Quickbooks Alternatives

Since founding Edoceo in 2001 we have sought to run our business on a strictly Open Source platform. There are many business applications whose vendors don't support this including QuickBooks and Microsoft Money. This forced Edoceo into a position where we needed to develop our own Accounting and Business Management System (BMS). This document describes our in-house system Imperium and a few others we've found that run on Open Source platforms.

Imperium

Imperium is a web-based system that is deployed on a company server, or accessed via hosted service. This system provides features to manage Clients, Contacts and Vendors in a CRM type fashion. To track work, or jobs one uses the Service Orders module, these can optionally be closed to Invoices. Each Client or Vendor can have their own Account in the system. Imperium also handles General Ledger, Accounts Payable and Account Receivables.

It's primary design is for services based industries but is useable in a retail environment. Imperium lacks the Wizards that are present in Quickbooks but as a licensee one has access to the code to customise the application to the business needs.

LedgerSMB

This system is a fork of the SQL Ledger project. It offers these features over SQL Leger: enhanced security and reporting, open development and better data integrity controls. Since the fork from SQL Leger this project has made steady monthly improvements and has an active development community.

This system has a larger development base than LegerSMB and has much larger goals. This system seems to be written with a retail/manufacturing type business more so than the service model.

Open Systems Accounting Software

This is a Windows only solution, the source code is only offered when licensing the application.

SQL Ledger

This is a very mature Open Source software package that handles Clients and Vendors but lacks some CRM features. Jobs and Invoices entries are flexable and provide for many options for customisation. SQL Ledger also contains features for ERP for manufacturing, these features do not exist in Imperium.

XIWA (XIWA Is Web Accounting)

A Web-based accounting package built with Perl and PostgreSQL. It supports Double Entry/Stocks and has a powerful, flexible reporting engine.

About the Author

/djb has been working with computers since 1987. During his career he has been an IT Desktop Support Specialist, Network Engineer, Systems Analyst, Security Analyst and Solutions Engineer in the hi-tech, bio-tech, financial and legal industries.