
Ask HN: Building a basic bookkeeping system? - ian0
Im looking at building a very basic bookkeeping system for small businesses. One that has things like a basic chart of accounts, ability to record transactions, balance sheet etc.<p>We will build a front end, ideally just looking for a reliable backend. It would need to be OS or if not reliable and with a self hosted option.<p>Does anyone have any experience doing something like this?<p>Did you just start from scratch or come across a good framework&#x2F;platform for it?
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lixtra
What solutions did you look at? Why didn’t they fit? E.g. [1,2]

[1] [https://www.gnucash.org/index.phtml](https://www.gnucash.org/index.phtml)

[2] [http://www.sql-ledger.com/](http://www.sql-ledger.com/)

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ian0
The best fix product wise I found was [1] but Im afraid its not self hosted
and seems a bit abandoned. So basically providing the ledger backend with API
calls for transactions & reporting. That would be the perfect fit.

The rest are all linked to paid accountancy software, with liscencing and
hosting trickiness.

Gnucash I did check out - it just seems to be a bit too large. What im looking
for is only a small subset of the functionality and id worry id have a hard
time stripping out the parts we need.

sql-ledger looks interesting though... Have you used it before?

[1] [http://subledger.com/](http://subledger.com/)

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lixtra
No, I had no need for accounting software so far. I just kept an eye on the
oss solutions if need ever arises.

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stephenr
I've been looking for a _good_ invoicing solution along the same lines (OSS
and realistically self hostable) and not found much that ticks all the boxes.

Would your project be OSS as well?

To answer the last question, things like this are pretty CRUD-y, so a decent
MVC framework/library should be enough to get going.

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sparkie
I'll recommend Odoo. Easy to deploy, configure, and it is fairly simple to
make modifications or extensions you need in python.

Demo here: [https://demo3.odoo.com/web](https://demo3.odoo.com/web)

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ian0
Odoo looks pretty impressive

