Open Source ERP: accounting, invoicing and more

Mission

The LedgerSMB project provides small and mid-size businesses with solid open source accounting software: integrating invoicing, order processing, quotations and more (ERP). LedgerSMB aims to provide a strong (multi-currency accounting) basis to build your business on -- without vendor lock-in.

The project team considers correctness and performance equally important key usability features and is dedicated to providing both, even on the biggest data sets.

Features

  • Sales (Invoices, Orders, Quotations)
  • Receivables & Payables
  • General ledger
  • Inventory management
  • Fixed asset accounting & depreciation
  • Profit & cost centers, departments, projects
  • Output documents in PDF, HTML, CSV, Office formats
  • Mail documents (e.g. invoices) from within the application
  • Translatable to your language (comes with 45 languages)
  • and more

The fact that LedgerSMB is open source - meaning that the source code is freely available - makes it even more customizable and flexible.

Use-cases

By company size

Company size is measured by its data and data growth. There are companies known to run with these numbers (as per April 2023):

  • Transactions and invoices: 650 000 accumulated, growing over 50 000 per month
  • Journal lines (across invoices and general journal): 2.3 million accumulated, growing over 170 000 per month
  • Customers and vendors: 260 000
  • Products: 40 000 configured products with inventory tracking

Most installations are much smaller (50 to 500 transactions per month). Many of the more complex features required for larger companies remain hidden until explicitly configured. This way the software stays simple for smaller, less demanding companies.

By industry

While LedgerSMB will generally work in any industry for its basic accounting functionalities, it is known to have been deployed in the following types of businesses:

  • Communications
    e.g. VOIP services
  • Factoring
    i.e. invoicing of others
  • (IT) Services
    e.g. Website design, IT Support, hourly services
  • Financial services
    e.g. Investment firms
  • Rental
    e.g. Housing rental, IT Hosting
  • Retail
    e.g. Sewing necessities
  • Trade
    e.g. Trading pet foods

Many of these applications include integration with domain-specific applications to perform specific business functions.

Next to the ones listed above, various manufacturing setups have been deployed, ranging from standard (batch based) mass production, to make-to-order one-time product configurations. The latter being supported by a custom developed product configuration plugin.

By country

Although the nature of open source projects makes it hard to know where our software is being used; however, the project is aware of installations in the Australia, Barbados, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Estonia, European Union, Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, United Kingdom and United States.

The software can run in a different language for each user. Also: documents (invoices, orders, etc) can be produced in selectable languages, different from the user's language.

Contributions

The project welcomes any and all contributions. With lots of areas which would benefit from more attention, we like to invite newcomers to read our community guidelines and start out simple. Good (and helpful!) starting points are translation contributions as well as reviewing our (beginners) documentation.

We're hosted at GitHub; if you like us, please star us!

Current versions

Our current stable version is 1.12 - initially released on Dec 14, 2024. It features, among others, audit trail (history) on AR and AP transactions, more consistency checks for data validation, many enhancements for migration from versions as old as 1.3, support for external rendering engines (e.g., weasyprint HTML-to-PDF renderer), many fixed bugs and much more... More details about this release can be found in the release notes. This release will see its End-Of-Life for community support on Dec 14, 2026.

Our current stable version is 1.11 - initially released on Oct 3, 2023. This release has a wide variety of improvements and code cleanups: it features support for barcode scanner input on invoices, printing of GL transactions, cross-referencing between reversed and reversing transactions, fixed migration from SQL-Ledger 2.8/Ledger123, improved migration from not-the-latest LedgerSMB 1.3 and much more... More details about this release can be found in the release notes. This release will see its End-Of-Life for community support on Oct 3, 2025.

Older versions

Version is 1.10 has been declared End-Of-Life on Oct 8, 2024 (released on Oct 8, 2022). This release has a wide variety of improvements and code cleanups: it features support for customized workflows, the ability to export document templates from the database, much more flexibility for customization by dependency injection, cleaned up document templates, login.pl & setup.pl being translated based on browser preferences and much more... More details about this release can be found in the release notes.

Version is 1.9 has been declared End-Of-Life on Sep 24, 2023 (released on Sep 24, 2021). This release has a wide variety of improvements and code cleanups: it features faster loading of the menu, fixed migrations from 1.2, the ability to upload a logo into the database and include it in printed documents and much more... More details about this release can be found in the release notes.

Version is 1.8 has been declared End-Of-Life on Sep 04, 2022 (released on Sep 04, 2020). This release has a wide variety of improvements and code cleanups: it features faster loading of the menu, fixed migrations from 1.2, the ability to upload a logo into the database and include it in printed documents and much more... More details about this release can be found in the release notes.

Version is 1.7 has been declared End-Of-Life on Oct 04, 2022 (released on Oct 04, 2019). This release focusses on improved support for foreign currency transactions, lifting the restriction of a single rate per currency per day; UI improved by showing both the functional and foreign currency amounts. Additionally, a lot of work has been spent on increasing the application stability through more rigorous testing and code cleanup. A full summary of the changes since 1.6 can be found in the release announcement. More details on this release can be found in the release notes.

Version 1.6 has been declared End-Of-Life on 2021, June 10th (released on June 10 2018). With 33 patch releases, we consider this version highly stable. Although there are more patch releases for 1.6 than thee are for 1.5, their size is on average smaller, attesting to the project's promise of delivering increasing software quality.

Version 1.5 has been declared End-Of-Life on 2019, Dec 23rd (released on 2016-12-23). With 30 patch releases, we consider this version highly stable. We believe that the lower number of patch releases over a similar life-span as 1.4 is an indication of better stability of the initial 1.5.0 release. We conclude that the project is delivering on its promise of increasing stability of minor releases.

Version 1.4 has been declared End-Of-Life on 2017, Sep 15th (released on 2014-09-15). With 42 patch releases, we consider this version highly stable.

Version 1.3 has been declared End-Of-Life on 2015, Dec 23rd (released on 2011-10-11). With a total of 48 patch releases since the initial release in October 2011, we consider this version highly stable.

Although their use is highly discouraged for both security reasons and data stability issues, older versions are still available for download. When using LedgerSMB versions 1.6 or earlier, you should to do so in only in a highly restricted network environment, because of known security problems.

It's project policy to provide at least 24 months of community support for every 1.x release series, aiming to have two versions supported at any time.

History

LedgerSMB began in 2006 as a fork of the popular general ledger software package called SQL-Ledger largely written and maintained by Dieter Simader since 1999. Versions 1.2 and earlier are heavily based on SQL-Ledger's code.
As of 1.3 our codebase is quickly moving away from what we inherited.
As of 1.5 our User Interface has moved to Dojo Javascript libraries providing a more dynamic feel.
Some of the improvements that we've made to the code base so far include:

  • Enhanced security
  • More reports
  • Better data integrity controls
  • More code quality control measures
  • Major code size reduction while growing functionality
  • Unit testing Infrastructure to help ensure once an issue is fixed it stays fixed
  • BDD (headless automated browser) Testing infrastructure
  • A very large number of tests against both testing frameworks

Travel in our history with Internet Archive and WayBackMachine.

 

Matrix support request ownership proof: ehuels@gmail.com