There were a couple of itches we were trying to scratch. First we realized that a lot of people were looking for a good free accounting application and ERPNext was just too heavy. Also we realized that cloud is a bottleneck. Most SMB owners can't manage a cloud or write a simple Shell command.
The only way to truly build decentralized solution was Desktop. Also we realized this was a big gap in FOSS offerings.
This is just the first version, we do plan to add inventory and other capabilities overtime.
https://github.com/frappe/books
or do you mean 'build' in some other way (like a technique or other tool)?
That said I am open and eager to try something new. I really respect the Frappe and ERPNext team, and enjoyed this home page a lot so I downloaded it to my Linux box. I had some really odd UI glitches from the start, mostly just with electron window management (setup screen is not resizeable, then I accidentally resized the main window to 1 px wide). I found that the date picker was hilariously wrong - it would show 30 or 31 for all dates of the month except for the first row, then jump back to the prior month every time I selected a date. I could not remedy this with manually typing in a date entry. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/7XjT9i3
Other little issues: - no app icon on Ubuntu (gnome) desktop - I wish the account names were 'frozen' to the left side of the P&L and Balance Sheet reports. I have to scroll left and right to read the reports. - I kind of need a description line on my invoice line items, or I'm going to need to make a ton of items, which will kind of mess up reporting. - Some of the UI and language isn't really customized for US norms. Its not a big issue but sometimes feels awkward.
I hope this is helpful feedback. I'm going to talk with my accountant soon and see if they would be open to trying something new, but until then I'm stuck with Quickbooks. I just can't stand paying for a product that is chock full of ads for other products, and which walls off competitors by design.
I do love the stack, and would like to be able to just keep the sqlite.db in Dropbox and share with my other machine and accountant.
Best of luck. I could definitely see myself paying for this in the future, preferably one time or annually.
I'd be open to working with an open source tool, but it sounds like some of the little issues you already noticed imply there'd be a lot more issues with smooth usability.
Odoo is also an open source accounting program, that's been around for awhile, aimed more at ERP side.
It's probably like the old excel joke - everyone only uses 20% of the features, but every user uses a different 20% ;-)
looks like you guys have a big team and have been running for a decade now doing open source stuff
So we are based in India so salaries tend not to inflate too much. We also pick raw talent and nurture them (and also pay above market), so it just about works!
Having said that, I think the market for products like ERPNext (our flagship) is huge, in the tens of billions. Looking at our current traction, we really hope we can make the product good enough for enterprises to switch to this. I see a huge potential revenue in support, assurance, consulting when it comes to it. So its a waiting game.
So to see a new project like this - one that isn't just developer tooling or bleeding edge new-tech experimentation for nerds - it's refreshing! There's nothing wrong with the other sorts of projects - but good GPL software that is actually useful out of the box to average people - that's the dream. At least that's the dream that drove me into this industry in the first place. Thanks for creating and sharing your work.
https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/t...
This is amazing I just don't understand how they do it?
They offer paid support and hosting.
- Automatically pull transactions from credit cards and banks.
- Allow me to manually and automatically tag transactions as business and personal and which tax deduction category it belongs to (rent, apps/software, computers, utilities, etc)
- Estimates my quarterly federal tax payments based on income and transaction deductions.
Any support for those features?
It being open-source is important mainly because accounting apps UX usually sucks for some specific types of data entry and I want to be able to fix that for my use cases to get the annoying job done faster and get back to programming.
I immediately hit some dealbreakers with Frappe though (and filed them as issues, hopefully they are useful), most importantly that I cannot figure out how to delete General Ledger entries (if it is possible at all), see https://github.com/frappe/books/issues/129.
In terms of product feedback, I also recommend that you add a "spreadsheet mode" in which you can quickly and immediately edit most of the ledger data in one view, (without having to open popups and so on), with effective search-and-replace. That is a key accounting tool feature to get things done fast. For example, I currently use Banana (https://www.banana.ch/en/features) which is spreadsheet-based and pretty effective for this task (but could still be a lot better).
Fiscal year end start or end normally is sufficient to define the fiscal year. Why is both a start and end date needed for the fiscal year here? That's usually an immediate tell that system was designed by programmers not accountants.
Why can't users type in a fiscal year - the date picker is broken, the size of the date picker jumps around for different months, lot's of repeating dates etc.
The system allows datepicker to pick odd fiscal year ends (ie, leap years and mid month dates) are these fiscal years properly supported?
ERPnext looks great though - I look forward to trying it and supporting it - I imagine it's more refined!!
Hope you get good leads for ERPNext premium offerings through this. It's important for more open source projects to flourish in the market.
Any plans to develop something like it for personal finance?
