@neil

Firefly III, maybe? It's more geared towards personal finance than for small businesses, but it's what I've used that fits this category. I'm using hledger now, which is plain-text, though not through any fault of Firefly III.

https://firefly-iii.org/

@neil No personal recommendations, but perhaps see @corbet's article series from a while back https://lwn.net/Articles/729088/

@neil Odoo ? Either their free tier, or the self hosted community edition?

(Or the paid version off course)

@jani @neil Indeed, we have been doing LWN's accounting locally with GnuCash for the last two years now, and I've never looked back. The OFX import is pretty good for bringing in data if you want to do that, but I've just written a set of Python scripts to import data directly and easily.

I really can't imagine trusting such a critical function to somebody else's web platform, both for reliability reasons (as the Bench fiasco has so nicely illustrated) and for privacy reasons as well.

@neil We've been using #Odoo for @hiveboston. They have a reasonably priced Saas (with excellent support, btw) and supported self-hosted pricing, and as an open source platform, can be run self-supported for free. We like the accounting, product, sales, and POS modules so far. The accounting is double-entry, unlike QuickBooks. we plan to start using the CRM and mailing list modules. Integration with WordPress is not great, but there are third-party modules that seem like they will help.

@oca

@neil I use Kimai as a freelancer. But I saw that it supports multiple users and reports like time-sheets
https://www.kimai.org/

@neil
Hey. I have no particular suggestion but want to point to "awesome selfhosted". A great collection. Includes financial stuff like the already suggested GNU cash and firefly.
Maybe you find some interesting projects there to try out.

@neil I did lots of research into this and settled on Akaunting, but it's not free if you need advanced features. Self hostable. Very nice GUI and easy to use. Extra users, double entry, and bank sync is extra as "apps". Comes with BSL licence.

I think it's worth the money, but YMMV.

https://akaunting.com/license
https://akaunting.com/plans-on-premise

@neil they also have a cloud option, but in my bit of "due diligence" I couldn't find any compliance docs on security they have, so I wouldn't go there other than for trialing the features to see if they fit your needs.

@neil @wannesss odoo is a very flexible ERP, with a sensible set of accounting defaults, generally supported by the Odoo Community Association localisations for advanced accounting stuff. It’s something you can run on their cloud, a third party cloud, or your own personal server.

I’ve included it in every ERP selection I’ve run, and it’s been on the shortlist every time, but lost out basically due to better Microsoft integration by other tools. In terms of accounting and invoicing it always was slightly ahead of the competition, but not enough for it to be a tipping point.

Gartner rate it highly. It definitely pulls its weight against the closed source competition like MS D365 Business Central, and Sage Murano.

It’s got a plethora of good implementation partners, and the ones I’ve dealt with (in Spain) have good open source philosophy, and have generally not tried to upsell me ongoing maintenance or other fees.

@neil it is open source, but obviously not the sort of licence that appeals to most of us ( looks with a side-eye at Hashicorp and Redis 😒)

(PS if you do get your wishlist of features in FOSS land do let me know!)

https://github.com/akaunting/akaunting

@neil Ahh.. good point! I guess I missed the bookkeeping part as I read accountancy in the sense of doing some work/projects, create invoices and have some overview about your projects, invoices and time spent.

I have https://akaunting.com/ on my list to test next year. It supports cloud and on-premise. Maybe this fits your needs

@moof @neil just gave it a try on my NAS. The accounting-app is not free in the self hosted. You should cough op some 💵

@wannesss @neil huh? That’s new. It certainly was when I looked at it a couple of years back.

@neil @wannesss ah, yes, that was something I needed to refresh my mind on. The support is there, but hidden, you have to turn it on. https://www.cybrosys.com/blog/how-to-enable-full-accounting-in-odoo16-community-edition

Then you probably want to install the community supported accounting modules that mirror the odoo ones: https://apps.odoo.com/apps/modules/18.0/base_accounting_kit

And finally the UK localisation for uk specific services

@moof @neil hmm, I’ll look into that.

I was thinking about trying to do my own file in Odoo for a year. Just to give it a try.

Not my client files, I’m not crazy.
(I’m a Belgian accountant)