The Blog From Hell

I run a free software based company. Like any company, that means I have to keep books. I need to keep track of invoices sent and their status, give receipts to customers, keep track of bills paid and other expenses – and be able to see how my company really did financially when all this is said and done.

I tried about 50 different accounting apps over the year of my company, even quickbooks online (shock, shock, horror – I hated trying a non-free program) – the latter quickly failed for me, it is US-useable only. I sure wasn’t going to waste R1K on it’s equally proprietary desktop counterpart – I have my pride after all.
So I started looking for solutions, I even wrote my own invoice creation tool- which worked fine, but didn’t do the rest of it all – and adding it all would be a long, hazardous process.

Then I tried quasar accounting. Finally, I am settled on an accounting app that works. It does everything I want it to do, it’s stable and fast and very feature complete.
Unfortunately the GPL edition hasn’t been updated since 2005. Don’t get too worried, the company is alive and well and so if the project – they have just spent the last two years focusing on adding features to the for-sale parts (the point of sale tool is the major bit). I don’t run a shop, I had no need for a point of sale, so I had no reason to use the proprietary version. The only real impact of this is that to initially install quasar the binary packages are largely useless now – as they are all built for old distro releases. But a rebuild from source worked just fine on pclinuxos 2007 (I haven’t actually gotten it to build on gentoo 64 yet but I’m sure I can).

The biggest grip I have against quasar is one of the most cumbersome installation processes I have ever encountered. The stupid reluctance of desktop distro’s to include enterprise accounting packages in their trees (nothing I checked had it) has a lot to do with this. You have to follow the steps yourself – and there are quite a lot of them.
Make sure you have postgres up and running for starters. The good news is that the steps are very well documented, the installation guide is nearly 60 pages long – but if you follow it, everything should work right out of the box.

Once quasar is installed, the time comes to set up a company. This is complex if you don’t have at least basic accounting skills, but once more there is a very complete manual (the quasar guide) which explains all the various steps and what you are doing there. If, like me, you don’t need all the features (I have no need for inventory for example) then it’s hardly arduous though.
It took me some time to figure out the correct ways to add intransient product items (labour) but by checking the doc and the excellent online help throughout the program, I got through it all.
The process of getting everything set up to match my needs took about 3 hours – honestly from what I hear, thats a very short time compared to what people tell me about programs like pastel. Where I had difficulties it was almost always me not knowing all accounting terminology in English (I only have Grade 10 accounting from high-school and I had it in Afrikaans).
At that point, I could enter my first historic invoice – it took about 10 minutes as it was a first time. Then issue a recept for it’s payment, another 10 minutes to figure out all the details.
From then on, it was easy. Silvia had entered all our historic invoices before the end of yesterday (e.g. in less than a day).

So far, I am extremely happy with the program. It would be nice to see an update to the GPL version, if only to get packages linked to the latest library versions but this is hardly critical. Quasar’s more advanced features are impressive, in fact if you know xml a bit you can completely redesign the interface to your liking.
It’s responsive and fast too.

What I haven’t figured out how to do yet (though I’m sure it’s not hard, I just haven’t gotten there yet) is how to customize the look of invoices to add my own letterheads etc. before I issue new invoices with it, I will obviously need to do this.

The only feature I truly miss from it, isn’t in the retail version either as best I can tell – an integrated payroll system. But payrolling is a very complex thing with enormous amounts of per-country requirements so I also understand why it isn’t there (yet?).
There are many specialized payroll tools out there, so that will be the next step for me, finding one so I can generate accurate payslips before I have to do my tax returns soon. Then I’ll simply enter the actual payments into quasar as expenses paid to the employee salaries account. So despite the lack of a payroll system, with a fairly simple process, my balance sheets will still be exactly right.

Over all I rate quasar a very impressive project. In my book it is the only enterprise level accounting package for GNU/Linux that’s truly up to scratch. Other projects like sql-ledger proved unusably complex. Quasar works with all the enterprise features I want – and it does so in a way simple enough that a non-accountant can still do his books without any major hiccups.

I am now contemplating proposing it as the default accounting package for pclinuxos-BE – it’s much better than sql-ledger as a business owner who uses pclos – it has my seal of approval.