Financial / Accounting Software to pair with FarmOS?

Using farmOS
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I am looking for recommendations, has anyone found good financial / accounting solutions that pair well with FarmOS to track operational and capital expenses and income? Are folks tracking it right in the inventory mechanism of FarmOS are are their other apps that pair well? I see there is an active discussion on eCommerce integration but that seems to be more on the inventory side and I’m curious for recommendations on the $ side. Thanks in advance for any tips.

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I would also be interested in a open source software that does that.
For about a year I tracked everything in FarmOS but have since gone back to an Excel sheet. Its more flexible and can be used for tax calculations as well.

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Not sure if this would work, but GnuCash might be a good solution to start.

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I use GnuCash for my own bookkeeping and like it a lot (but not connected to farmOS).

In fact, before farmOS I started a project called Ledger, which aimed to be a GnuCash clone for Drupal. farmOS’s log-based architecture is very much inspired by double-entry bookkeeping. And my long term vision was to eventually include Ledger in farmOS to serve the “bookkeeping” side of things. I’d still love to see that happen, but it has fallen very far down the priority list. Maybe someday… :slight_smile:

(Here’s the old issue I created for that: https://www.drupal.org/project/farm/issues/2622552)

In my mind, farmOS’s long-term trajectory is to eventually include “bookkeeping” alongside the existing “recordkeeping”. And in practice this may mean simply integrating with other software like GnuCash/Quickbooks. But either way, we do need to have some data architecture in farmOS itself to connect things up.

We took a very simple first step in 2017(ish?) by adding Sale and Purchase logs (available in the “Farm Ledger” module in farmOS 1.x). But ultimately, I think all Log types should have the ability to store value information - so that you can truly track costs in a granular way (and therefore relate them back to the assets they reference).

Related to this is time tracking: Additional log "time" features - any interest?

Logs can already have “Quantities” associated with them, which can be used to record “Time” and “Value” measurements. But this is still pretty low-level, and there isn’t any supporting UI/UX code to standardize how it is used. Ultimately we need to develop some agreed-upon conventions (Creating a standard 'interpretation' layer on top of core farmOS schema).

We are in the process of adding two new Quantity types to farmOS 2.x to help with this:

Hope that all provides some context. I’m excited to see the financial side of things develop in farmOS. :slight_smile:

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Gnu Cash looks interesting but its missing inventory side of a farm business, which would be created from the harvest logs of farmOS. The integration/ of GnuCash or something similar would be very helpful but lets see how the financial side of farmOS will develop in the future.

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Thanks all. I figured that this is something mstenta had put a lot of thought into already.

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Fully agree that it would be fantastic to have a book keeping module integrated.
I’ll have a look at Gnu cash, thanks for the tip

As I was also looking at relevant options for farm book keeping, I also found this useful review (but haven’t reached the stage of accrual testing, just read pros/cos), which might also be of interest to others?

(But intégration of GnuCash (or other) directly into FarmOS would of course be the ideal scenario…)

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Hi, any new ideas on integrating Gnucash with farmos? Would it be feasable to import in farmos as logs transactions from gnucash ? For example, I record in gnucash everytime a car is fueled, or every time it needs repair. Does it make sense to try to save this info in Farmos without having to type twice?

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Hi @rafaeltcc
Sorry, haven’t made any progress on this, I don’t know yet.
But also interested in any recommendations from other!

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Just here to say I too would be very interested in (and willing to pay for) some sort of accounting software integration possibilities.

This would in fact be a great time to explore this, as many farmers I know are looking for alternatives to Quickbooks, now that they’re forced to pay exorbitant yearly SaaS fees. And for a cloud based service that presents challenges to those without consistently reliable internet…

The combined capabilities of farmOS and those features would almost sell itself.

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I’m also in process of finding a farm oriented accounting/book keeping solution. PCmars came recommended by some other farmers I know. Just passing on the reference. No direct experience in this area yet. As you say, still reading pros and cons.

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