From the abacus to written ledgers to adding machines and calculators, people have been using accounting tools for centuries.
Most businesses start off by relying on spreadsheets to manage the books, and many continue to use spreadsheets, even as the business grows and becomes more complex.
The result is disparate data spread across multiple spreadsheets that are often out of date or present conflicting numbers.
Businesses need to invest in modern accounting software solutions:
- Consolidate the financial data of a business in one place.
- Automate accounting processes like invoicing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, income and expenses.
- Make it much easier to disseminate financial data to both internal and external stakeholders.
With all financial data in a single place, accounting staff won't have to spend hours cross-posting information, re-keying numbers, or manually reconciling data. Ultimately, this saves a business time, reduces costs, and ensures more accurate financial reporting.
Best Open Source accounting and invoicing solutions
1- Kill Bill
Kill Bill is a leading open-source subscription billing, payment platform and accounting software includes all the basic billing and payment features.
It features included: It is accessible, adaptable, Controllable, Configurable, Extensible, Flexible, Scalable, and has all the necessary options needed in an accounting software.
It also helps you to control your business, client data, avoid vendor lock-in, access real-time analytics and financial reports, scale your billing and payment infrastructure and grow your business.
Likewise, it is released under the apache-2.0 License and written with Java language.
GitHub: https://github.com/killbill/killbill
2- Invoice plane
Invoice plane is a great self-hosted open-source financial accounting software to manage quotes, invoices, client, and payments for small business or individuals.
We highly recommend it for anyone doing freelance work or for sending simple invoices and getting paid quickly and securely via PayPal.
It offers many features that cover the whole concept of billing System. It let clients pay the invoices to providers like PayPal, Stripe or even using Bitcoin via Coinbase.
GitHub: https://github.com/InvoicePlane/InvoicePlane
3- Fusioninvoice
A PHP, powerful yet simple open source CRM system. It has been tailored to freelancers and small businesses.
With it, you can host on your own server, get paid, sending the same invoices each month, everything is customizable, support multiple currency, save frequently used items, import data from anywhere, and more.
GitHub: https://github.com/kingcody/FusionInvoice
4- Crater
Crater happens to be yet another free and open-source Invoice app for freelancers and small businesses. You can easily utilize this to create and send professional invoices, and a quick and detailed quote including prices, discounts, inventory a lot more.
It offers reports and allow you to input different tax types, track payment, manage your invoices from iOS and Android.
GitHub: https://github.com/bytefury/crater
5- Firefly
Firefly a self-hosted personal finance manager free and open source use to save and organize your money because it gives you insight into and control over your finances.
The most special thing on it that it is let you keep your eye on the money without having to upload the financial records to the cloud.
Just like some others, it can help you keep track with income, budget, expenses.
It licensed under GNU AGPL 3.
GitHub: https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii
6- Akaunting
Akaunting is a free online accounting software for businesses. It has all the tools to manage your money.
Fortunately, you can access it from any device. They also offer cash flow, expense tracking, powerful reporting, it also can create category for incomes.
Akaunting is not really free. You have to pay for some features like journal entry, chart of account and balance sheet. I am an accountant.
It licenses under the GPL-3.0 license and written with PHP language.
GitHub:https://github.com/akaunting/akaunting
7- LedgerSMB
LedgerSMB is a web-based, open-source ERP accounting software that originally provides small and mid-size businesses. It aims to provide multi currency accounting without vendor lock-in.
In addition to all the essential features a LedgerSMB has to offer, it offers some great integrating invoicing, order processing, quotations, inventory management, shipping, and more.
It is released under GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2 and written with Perl.
GitHub: https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/blob/master/LICENSEhttps://killbill.io/
8- OpenSourceBilling (OSB)
OSB is a free, simple web application billing software which offers open-source version as well released under the GPL-3.0 license.
It features include: it let you create and send invoices to your clients via email, manage invoice disputes, print or download customized reports, review payments collected, export your invoices via .pdf, charts demonstrating invoices and payments statistics, and more.
GitHub: https://github.com/vteams/open-source-billing
9- jBilling
jBilling is one of the best enterprise world’s leading open source billing solution. Well, the primary aim of it is giving you all the flexibility and customizable options you need for highly complex billing.
It comes to disrupt established markets fast with your innovative products, gives you complete visibility into source code, and more. jBilling offers a community edition with limited features.
GitHub: https://github.com/emilc
10- BillRun
BillRun is an interesting open-source business CRM platform. We recommended it for a big data billing solution such as VoIP providers, digital businesses and SMBs.
It offers the identical features as our proven, enterprise-grade billing solution, can be handle in real-time, wholesale reports for management, fully support in high-availability volumes and sizes.
The database that they use is MongoDB that can support for different type of documents, and it has written with PHP.
GitHub: https://github.com/BillRun/system
11- SolidInvoice
SolidInvoice is an open source, simple and elegant invoicing solution that allows you to manage clients and send invoices and quotes, receive notifications via text message, email.
With it clients and contacts management can create and manage quotes, Invoices, it has RESTful API.
It is released under MIT license and written with PHP language.
GitHub: https://github.com/SolidInvoice/SolidInvoice
12- OpenBRM
OpenBRM is a free open source flexible billing system and CRM built on a time-tested framework. It deploys with an integrated ecommerce component.
It offers the most flexible options for management, subscriptions, Telecom, converged billing, discounts and bundles.
OpenBRM exposes all the API over SOAP, REST, it has in built CRM module to generate quotes and handle Support Tickets.
GitHub: https://github.com/kaliman1997/openbrm
Conclusion
We reviewed 12 Best Accounting and Invoicing Solutions, which are all available for you to choose from.
If you have any other recommendations for this list or comments in general, we’d love to hear them below!