I own a small business and am currently using quickbooks, however I don’t really make enough to justify the price I am paying for it. I did have a deal for roughly 3 months which made it cheap, however the price has gone up now.
I was wondering if anyone knows of any self hosted applications that support business like tracking. Would something like firefly work for this? I am not really needing budgeting.
I use Firefly for business and personal finance purposes. I do my books nightly via a script that imports line items from the sales platform I use. Firefly’s automation allows easy tag/category assignment based on any number of details (source/destination account, transaction description, etc.) A tag in my case is just “business name” (personal expenses have no tag), and categories are expense types. At the end of the tax period I can generate a report that I copy-paste into my tax software. So far all of my numbers have lined up perfectly across the board, but I also balance accounts by hand to make sure. Biggest problem is backing it all up and testing the backup. I backup the database nightly and test the latest backup every 2 weeks, at which point it goes to the cloud. I need to automate that.
The developer is also very active and there’s regular releases.
Does Firefly allow double entry accounting style? I would definitely try to keep the way I keep track of things in a manner that is easily transferable to an account if things pick up or I need help with something.
Yup, it’s double entry.
How does it handle stocks and other assets? Do you know iysf it’s possible to import from GnuCash into Firefly?
I’m a fan of beancount and it’s corresponding web interface fava.
Since the underlying format is human readable text, it’s easy to edit by hand, and you can send the raw file to your accountant as-is and they should have no issues understanding it.
It looks interesting and I like the idea of it being simple human readable text. Though it would be nice to have it built into the same self-host stack I run with everything else. I will check it out more in depth though for sure.
Depending on how nerdy you want to be, hledger is pretty robust.
It would take a bit of setup, but you can automate transaction imports and apply rules to categorise transactions automatically.
Check out https://plaintextaccounting.org/ for write-ups, alternatives, etc.
Do you want to be able to access it from a browser? Gnucash is a standalone program, but you could edit the file from anywhere as long as you have access to it.
I’ve never used Gnucash for business purposes, but it’s certainly capable. There’s a learning curve to it but it’s not too bad. I never got online banking set up with it, but you can import .csv, etc.
Maybe do some gtk Broadway funkyness if they feel like playing god and want browser access
Maybe you could try tryton? It’s modular and you can add a lot of useful functionality for businesses, like stocks/orders etc
I’ve tried odoo and while I like it, a lot of the accounting side of things is lock behind a pay wall although there are third party plug ins that accomplish the same tasks.
Once I have more free time I’m going to test out Erpnext as it’s 100% open source with no pay walls if you self host it.
Erpnext looks interesting and looks like it has a ton of what anyone could need. Though looks like the setup is a little more confusing.
If you use ESXI as your hypervisor then you could use their virtual machine package to see if you like it. https://bitnami.com/stack/erpnext/virtual-machine
I do recommend manually installing it yourself if you end up liking it so you can understand how all the gears mesh together if you ever have to troubleshoot.
I’m in the same position, hopefully you get some responses from more experienced people. I handle my own home server but have never tried to host business apps. This would really be beneficial to me. We really need to upgrade our POS and this would be great.
