FOSS Alternative To Quickbooks

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I bet I am not the only one who would like to replace their Quickbooks Software with something that is free and open source. I am aware of Gnucash and Kmymoney but it is my impression that they are not much more than checkbook registers.

Has anyone here recently reviewed the status of alternatives to Quickbooks for small business use, maybe with the possibility of importing data from Quickbooks for those who want to make the conversion? Of course the optimal possibility would be data file format compatibility, so that accountants who are used to seeing Quickbooks files could open the data from the FOSS program.

Thanks!

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Answering myself, it looks like this may be more like what I am looking for as a Quickbooks replacement. But if others know of options please let me know —

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@kernellinux uses one for his business. He has said what it is called, but I can’t remember the name of the application.

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And appears to not been on the site in a year

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Bummer! I’ll have to see if I can find the show in the archives where he talks about it.

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@kernellinux is on Matrix more often nowadays. I posted a link to this discussion in the LinuxDelta Small Business Corner forum. I’d also be interested in what he uses. I think it must have been before I discovered DLN myself… :slight_smile:

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I ran my small retail business using GnuCash. My accountant and I set up some custom reports to facilitate his back end stuff and I used it to track my day to day financials.

So, it’s obviously possible. The workflow is not the same as Quickbooks from what I have heard and vaguely remember(My use of Quickbooks was a decade earlier so I can’t remember the differences between them).

GnuCash has reporting tools and is way more than just a checkbook program (Even though that’s primarily what I use it for now that I don’t have a business anymore).

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Here’s an episode of Ask Noah talking about several alternatives.

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It is going to depend on your use case. For business most of the ones that come to mind will not fit your use case. GNUCash can do business accounting but I personally don’t recommend it. In the past I’ve implemented Odoo and Adempiere to solve that function. Adempiere and the project it was forked from I’m pretty sure are now abandoned. Odoo has a good community and they have a SaaS product if you don’t want to run it yourself.
For personal finance, I personally like GNUCash, KMyMoney and Skroge. They have the traditional connectors so you can sync data from your bank which is nice (not all banks support that). HomeBank is pretty but really lacks in features. I haven’t implemented this but it might be worth taking a look at, https://www.firefly-iii.org/. It is a web based application that you self host.

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@Freecicero

reeciceroI have tried MANY different options and most of them are not viable for what I think a QB alternative would be. However, I did find one and have tested and so far it is quite good.

I am currently using Invoice Ninja and I also tried it in the past. They completely rewrote the whole thing and this current version (v5) is very very good replacement for QB in many aspects.

GNU Cash is personal finance, not business ready and honestly . . . GNU Cash feels like 1998 in so many ways.

KMyMoney can be used for business as I know people who have done that but it still doesn’t fit exactly what I was wanting. So this could be done if someone wanted to do it.

Homebank is personal finance only so not a QB replacement, imo

Firefly III is a very cool self-hosted application and would be great for anyone in Europe or any supported country. Unfortunately, the expense tracking in Firefly III does not work with North American banks so everything has to be entered manually.

There are also some SaaS options but for self-hosting my suggestion is Invoice Ninja

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