Ask HN: Building a basic bookkeeping system?

by ian0 on 8/14/2018, 5:06 AM with 11 comments

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.

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.

Does anyone have any experience doing something like this?

Did you just start from scratch or come across a good framework/platform for it?

  • by lixtra on 8/14/2018, 6:43 AM

    What solutions did you look at? Why didn’t they fit? E.g. [1,2]

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

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

  • by stephenr on 8/14/2018, 6:14 AM

    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.