Accounting software with Lazarus/FP

[JD]

For accounting questions, I don't know if anyone here could help you, but any general or specific programming questions, even related to how to get started, can usually get pretty decent and quick (maybe even helpful) suggestions here.

My only question would be to wonder if you're a little late to the game. Aren't there already cheap and maybe even free accounting packages available?

I can help with accounting AND programming questions but is it worth the trouble to start from scratch when there are many low cost options available? Just asking....

[J-G]

... is it worth the trouble to start from scratch when there are many low cost options available. Just asking....

It depends upon the reason for doing so.

In the case of the OP I suspect not but I have thoroughly enjoyed writing my accounting package from scratch (now some 16k lines) starting with just a Sales Invoicing module with customer records and then adding Purchase Ledger, Stock Control, Asset Register, Finance etc.. It now produces up-to-date Balance Sheet, TPL Account and Asset Control at a click of the mouse!

My reasons were as much to do with my knowledge of how my business is run and to incorporate particular features more to do with Income Tax Self-assessment and Pension Funds.

Using Lazarus and FPC (and with wonderful assistance from this forum) it has taken me about 10 months - this compares with my first effort using Turbo Pascal under DOS which was never as complete after more than 10 years !!

[ssliackus]

Hi guys and laba diena Thaddy 

Thank you for ideas and being supportive.

The good sign is that I was not convinced to stop , the bad thing is that the road will be long and not necessary successful. I do not think that the biggest challenge would be to create the product itself. Accounting software exist near half of the century and best practices and best ways to do things already been discovered and implemented and not only once. The biggest challenge would to turn the project into profit.

It seems that there is plenty of accounting packages and even for free, and you have named few of them, but when I need to download, install and have a working tool (accounting software, that allows you to quickly process large amount of data with high accuracy and import/export data from/to non proprietary file formats,  produce highly customizable reports), it appears that the choice is not that big:



Few in my opinion interesting and competitive (at some point packages):

1. Skrooge - undiscovered gem, they way I understand accounting software should look and work, but it is single entry bookkeeping (aka personal), business needs double entry recording . 
2. Manager.io - clean minimalistic design, implementation few of best practises, universal approach to accounting, available for few platforms, but very strange and unusual solutions in some cases (probably due to some technical limitations)
3. Microsoft money express - very good product, not available on linux, not in development since 2009, no support and to that related limitations, but still very decent tool.
4. Solar accounts - new kid on the block, nice, clean, straight to the goal, almost implements what I am thinking of, but it is available on Windows only and tied to UK accounting.
5. Giants like Sage/Quickbooks/Kashflow - they are always good, but they are always expensive, but even they some time ago started from the ground.

I understand, that accounting software development is not the water where one catch the big fish, it is not making facebook2 or something extremely profitable, but still it is worth of doing, because there is a lot of niche software that exist and are profitable. Probably it would be much easier to do this with Access/Visual Basic or similar tool, but this is not the part of idea. The idea is to use of Lazarus/FP (and probably SQLite/Firebird) as a main tool.

It is too late for that? Yes and no. Yes, because technologies evolving rapidly and you have to move together, no because there is always space in a market (even very competitive) for decent product.

What I am going to do, is to describe the idea on more detailed, do some visualization to give better perception of it and the will come back.
The question still remains unanswered, where should I look for people who might be interested in this idea and would like to join this?

Thank once again for everyone.

S.