I know one of my weaknesses has been accounting. That is one of many reasons I am back in school. And one of the reasons my brain has been hurting lately, however, I am trying out a few open source accounting solutions I can use if I become a consultant.

For a small business, gnucash is ok. It is more fully featured than the cheaper versions of Simply Accounting, but nowhere near the ease of use of the expensive versions. But there is the rub. For a small business, is costs over $400 to get what you need, as well as a bunch of stuff you don’t. $400 may not seem like much, but it is an expense with no return that repeats every year. If you were to take that same $400 and buy inventory that you can sell with a 25% margin, in 5 years, you will have made an extra 3 grand. (see that is some of my new accounting/financial planning knowledge) I have also been exploring LedgerSMB and FrontAccounting. These program are very powerful, can be run off a server to be accessible anywhere, and can be quite customizable.

LedgerSMB{{1}} is ugly, but since it is html template based, it may be possible to make a prettier face on it. It also feels a bit dated and awkward to use. It was also much harder to install (mind you email support was very friendly and fast).

FrontAccounting is quite easy to install on any basic Linux server. It does take a bit of work to set up a complete set of books, customers, vendors, and inventory, but with a bit of patience, and a very little bit of bookkeeping knowledge it is possible. I do wish you could add things “on the fly”, such as adding a customer from within the invoice screen. Instead you have to exit the invoice, go to “add and manage customers”, add the customer, then go back to the invoice screen. Reprinting invoices is also a bit convoluted, as you have to go in through the journal entry screen.

As a techie, FrontAccounting is not bad. I am not sure if I could recommend it to a small business owner, only because it doesn’t have as much hand holding as Simply Accounting. If you have a bit of bookkeeping knowledge (I only have three courses under my belt) and are comfortable with computers, you can save your $400 per year, and I am sure that as I get more familiar with it and use it more, FrontAccounting will become easier. This software also seems to be under active development, so improvements will continue to make it better. Here’s to open source…..

[[1]]LedgerSMB is a fork of SQL-Ledger (see wikipedia) and has decided to go its own way. This may be a good thing, but IMHO it has a long way to go still….[[1]]