If you work for an organization that does business in multiple countries, have some sympathy for your accounting staff. In addition to the usual credits and debits, they have to handle multiple currencies, and often turn to multiple accounting applications, which then have to be reconciled with each other. But that problem goes away if your company uses FrontAccounting, a multilingual, multicurrency web-based accounting system for the entire enterprise resource planning (ERP) chain for small to medium-sized enterprises.
FrontAccounting excels in an international context. It’s available with 23 language/region files, and many chart of accounts systems for different countries and environments are available for download. You can also customize the application’s look, with different themes available with the software or via download.
FrontAccounting is also developed by an international team. Senior developer Joe Hunt lives in Sweden and Janusz Dobrowolski is in Poland, while other developers come from the USA, Canada, Egypt, Dubai, India, Australia, and elsewhere.
FA was originally a fork of a project called OpenAccounting, but the project stalled. In 2005, Hunt saw potential in the software and decided to continue it under the name FrontAccounting. He placed it on SourceForge in 2007, and Dobrowolski joined the project at that time.
FrontAccounting is written in PHP and uses MySQL. “From the beginning it was important to split the HTML code from the PHP code to make it easier to see the algorithms,” Hunt says. The developers put the HTML code in special user interface include files. Similarly, the MySQL database statements live in database include files. “This way our code API is not cluttered with anything but pure PHP code. Janusz has also implemented an AJAX engine, so our pages are smoothly updated without new page loads.”
The project takes pride in keeping close contact with its user community, which helps the developers implement worthwhile ideas that come from users. “Our response to reported issues is very fast – in most cases bugfix patches are available in a couple of days or even hours,” Hunt says. “One of fundamental priority in development is high compatibility of our software both on client and server side. FA can be launched even on very mature hardware, and can be used with modern browsers or old ones that don’t even support JavaScript.”
The developers also keep the core source code clean to make it attractive for new developers and those who want to customize the application. They also provide a way to create extensions to the core application. Available third-party extensions include integration with shopping carts and modules to import data from other systems.
Hunt says project developers are working on asset manager and payroll extensions for upcoming release. “All the extensions will be available for one-click installation on a user’s site via a built-in FA extensions manager, which will be included in next major release of FrontAccounting.”
Despite the fact that FrontAccounting has attracted a couple of good developers recently, the project leaders say they are always interested in working with skilled people. “Our user community is asking for a common API for interactions with third-party CRM/MES systems. Integration with open source POS applications also would be great. And we suffer from a lack of user manual. We invite anyone who’d like to help to contact us.”