-based business accounting system. The code is GPL-licensed (this week), but its owner (DWS Systems, Inc.) has not always distinguished itself as a community-oriented operation.

• Ledger-SMB started as a fork of SQL-Ledger. It has gained significant community support and diverged significantly in a short period of time.

• Lx-Office is another SQL-Ledger fork. It appears to be aimed at the needs of German companies.

• Compiere is an "integrated ERP & CRM solution" which happens to have an accounting module built into it. Like SQL-Ledger, Compiere is the product of a single company which has not always been as open as its user community would like.

• Adempiere is a fork of Compiere with a stronger community focus.

• TinyERP is billed as "the world's most advanced open source ERP & CRM." It appears to have an active community and a fair amount of documentation - as long as one doesn't mind reading a little French here and there.

• Lazy8 is a general ledger package written in Java. It appears to be less feature complete than many of the others.

• OFBiz is an Apache "enterprise automation software" project with an emphasis on supporting electronic commerce. It is covered by the Apache license and is used as the base for a number of other applications, both free and commercial. Free applications based on OFBiz include Neogia, opentaps, and SourceTap.

• Project Open is a web-based system with an emphasis on project management.

• ERP5 is "a full featured high end Open Source / Libre Software solution published under GPL license and used for mission critial ERP / CRM / MRP / SCM / PDM applications by industrial organisations and government agencies." The current pace of development on this project appears to be a little slow, though, judging from the traffic on its mailing lists.

• Quasar is a formerly proprietary package which was released under the GPL at the beginning of 2005. Unfortunately, it appears that not a whole lot has happened with this package since then.

• Several proprietary accounting packages for Linux exist as well. If your editor determines that none of the free utilities is yet up to the task, he will venture into this area. But one can hope that entrusting a vital business function to another proprietary package will not be necessary.

As one can see, there is no shortage of alternatives to look at; no doubt LWN readers will know of a few which your editor missed. Working through this list will be more than enough to keep an editor busy for some time; since your editor has no particular passion for accounting, it's also likely to make him somewhat grumpier than usual. It's clearly not a topic which can be covered in a single article. So expect a series of installments as your editor heads into the accounting jungle and tries to figure out whether it's possible to run a business completely on free software or not.

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