Open Source Accounting Software

March 12, 2012 10:53 AM

I am looking for a good, professional quality Open Source accounting software written either in C# (1st preference) or VB.NET.

I am looking for desktop based (thick client) accounting software, not Web based. My objective is to study how professional quality applications are written, with a good and intuitive user interface, and use this knowledge to build my own software or tweak the open source software. The software should ideally support most common accounting and inventory features, expected of a professional app, and should be written for .Net framework 3.5 or above.

I have liked QuickBooks, T++ (mytplusplus.com), Microsoft Money, etc. but they are all paid apps and do not provide source code.

posted by inquisitive to computers & internet (3 answers total)

The only "professional quality" open source accounting program I'm aware of is GnuCash, from what I can gather from the wiki there, it seems to be written primarily in C, with some some Scheme and Python as well.
posted by Oktober at 11:49 AM on March 12, 2012

> My objective is to study how professional quality applications are written,
> with a good and intuitive user interface, and use this knowledge to
> build my own software

These are the general principles of software development, and you can actually learn all that from an OSS project which isn't about accounting.
You could try and find some other project which you use, or at least in the area which is of interest to you, and learn from it.

I can't recommend you any significant C# OSS projects (it's mostly used in corporate environment - and that was one of the reasons why I started moving from C# to Python about a year ago), but a good place to start might be OpenHatch - a project that aims to help people get started with developing OSS.

You could also just browse projects on GitHub (here's the page for C# stats) or SourceForge.
posted by egor83 at 3:15 PM on March 12, 2012

I've just found (via OpenHatch) that Banshee is actually written in C#!
It is a music player that is installed by default with Ubuntu, so I'm using it there. It's pretty decent.

Check out "How you can contribute" if you're interested.
Here's the bug searching tool to get you started. They seem to mark easy bugs with "GNOME-love".
posted by egor83 at 3:28 PM on March 12, 2012