Accounting and Payroll systems on Linux

Egressive has long been using an Open Source accounting package. We currently use LedgerSMB (and SQL Ledger before that), and we host LedgerSMB for customers as well.

Having a web based interface makes it incredibly easy to access from any machine with a browser, and using either a VPN or a secure browser session keeps things safe. No application to install on the workstation - just use the browser of your choice¹. No licenses to purchase, no matter how many people need to use it.

None of us are qualified accountants, but as business owners we think it is ideal for small to medium sized New Zealand business. LedgerSMB handles our AR and AP, Inventory, and Sales and Purchase Orders. It can do a lot more with inventory and time based billing than we use it for, and the warehousing (receipting and shipping) is useful. The reporting is basic, but easily meets our requirements. While it has the ability to print forms and cheques, we don't use any paper in our billing process - all our invoices and statements are emailed directly from the accounting system as PDF files.

LedgerSMB uses PostgreSQL as its database, which is a very popular and rock solid open source relational database system. Having a proper RDBMS behind the accounting system (just like the big corporate financial systems) means you pretty much eliminate the problems with sharing and corruption that plague many of the proprietary accounting applications pitched at small to medium businesses. And as an open source application there are no licence fees for PostgreSQL either.

LedgerSMB does have a few cons - the interface does take a bit of getting used to, and its original technical design has a few quirks like separately maintained lists of Vendors and Customers. The the data import and export are very basic and there are no interfacing features like bank account uploads and downloads for New Zealand banks. The customisation of invoice and statement forms is incredibly powerful, but does require some expertise (or you will need to pay someone to do it). LedgerSMB is in active development, and the original design issues are being addressed.

Egressive now has enough staff on board that our spreadsheet based payroll was creaking at the seams. We've recently started a trial of Ace Payroll. Although this is not an Open Source product, it appears to run happily on our Linux desktops using Wine (on our Ubuntu desktops we didn't have to install anything - it just ran straight after we downloaded the trial from Ace).

Many of our customer use Ace Payroll on their Microsoft Windows desktops, and we have found that so far it works just the same for us on Linux. We'll see how it goes for a few pay runs and see if we want to continue with it. We'll also look at some of the web-based payrolls that are available here in New Zealand.

¹ Obviously, Egressive doesn't recommend Microsoft Internet Explorer due to its poor support of open standards and its poor security record.