10. Financial Management

Just ran across a new Open Source shopping cart system, Magento. We've been using Zen Cart for a while now, and it's great to see an alternative.

We actually really like Zen Cart. It's fast, clear, and customizable. From a quick look at the Magento demo and feature list, it looks like they're starting with Ajax in mind, but it doesn't look like there's that much different in the administration area. Will have to keep an eye on this one.

... but are you sure price is the most important thing?

We've been on the receiving end of this type of call quite a bit these days.

Anyone still using SQL Ledger should be aware that new versions are no longer released under the GPL. When I wrote the book, and for several years afterward, SQL Ledger was the only game in town, and it's been the only viable open source financial web application for quite some time. It's been open source in name but never in spirit--the owner only helps people who have paid for the software, and discourages help from others that compete with his ~$300 manual. It's quite the interesting drama.

Fortunately, last fall a group of developers forked the SQL Ledger codebase, starting LedgerSMB.

There seems to be a misconception out there that business applications don't exist for Linux. Wrong. There are some excellent ones. Recently, the Linux equivalent of QuickBooks just hit version 2.0, and it has become quite easy to use. Joe Barr has a nice article describing how to get started with GnuCash, with some helpful tips for downloading transactions from your bank with minimal fuss. From the article:

Using GnuCash to balance your checkbook is perfectly legitimate. It's easy and it's accurate. You don't need a commercial product to do the same thing.

Open Source projects have to deal with something most proprietary projects don't: forked projects. What's that? It's when a person or group exercises the terms of an open source license to create a derived version that competes with the original. It's practically the definition of open source, the ability to take the code and do whatever you want with it.

This frightens most business people.

Sitepoint has a nice summary of when to get a merchant account, versus when to use a third-party payer such as Paypal, complete with detailed example total costs for different types of businesses. Required reading for those thinking about accepting credit cards over the web, who do not already have a merchant account.

Solve the Payment Processing Problem [eCommerce]

The New York Times has an interesting editorial running today by Joseph Nocera, about solving the identity theft problem. Nocera proposes making the banking industry completely responsible for identity fraud, the same way Senator William Proxmire held them accountable for credit card fraud in the early 1970s.

Newsforge is running a story about the realities of using OS Commerce, the open source shopping cart/e-commerce package. It describes the pluses and minuses fairly well: NewsForge | OSCommerce in action

Make sure you read the comments at the bottom of the page. At Freelock Computing, we've done half a dozen test deployments for various customers, and haven't put any into production quite yet. We've found that if all you need is a basic shopping cart, it's great.

LinuxPlanet has a review of open source and Linux accounting software. Unfortunately, they omitted what I consider to be the best for most small businesses, the fantastic SQL Ledger program. Review: Small Business Accounting Software For Linux - Replacing Quicken/QuickBooks.

An open source time tracking program called Jobby has just been released. What's cool about this is that it hooks into the SQL Ledger financial database. It also connects to dotProject.

Right now, it reads customers, vendors, and services directly from SQL Ledger. In its next phase, it will transfer hours directly into SQL Ledger invoices!