Accounting systems: a rant and a quest

I can recommend the accounting program *I* use because that is the best. Seriously, But of course I say that with reason.

I have been trying OpenErp, used it for 2 years. It has a number of very serious bugs. But bugs in provious versions are not confirmed anymore. Only in the current version. As you know, upgrading in OpenERP is a nightmare or a paid job. So if you stick with the old version there is no bug fixing. If you go through the effort of upgrading you are replacing known bugs by unknown bugs. And by the time you learned the new bugs, the next version is current and your new bugs are too old to be fixed. WIth serious errors I mean a balance which is unbalanced, etc. If the tax Dept. ever decides to audit my books over those years I am bankrupt.

SQL-ledger is more the spirit of real FOSS. But it doesn't do inventory. And I am not sure about multi-currency. Anyway it felt rather basic and lacked some functions I needed.

XTuple is a nightmare. Even the simplest things are extremely complicated. Correcting a wrong booking is so complicated you can't correct it without making other errors which have to be corrected, which causes you to make errors... Community support is almost non-existent. Very bad, everything is coded in PostgreSQL. Restoring a backup version takes 15 minutes on an i7 machine.

Then I found FrontAccounting. It comes close to Quickbooks in functionality. It uses MySQL. It is fairly simple. You can understand and hack the database. 30 tables or so. It has an undo function which voids a transaction, but leaves a trail. It has inventory and multi-currency. It has good reporting. It is flexible. Multi-language. Community support is good. Making a test copy is easy. Restoring previous versions or previous data is a breeze.

Frontaccounting is close to perfect for any small business.

jlinkels