Welcome to the LedgerSMB Forums - Open Source accounting software
Hi, I'm Chris Bennett, owner of Bennett Construction, a very small construction, remodeling and repair company. Bennett Construction has been around for about 9 years of unending struggles to build up the resources to have a successful business and means of supporting myself and my employees without compromising my morals. I started the company without any real funds or equipment. My only credit access was a gas card. Over the years, with great sacrifice to my personal income, I was able to acquire the vast variety of tools needed for such a business. But only when a job required a purchase. There was never enough money to "go shopping" for tools or equipment. So every purchase had to be driven by an immediate need and immediate return on that purchase. Because of that unchangeable economic fact, I always lacked what is undeniably the most important tool for any business: accounting software. Good accounting provides a huge economic gain over time, but little return quickly.
Sure, early on I tried buying some software. I bought a copy of Peachtree accounting. Waste of money, I couldn't figure it out as far as a small company. The default settings included hundreds of accounts and everything seemed only relevant to huge companies. The only support seemed to be how to upgrade $$ my version. It also required me to trash my fonts sizes. I didn't know what I was doing so two weeks of income were lost to no gain
Later I tried again. No more huge outlays on new programs. I got lucky and found a copy of Quickbooks a few versions old at a second hand store for like $3.00. Couldn't get the program to get past the initial interview wizard. Time lost but not much money. They had support forums. Lots of useful advice like a newer version fixes your problems and call a Quickbooks approved accountant or whatever they were calling it. Once again no help for little guys with no money trying to get to the point of having money for upgrades and Quickbooks approved accountants/assistants or whatever!
More recently, I grew to have a better understanding of what I really needed in accounting as I continued to search for an answer to my desperate need that was unfilled. Then I realized the horrible truth. What my business needed, even though my business has never had more than seven employees including myself and was usually just me and one or two employees, I repeat : What I required was the very most expensive option from these companies. I needed job costing! This also explained why I got nowhere with Peachtree because the version I bought didn't support job costing. At the time I didn't know better. I would have to buy the top-of-the-line versions to get the features I needed.
Oh well. Without lots of money to burn, that wasn't going to happen.
Then I had a brilliant idea. Recently I had been learning perl and html. Maybe I could find a basic straightforward accounting problem that was inexpensive and start keeping books without job costing (a step forward but still not what I critically needed to give me the information I really needed.) I would start trying to write programs myself to assist with job costing and estimating only. So I looked again but by this time inflation was really hurting business so I couldn't buy anything. I looked for free software as an unlikely hope. Nothing at all. Try again later. Stumbled upon an article about several linux based accounting applications. Only one sounded right-ish. SQL-Ledger. Began investigating support and help for SQL-Ledger and stumbled upon LedgerSMB which seemed to be a better choice.
At this point my business is not able to survive the terrible changes in the economy and morals of these times. The lack of a solution to my accounting needs kept my business weak and unprofitable. Bennett Construction is not going to disappear but be changed into a web business. The construction industry is about to enter hard times, Bennett Construction is going to make another of many course changes in order to survive and hopefully flourish. I am supporting LedgerSMB because I believe that it is becoming a good product that fills a real need in general. As open source software, it allows an individual the opportunity to customize for their businesses exact needs (When I looked for estimating software, I only found one product that I really liked. It was closed source and had a few minor issues that were absolutely unacceptable and, of course, unfixable as closed source). Finally, LedgerSMB is free. I wish I had had a product like this available to me when I needed it. The money I spent on Peachtree could have bought a used computer to dedicate to accounting only. :-)