Testimonials
NP Broadcast Limited
NP Broadcast Limited is a UK-registered Limited Company with a yearly turnover of approximately GBP 150,000, VAT registered with 2 LedgerSMB users. We are mainly a services company providing studio and outside broadcast engineering support to broadcasters.
I primarily chose ledgersmb to have control over our accounting data, with it being stored in an open format and having scope for integration with other business systems. I concluded it is too risky to have my business accounting dependent on the whims of a much larger third party - especially one with a strong incentive to create user lock-in and ensure ongoing subscriptions.
I have around ten years experience using QuickBooks, from a previous role. I considered this and the online services Kashflow and Xero, before settling on LedgerSMB.
Had there been a UK-focussed company offering a hosted ledgersmb solution, with support, for a similar monthly price to other online bookkeeping software, that would have been tempting - even though we have in-house hosting and development expertise.
In addition to our studio and outside broadcast engineering support we do some bespoke hardware design, assembly and software development, but do not generally keep stock or use LedgerSMB's assembly or part-tracking facilities. For payrolling we use an external website (http://payrollsite.co.uk).
I find the ledgersmb mailing lists helpful and responsive for support queries, but I'm always concious that this imposes upon the goodwill and generosity of others when I have a daft question!
Riverbend Community Math Center - Dean Serenevy
We are a US not-for-profit (http://riverbendmath.org/) using SQL-Ledger and LedgerSMB since 2006 (I'm not sure exactly when we made the switch). We are a small organization: ~15 part-time employees; ~$150,000 annual revenues; 2 users of the ledger. We are still using 1.2.x because my trial transition to 1.3.x did not work out as smoothly as I had hoped. Thus, I have put the transition on hold until I can give it a few days attention. As an organization we believe in and use open source software almost entirely.
My wife and I had been using GnuCash for our personal finances, but when we started our Math Center in 2006 we went looking for something that would be able to grow with our organization. We chose LedgerSMB because it was open source, was an advanced "next level" accounting system, and used technologies I was familiar with (Perl, LaTeX).
We still only use only a portion of the system's functionality, but the list steadily grows each year. We are currently using:
- AR/AP/GL/Reconciliation,
- recurring transactions,
- (individual) check printing,
- Sales Orders + Invoicing (services only).
- We make heavy use of "Projects" (about 40 projects in two "levels": "Category - Subcategory") and
- some use of "Departments" ("restricted" and "unrestricted" funds - required tracking for non-profits).
Our use of projects has required that I write some separate perl scripts to generate my own Income Statements (by directly reading from DB). Additionally, we maintain 9 simple local patches on the core system which I consider a great feature of LedgerSMB (these local patches include: require non-blank project before posting; misc UI tweaks for our work flow; alter some form defaults; alter latex compilation; ...). Amazingly, I do not recall any occasion where an upgrade of LedgerSMB has broken our patches (of course, I expect that v1.3 will require reworking most of them).
Our auditor was impressed by the system and considered recommending it to other businesses that he knew of - though I did feel the need to warn him that setting up and maintaining the system required someone comfortable with at least some level of system administration.