Akaunting: a web-based accounting system

As an aside, additional motivation for this effort came in the form of an essentially forced upgrade to QuickBooks 2019 — something that QuickBooks users have learned to expect and dread. There appear to be no new features of interest in this release, but it does offer a newly crippled data import mechanism and routine corruption of its database. If your editor didn't know better, he might just conclude that proprietary software is buggy, unreliable, and unfixable.

A perfect choice

Akaunting bills itself as the "perfect choice" for those looking for a QuickBooks alternative. The page hits a lot of the right points: free software, maintaining control over your accounting data, etc. Just the sort of thing your editor was in the mood to hear.

The Akaunting project is relatively young, having announced its existence in September 2017. The system is written in PHP and JavaScript; the code is licensed under GPLv3. Akaunting is able to use MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite to store the actual data. It is, as one might expect given the implementation languages, designed to run as a web application; one can install it on a handy machine, but Akaunting (the company) also offers to host accounts free of charge on its own servers. The company promises "we cover it, for free, forever" — a pretty big promise for a free-software startup with a minimal track record.

Akaunting is an open-core offering; the basic functionality is available in the free version, and various "apps" can be added to increase that functionality. The site talks about "buying" apps, but the prices are quoted in dollars per year, which might be a bit confusing. The site claims that all apps must be GPLv3-licensed, and the apps in the store appear to adhere to that. One must pay to get the source initially (at least, as long as nobody posts it elsewhere); after that, ongoing payment is only required to get support and updates. There are 48 apps listed in the Akaunting app store as of this writing.

As seems to often be the case with company-owned free software, pointers to the source repository are rather hard to find. A look at the Akaunting repository shows about 1,200 non-merge commits over a period of about two years. The number of developers is quite small, as might be expected. There appears to be no contributor license agreement associated with this project, so any outside contributors would retain the copyrights for their code; it's not clear whether that was intended or not. Ominously, the last commit in this repository happened in April; an Akaunting employee responded to a forum query two months ago with a promise that "new versions will be available soon", but that has not yet happened.

One of the key attributes that anybody should consider before adopting a new accounting system is the strength of the community that works on it. Akaunting raises some red flags in that regard. Work seems to be done exclusively within the company, and there is no evident effort to build a wider community around it. Using an instance hosted on the company's servers appears too risky to be considered seriously; hosting it locally eliminates the concern that one's entire accounting system could vanish overnight, but the risk of ending up with an unsupported system remains.

Test-driving Akaunting

Your editor chose to experiment with the company-hosted version of Akaunting in the hope that it would eliminate the pain of installing a large PHP application and show off the software as the company wants it to be seen. One immediate observation was that the system was generally slow to respond; that might be the result of an overloaded server rather than slow software. Either way, it is not a hugely encouraging introduction to a new system.

The basic company setup is easy enough; the system doesn't ask for much more than a company name. The user is then dropped into the "dashboard" screen, shown in the screenshot to the right. Adding bank accounts would be a logical next step; the screen to do so is straightforward enough but somewhat limited. There is no distinction between types of accounts, for example; a savings account is the same as a credit-card account. There is no provision for asset or liability accounts.

This is about the point where one runs into a significant show-stopper: Akaunting is a single-entry accounting system, with all of the limitations that implies. Double-entry accounting is available as an app ($69/year), which is perhaps better than nothing. But a proper accounting system should have double-entry wired deeply into its design; bolting it on as an app seems unlikely to work well. Since this functionality is a paid add-on with no public repository, it is unlikely to see any community support even if a community grows around Akaunting in general. While Akaunting with the double-entry app is still free software, it begins to have some of the characteristics of the proprietary variety.

Importing one's data might well come next. Akaunting does feature an "import" button for most of the sorts of records — customers, vendors, transactions — that one might want to feed into the system. The only format accepted, though, is an XLS spreadsheet; the system will helpfully provide a "sample spreadsheet" as a way of documenting the expected layout of the data. Limited support for other file formats, such as one might want to use to import data from a bank, appears to be available (for a fee, naturally) from the app store. There is also an API that one could, in theory, use to write an importer, but the documentation is rather limited.

Support for the entry of invoices, bills, and cash payments works well enough. The use of drop-down menus for selecting customers and vendors will get unwieldy quickly, though, for companies with large numbers of either. There is support for recurring payments and sending email to slow-paying customers. The ability to attach arbitrary files seems like a useful feature not found in all accounting systems. There is no support for check printing (or the printing of any sort of form, for that matter). The basic set of expected reports is there, but there is little ability to customize them. Reports that one would expect from a double-entry system, such as a balance sheet, are missing.

One could go on, but the conclusion seems clear enough by this point. Akaunting has been put together as a visually pleasing web application, but its accounting capabilities fall short of what even a small company like LWN needs and its development future seems uncertain at best. Perhaps, with time, Akaunting will become a more fully featured system with an active development community. Your editor hopes so: one can only wish well to a company with an apparent commitment to free software that is trying to improve the state of the art in this area. But, for now, Akaunting is not a candidate to be LWN's next accounting system.