i find these plain text accounting projects very interesting but what i need is something more akin to what YNAB provides, which is budgeting.
Plain Text Accounting, a Guide to Ledger and Friends
11–20 of 27 posts
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a Guide to Ledger and Friends
#12Does anybody have a suggestion for an Android/Sailfish OS app which supports this? Ideally I’d like to run something like hledger-web on my home server and have a little app on my phone which lets me do data entry during the day, either directly talking to the server and/or caching the results until a connection can be made again.
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a Guide to Ledger and Friends
#13I've just started to take a look at LedgerSMB (perl), ERPNext (python), and Odoo (python). These are backed by Postgresql or MariaDb. Anyone have any experience with these for a small business?
For personal finance or very small businesses there is GnuCash.
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a Guide to Ledger and Friends
#14I've just started to take a look at LedgerSMB (perl), ERPNext (python), and Odoo (python). These are backed by Postgresql or MariaDb. Anyone have any experience with these for a small business? For personal finance or very small businesses there is GnuCash.
I like Odoo, but, there doesn't seem to be enough glue in the Open Source release to do things like billing for services in a sane and coherent manner.
The UI for LedgerSMB is just horrible. I don't think it's really been updated since 1999.
I really haven't messed with ERPNext, mainly because I can't get it to install correctly.
It's my opinion that there really are not a lot of good, truly open source ERP/Accounting systems for businesses out there.
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a Guide to Ledger and Friends
#15I've just started to take a look at LedgerSMB (perl), ERPNext (python), and Odoo (python). These are backed by Postgresql or MariaDb. Anyone have any experience with these for a small business? For personal finance or very small businesses there is GnuCash.
Rushabh here from the ERPNext core team. ERPNext is mostly used by small businesses with 3-50 users and covers most use cases for accounting, inventory, sales, purchase and other functions. We estimate there are between 800-1000 businesses using ERPNext at the moment. These are mostly small businesses (non tech) in services, manufacturing, distribution and retail.
The project is reasonably stable, but still takes a bit to set it up. The community is quite active (https://discuss.erpnext.com) and there is a long list of things that need to be done (https://github.com/frappe/erpnext/issues)
It has a metadata based framework and has REST API's out of the box. Its never been discussed on HN, so would love to get feedback.
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a Guide to Ledger and Friends
#16I've just started to take a look at LedgerSMB (perl), ERPNext (python), and Odoo (python). These are backed by Postgresql or MariaDb. Anyone have any experience with these for a small business? For personal finance or very small businesses there is GnuCash.
I like Odoo, but, there doesn't seem to be enough glue in the Open Source release to do things like billing for services in a sane and coherent manner. The UI for LedgerSMB is just horrible. I don't think it's really been updated since 1999. I really haven't messed with ERPNext, mainly because I can't get it to install correctly. It's my opinion that there really are not a lot of good, truly open source ERP/Accountin…
> I really haven't messed with ERPNext, mainly because I can't get it to install correctly.
Please post any issues, tracebacks on the forum. Install is pretty straightforward and works well for most people https://github.com/frappe/bench
Edit: You can also use the VM https://erpnext.com/download
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a Guide to Ledger and Friends
#17Great resource, thanks for sharing. My business accounts aren't too complicated but there are a few quirks which seem to stop me from migrating over from Freeagent, namely: . Client + invoice integration . Invoice preparation, with translated templates . Multiple currency invoicing, with auto-calculated gain/loss . Cashflow reports . P+L, balance sheet . UK tax calculations for self-assessment and for corporation tax…
> The accountant I work with charges more than average (from what I can tell - I pay £1k per year all-in, more or less, rarely have to lift a finger) There's accountants and accountants, and £1k for an accountant who knows their stuff is reasonable. I prefer that to having a glorified book-keeper-cum-accountant who doesn't think beyond what's needed to do the paperwork, as some of the larger firms targeting small com…
Thanks for confirming that. I only had a few data points to go on so far. I did work with a small one-person-band £300/year accountant for a while, but then paid for the Freeagent account on top of that (£300) and didn't feel that the accountant was doing more than, as you say, the paperwork. Still, helped with securing a mortgage, so not all bad.
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a Guide to Ledger and Friends
#18Does anybody have a suggestion for an Android/Sailfish OS app which supports this? Ideally I’d like to run something like hledger-web on my home server and have a little app on my phone which lets me do data entry during the day, either directly talking to the server and/or caching the results until a connection can be made again.
There's no "nice" app where you click on drop downs or type in amounts and then it appends it to your ledger file.
Generally, and it's been discussed a lot on the mailing list/irc, people end up finding just writing down transactions in a text file works best. e.g. google keep, or simplenote, or Notes app etc.
I keep my ledger file on dropbox, so I can edit it directly.
I've not tried hledger-web on my phone to see what it looks like, but that has an add transaction function. So you could just go to your site and edit it. Obviously want some security to prevent others accessing it, e.g. VPN to home network.
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a Guide to Ledger and Friends
#19Sorry, but personal accounting shouldn't need a guide. Everyone writing personal accounting software seems to nerd off on accounting stuff making it unusable. You should nerd off on other stuff instead: photographing receipts would be an awesome way to data entry for instance.
You've got a great idea for your next project. These folks will continue to spend their free time as they wish.
Re: Plain Text Accounting, a Guide to Ledger and Friends
#20I've just started to take a look at LedgerSMB (perl), ERPNext (python), and Odoo (python). These are backed by Postgresql or MariaDb. Anyone have any experience with these for a small business? For personal finance or very small businesses there is GnuCash.
I like Odoo, but, there doesn't seem to be enough glue in the Open Source release to do things like billing for services in a sane and coherent manner. The UI for LedgerSMB is just horrible. I don't think it's really been updated since 1999. I really haven't messed with ERPNext, mainly because I can't get it to install correctly. It's my opinion that there really are not a lot of good, truly open source ERP/Accountin…
One way to look at ERPnext is with their live demo: https://demo.erpnext.com/desk
(for example, click POS and enter an order..)