Open Source Accounting

I have been going through a shift in my own business and looking to grow beyond Quicken as my accounting tool. As most know – Quicken is an invaluable package for home and home office accounting – however if a small business grows Intuit would prefer the natural evolution to migrate toward Quick Books.

Initially starting out using a manual system for invoices and growing into Quicken, I needed to go to the next level. However I did not want to use a web-based app as I would likely sync details to my iBook and take details on the road and work on planes and in airports (yes I know about WiFi!). In addition, as many already know from reading Open Sourcery, I would be loading the system on my Macs running OS X.

As a bit of due diligence I begain exploring what else was available for a growing small business that has custom needs but remains largely virtual. I was pleased to ultimately select GnuCash. As of release 1.8, and perhaps earlier as it has been a long time since I revisited the program, now supports OS X (by way of Fink) as well as a PostgreSQL back end.

GnuCash supports the invoicing and account management functions I seek to implement as well as obviously enabling me to continue supporting open source through other avenues.

Perhaps this is also a project I can contribute to (practicing what I preach), writing documentation or some other function (as I do not write in C!).