I hope this little information about WebERP could help you in your quest of finding the software that suits you best!

Don’t even get me started on MySQL having a GPL version. They also have a commercial licensed version which they want you to use if your application touches non-GPL code. Check out their FAQ sometime.

PostgreSQL is free to use, distribute, modify, etc. Your code doesn’t even have to be GPL. It has NO RESTRICTIONS that I or anybody else can find. Why is the lack of GPL a hindrance, when it is replaced by a license that has less restrictions?

Perhaps you don’t understand it’s license?

By the way: PostgreSQL is also a much better database than MySQL. (Coming from a database administrators point of view). It is the only free database that can even come close to enterprise databases like Oracle.

R

But, I have to ask, is it really worth all that trouble to avoid QB?

IMO: here is a brief listing of what foss financial software seems to be missing. Note: all of the following is based my limited understanding, and my opinions. Please correct me if I am wrong about any of this:

* Cost advantage: QuickBooks simple start is free:
http://quickbooks.intuit.com/product/accounting-software/free-accounting-software.jhtml
Or I can buy the full version of QuickBooks in only $128:
http://www.qbpro2008.com/quickbooks-2008-coupons-for-amazon/
Seems to me that any cost advantage of using a foss alternative is negligible.

* Ease of use: Somewhat debatable. But some people site this as a primary reason for Intuit’s amazing success with QuickBooks – supposedly 87% of small businesses use QuickBooks. Although, I have to wonder how the number of foss users can be accurately counted?

* Integration with online banking: my understanding is that only intuit or msft products can easily integrate with online banking. Not absolutely sure about that.

* Payroll: very regional, and changes often == not well suited for foss.

* Taxes: somewhat regional, and changes often == not well suited for foss.

* Wide acceptance: I think most businesses are much more comfortable using products that are accepted standards.

* Wealth of available add-ons: Intuit has a very active community of 3rd party developers. You can buy practically any kind of an add-on you can imagine. These add-ons cost money, but at least they are available.

* Major company: I think a lot of businesses are not comfortable with a product unless there is a major company behind that product. I have to admit, even I am not comfortable with software products that are essentially one man operations.

* Support: I can always hire somebody who knows quickbooks, or find a “ProAdvisor” consultant, or I can get support from the company, and there are hundreds – if not thousands – of developers who specialize in developing for quickbooks. I can not see where that is true for any project.

* Training availability and costs. I can hire people who already know quickbooks. If I hire somebody to work on some foss alternative, then there will be a significant training expense. Of course, there is also the issue of training availability.

* Documentation: If I had to pick one thing that kills the usefulness of more foss projects than anything else, this would win in a slam-dunk. Of course, this varies among projects, some foss projects have great documentation. But, I can always find plenty of books, or other documentation for popular proprietary financial apps.

* Many accountants, maybe as many as 200,000, use QB and recommend it to their clients. Some accountants will charge much more for files that are not in QB format.

* QB has much better 3rd party integration. For example, ecommerce packages like oscommerce, and magento, work with quickbooks, not foss alternatives. Msft accounting works with ebay. I can not find that sort of integration with foss software.

Just what you’ve mentioned about ADempiere “everything, including the documentation, is incomplete, fragmented, and disorganized” was true in my experience in installing it.

It took me several days figuring out how to make it run compared to other accounting/ERP system that I’ve explored on GNU/Linux.

The project is quite young and still trying to break mold from its Compiere root.

Here are two other ERP/accounting program that I’ve found while trying to explore and learn some basic accounting/bookeeping.

WebERP and FrontAccounting both are LAMP based.

Like LedgerSMB a fork of SQL-Ledger, FrontAccounting trace its root from the discontinued OpenAccounting which was a fork of WebERP. So, FrontAccounting is an indirect fork of a WebERP.

With some basic PHP you can modify their interface to only show basic accounting functionalities.

And I looked at PostBooks shortly after getting thoroughly fed up with OpenBravo and it’s “user’s manual” — bright and shiny version 2.3 even. Which is VERY helpful (not!):

List Price: The official price of a product in a specified currency.
Organization: Organizational entity within client
Price Limit: The lowest price a specified item may be sold for.
Price List Version: A price list with a specified validity range.
Product: An item produced by a process.
Standard Price: The regular or normal price of a product in the respective price list.

Given this blindly clear and detailed explanation of the difference prices, it only took me two days to figure out that the “standard price” is what the rest of the world calls the “purchase price” and the “list price” is what the rest of the world calls the “selling” or “resale” price, and that the “price limit”, or “maximum discounted price” to the rest of us, is really not overly useful.

And the rest of the user manual is equally perspicuous.

But anyway, to answer your question about PostBooks: It looks nice. But I was/am too tired of ERP programs to worry about it. And, PostBooks like all the other ERP programs (save tinyERP) has no shared language for importing or exporting financial transaction.

Yes, it does (if memory serves) do CSV (as does Compiere, OpenBravo, Adempiere, etc., but CSV is lame compared to OFX.

Also, all of these ERP programs seem really, really slow when it comes to data entry. For all its faults, I can do 3 days worth of book keeping in about fifteen minutes in GnuCash. After figuring out the order of operations in OpenBravo I timed a few simple transactions — like a tank of gas for the service truck: About 5 minutes each if I used my check card! And then I’m not done, because all transactions are “suspensed” until they clear the bank, which since there’s no OFX processing, also has to be done by hand. (Oh, and did you know that a tank of gas is INVENTORY in these programs? Actually, every transaction that goes through a bank account HAS to be run through the inventory system.)

PostBooks didn’t look much sleeker when it came to data entry of basic transactions.

In summary: ERP looks fine if you’re running a store or some other business that’s entirely inventory based. But anything else, stay clear.

Curious what you might think of
http://www.postbooks.org/

And also here’s a link to more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_accounting_software