Which is the best open source accounting software?

[sunybck]

In your opinion, what is the best OPEN SOURCE accounting software and why?

[gmobisson]

Hi sunybck,

In my completely biased opinion....

If you have fairly complex needs, and a desire for "ERP" type features, then I would have to say Compiere. Its the most feature rich and stable Open Source Accounting package that I have worked with. The product that has been around for almost a decade, is feature rich, stable, supports integrated Accounting, Purchasing, Ordering , Materials Management and Manufacturing...and has an integrated Web Store. It has built in Reporting Module and has a Configuration tool to allow code-free customization (like Sugar).

There are some others out there like OpenBravo, which I think is a Compiere fork (could be wrong), and WebLedger. I think that most of them have a ways to go to catch Compiere.

The SugarCRM partner that I work for also is partnered with Compiere, so I am pretty familiar with the product. Go to their website and check out their wiki/forums/docs.

Good luck!

[roblaus]

I looked at Compiere, Adempiere, ERP5, OpenERP (previously Tiny ERP) and OpenBravo.
I believe that Compiere and Adempiere (a Compiere fork) might be good enterprise grade softwares but need extremely skilled people to implement it.
OpenERP is probably better for smaller entities and I like it for its European origin (all the VAT issues) but is not yet on par with any of the commercial solutions I know (and I am not talking SAP or Oracle).
I also believe that due to the topic's complexity there is not enough community involvement in order to really drive these projects.

But this is nothing more than my private opinion...

rgds
rl

[longreach]

Agree that there is not really an open source accounting solution that offers the ease of implementation and use, or capabilities, of such low-cost commercial options as QuickBooks (which I gather in USA has 62% market share of businesses 1-20 employees).

I think you have to ask what is the goal of using Open Source software for accounting. If it is cost - almost certainly QuickBooks or one of the others will have a lower total cost of ownership due to Open Source options costing more to implement and support. If it is to support closer integration, then again, QuickBooks Web Connector has a 400 page document on this comprehensive web services API for full integration with the system. Not something you will find for most Open Source options.

[rwallace678]

If you have fairly complex needs, and a desire for "ERP" type features, then I would have to say Compiere. Its the most feature rich and stable Open Source Accounting package that I have worked with.

The impression I got from the website though is that while it is open source and feature rich, the open source version is not feature-rich, and the feature-rich version is not open source -- in other words, the community version omits most of the features. Is this not the case? (Not that I fault the developers for this policy -- obviously they want to get paid -- but from a users perspective, it is a different scenario from having all the features available in the open source version.)

[roblaus]

As far as I know the only difference is the web client (I installed it last week). That means the OS versions has all the features of Professional minus the web interface. It's using a Java swing client instead.
Nonetheless I find it very hard to use because of its Enterprise approach.

[DragonflyMaster]

I would say Compiere.
Take a look at this comparison from wikipedia.

[rwallace678]

Okay, yes, it seems the open source version of Compiere does include all the core functionality.

What about these packages?
http://www.xtuple.com/
http://www.appx.com/

I haven't used either, but from looking at the websites, Xtuple looks perhaps somewhat better than Compiere. I'm not sure about Appx; it appears to use a 4GL, it's been a while since I've seen one of those. Anyone have any opinion on how they compare?

[clusters]

We use SQL-Ledger since 2002 and we had used it in both a consulting and an online business. For the service oriented consulting business it worked great except at the time it didn't offer a time tracking module. The funny thing is that now that it does, we are more a retail than service oriented business so time tracking was not as critical as before. Anyhow, we did take advantage of the time tracking module and our employees use it to input timecards and our accounting use it for payroll. The only down side I see with SL is that it can be a problem for online retail businesses as its business logic can present issues if you accept returns (COGS get mess up). The good thing is that it is an open source and we were able to write a monthend script to have the COGS error corrected. Also, we like to keep things simple and SL is written in Perl.

Perhaps other tools may have better UI but then I really wouldn't know. Anyway, SL is proven for our business and every January we would close the year and print out the income and balance sheet for our accountant to file our taxes. Tim...

[roblaus]

Since all the products I mentioned further up are by far too complicated (despite the fact that I am doing erp implementations since 92) I settled for xtuple.
In short: nice and easy client for all platforms, installing is a no brainer (well...), great functionality when it comes to material handling, European tax/VAT works fine.
Unusable if you have more than two invoices with more than two lines each per day and the menu structure is not very logical. But apparently this can be changed by the (qt savy) user.