More than 57000 downloads [1] since 2006

Goal

The LedgerSMB project [2]brings ERP [3]/accounting software [4] to the small and midsize businesses.

Features

• Sales
• Purchasing
• General ledger
• Inventory management
• Flexible framework to support Rapid Application Development for custom extensions
• and more [5]

The fact that LedgerSMB is open source [6] - and that the source code is freely available - makes it even more customizable and flexible.

Quality standards

The project holds high quality standards that should be expected from business software regarding these topics in particular:

• Security
• Performance
• Software quality
• Useability
• Accessibility

Approach

We achieve this goal by:

• Stimulating a vibrant, open community centered around:
  • Two mailing lists [7]
  • SourceForge [7]
• Keeping a strong focus on efficiency and effectiveness through:
  • use of proven technology
  • re-use of existing solutions
  • code and design pattern re-use within the code base
  • real world use cases - introducing real solutions

Future

Some features [8] currently under development and/or planned for future releases of LedgerSMB:

• Platform and language neutral APIs (XML and database stored procedures)
• More authentication options
• LDAP customer/staff support
• More logic in the database with more constraints
• Improvements on the data structure

History

LedgerSMB began in 2006 as a fork of the popular general ledger software package called SQL-Ledger [9] largely written and maintained by Dieter Simader since 1999. Versions 1.2 and earlier are largely based on SQL-Ledger's code. As of 1.3 our codebase is quickly moving away from what we inherited. Some of the improvements that we've made to the code base so far include:

• Enhanced security
• Better Windows support
• More reports
• Better data integrity controls
• Major size reduction while growing functionality

Travel in our history with Internet Archive and WayBackMachine [10].