13 Best Free & Open Source Accounting Software of 2024

As a business owner, accounting is one skill that you will find handy. You do not need to be an accountant before you can handle your business’s financial transactions. With the use of accounting software, you can manage bills, invoices, debts, stocks, and any other financial transactions that your business engages in.

There is a lot of accounting software in the market, ranging from high price to low price. As a business owner, you want to reduce your costs to increase your business profits without negatively affecting the business.

If you do need accounting software but do not have the resources to pay for premium accounting software, the free option, consider free accounting software.

In this article, you will learn about 13 of the best free and open source accounting software, and why paid accounting software options are a better option.

Let’s get started.

Best Open Source Accounting Software

1. Odoo

Best Open Source Accounting Software with Most Comprehensive List of Features

Odoo presents you with a fast and intuitive user interface accompanied by a barrage of account management options. Alongside easy setup and mobile applications, Odoo provides you with automated features for creating, printing, and sending invoices, registering bank statements, and recording follow-up payments among a lot of others.

This free accounting software comes with automatic alerts and collaboration capabilities, automated bank connection and reconciliation, and multiple options for your account receivables and payables. You can create advanced payment terms, control supplier bills, track employee expenses, and enjoy automatic draft invoicing and payment reconciliation services.

Users also have access to multiple inbound and outbound payment options. Alongside inbound payments facilitated through credit cards, QR code scanning, and automated follow-ups, you get to print checks in batch directly from the application, keep track of deposit tickets, automate payment transfers, and organize payment orders.

Odoo does not stop there. This accounting software also presents you with advanced performance reports. You generate multiple standard reports which include profit & loss, cash flow statements, cash reports, executive summary reports, and aged payable/receivable, among others. These reports are available for over 80 countries and are exportable to Excel and in PDF format.

Users enjoy customizable dashboards, customizable KPIs, automatic fiscal year closing calculations, and report annotation options. All these among a lot of other features for legal statements, analytic accounting, asset and revenue management, subscription management, APIs, and third-party integrations are provided to you through Odoo’s accounting software.

Pricing

Odoo prices all its applications separately and all apps are free as long as you do not use more than one at a time. The amount of users also affects the pricing of each application.

2. Wave

Best Free Accounting Software Additionally that Offers An Intuitive Payroll Management Solution

Wave is an award-winning financial software designed for entrepreneurs that helps you to properly understand and manage your income and expenses.

You have access to automated solutions with which you track all your accounting activities and connect them to other Wave products for payroll, payments, and invoicing.

This accounting software is easy-to-use, dedicated to small businesses, and comes with read-only bank data connections with 256-bit encryption.

You enjoy unlimited bank and credit card connections, unlimited income and expense tracking, instant updates for your invoicing, payroll, and payments data, unlimited customizable invoicing and receipt uploads every month, reminders for your bills and invoices, among a whole lot of others.

On just one centralized workspace, Wave also allows you to create and send professional invoices for free. This feature comes with advanced features like recurring billing and automatic payments.

This open-source accounting software also presents businesses with a fast payment solution. It allows you to receive invoice payments through credit cards and bank payments. The service takes a 1% commission per transaction. Wave also offers you a payroll solution that makes managing your payroll easy and very accurate, including your payroll taxes.

Pricing

Wave’s accounting software is available to you for free. However, its additional payment solution comes with a pay-per-use pricing scheme while its payroll solution comes through a monthly subscription plan.

3. ZipBooks

Best Open Source Accounting Software with Extended Tagging Option

Simple to use and comes with an intuitive user interface, ZipBooks is another platform that gives you comprehensive software equipped with the tools you need to properly manage your accounting activities.

This accounting software presents you with intelligent bookkeeping and reporting capabilities for your accounting. You enjoy bank connection and reconciliation features, auto-categorization, project accounting capabilities, and a tagging option for the extended customer, vendor, and transaction tracking options.

ZipBooks allows you to accurately generate a full suite of accounting reports, with each report coming with its own optimized solutions. These reports include accounts receivables, balance sheets, general ledgers, income statements, taxes invoiced, and trial balances. You also have the option of generating custom reports.

Additional solutions for your invoicing and billing activities are also provided to you by ZipBooks. You can easily send professional invoices, get paid seamlessly through compatibility with all major credit cards or PayPal, and enjoy auto-billing and automated payment reminders. A feature allowing you to quickly create invoices is also available to you.

You enjoy mobile applications as well as team management options for collaborating with employees, contractors, accountants, or other team members.

Pricing

ZipBooks’ accounting software is available to you through four different plans: free starter plan, smarter plan, sophisticated plan, and an accountant plan.

The starter plan is ideal for you if you are looking for a free accounting option. The smarter plan allows you to add five team members and automate reminders, the sophisticated plan comes with unlimited team member collaborations and insightful reports, and the accountant plan is determined by a quote,

This accounting plan allows you to edit transactions in bulk, manage clients from one dashboard, and text clients directly from ZipBooks, among a lot of other exclusive features. It is best for professional accountants.

4. Skrooge

Best Free Accounting Software With The Most Compatibility With Different Platforms And Formats

Skrooge is another accounting software that allows you to analyze and manage your personal finances through its many features and tools. It is powered by KDE and compatible with Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac, and Windows OS.

This accounting software allows you to import your accounts from many external sources and in multiple formats including AFB120, QIF, CSV, MT940, OFX, and QFX. You also import transactions directly from all your banks’ websites in one click.

Skrooge presents you with advanced reporting options as well and gives you capabilities to build graphs. You get quality advice based on your behavior, bookmark your preferred reports, graphs, filters, and pages, and easily manage your budgets.

Some of the other features offered to you by Skrooge include infinite category levels, scheduled operations, compatibility with multiple currencies, and payee management options. The more advanced features include infinite undo/redo actions, bulk updates of operations, instant filtering on operations, and report generation.

Pricing

The accounting software is free to download. A development version is also available to be downloaded with the KDE's git webpage.

5. Akaunting

Best Open Source Software with Comprehensive Invoice And Client Management Options

Completely free, feature-rich, and has enjoyed over 270,000 downloads, Akaunting is another software you can count on. This open-source accounting software presents you with quality customer management options that allow you to create clients and send professional invoices to them. Invoices are taken care of online with no commission or transaction fee being charged.

Akaunting allows you to easily keep the balance of your bank accounts active and offers you vendor, tax, and bill management options. You also enjoy the option of automatically tracking the opening and current balances of multiple cash accounts, multi-currency compatibility, multi-company management through one account, and detailed financial reports for more actionable insights.

This accounting software offers a client portal that lets you accept bulk payments and share the transactions and invoices with your clients. You also have access to automatically created invoices, revenues, and bills. Akaunting offers a multilingual interface coming with up to 50 languages and sufficient team management options.

Pricing

The accounting software is free for you to download.

6. Apache OFBiz

Best Highly Customizable Free Accounting Software Majorly Dedicated To Developers

Serving you a suite of business applications sufficient for a wide range of industries, Apache OFBiz is another platform that offers an open-source accounting dedicated to developers.

This accounting software is a Java-based web framework that includes an entity engine, service engine, and a widget-based user interface. With these, you easily make changes to the base application and create a customized workspace of your own.

Apache OFBiz presents you with multiple pages, modules, and features for both developers and immediate users, one of which is dedicated to accounting. Its accounting module supports multiple payment gateways and gives you access to standard double-entry general ledgers, budget management options, asset management options, and contract management options.

This accounting module also supports multiple organizations, account hierarchies, and segmentation. It is fully integrated with order, manufacturing, purchasing, and inventory management features.

Pricing

Apache OFBiz’s accounting module is free to download.

7. iDempiere

Best Free Accounting Software With Useful ERP, CRM, and SCM Solutions

Founded in 2011, iDempiere is a powerful open-source ERP, CRM, and Supply Chain Management (SCM) system that manages all your accounting activities. iDempiere supports Linux, Windows, and Mac operating systems.

This accounting system is document-driven, meaning your accounting operations are generated from different accounting documents. These documents include invoices, match purchase orders, bank statements, inventory records, general ledger Journals, cash accounts, and asset accounts.

Pricing

The accounting software is free to download. Its source code and community-developed plugins are accessible on its website.

8. Openmiracle

Best User-Friendly Open Source Accounting Software that Offers Multiple Customizable Menus And Options

Openmiracle is another free and open source accounting software serving as a complete solution and tool for your business accounting needs. This software is user-friendly and equips you with multiple plug-ins for extended capabilities. You enjoy easy navigation and access to a customizable quick launch menu for faster actions.

The accounting software allows you to design all your bills using custom paper sizes and helps you to efficiently prepare your salary sheets.

For managing your payroll, you are presented with additional settings relating to employee holidays, attendance, pay heads, designations, advance payment, salary vouchers, and payslip options.

You have options to set seasonal rates or offer rates for products, easily create new invoices within seconds, and prepare and analyze budgets.

There is also the option of automatically preparing accurate financial reports including trial balances, balance sheets, profit and loss accounts, cash flow accounts, and fund flow accounts, among others. You also have the option to automatically generate barcodes for products.

Pricing

Openmiracle is available to you for free.

9. GnuCash

Best Open Source Accounting Software for Small Businesses

GnuCash is personal and small-business financial accounting software licensed under the GNU GPL. It comes in 17 different languages and is compatible with Linux, Windows (Microsoft Windows 8/10), Solaris, and macOS (10.3 or higher).

This free accounting software is easy to use, powerful, and flexible. It allows you to track your bank accounts, stocks, income, and expenses.

GnuCash implements professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports. This accounting software offers you solutions for double-entry accounting, stock/bond/mutual fund accounts, reports and graph generation, scheduled transactions, and financial calculations.

Pricing

GnuCash is free to download.

10. LedgerSMB

Best Open Source Accounting Software with Sufficient Solutions For Mid-Sized Businesses

Majorly focused on small and mid-size businesses, LedgerSMB is another open-source accounting software that provides you with integrated invoicing, order processing, quotations, and ERP-based options.

This accounting software has multi-currency compatibility. It offers appropriate solutions tailored for industries such as communications, factoring, IT services, and financial services, among others. Solutions provided by the accounting software also facilitate sales processes.

Alongside managing general ledger and journal entries, you also take care of invoices, orders, quotations, account receivables and payables, and inventory management.

LedgerSMB provides you with fixed asset accounting and depreciation options as well as integrations with external business applications and the capability to mail documents from within the application. It also provides an interface that comes in 45 different languages.

Additionally, you get to manage your accounts and transfer money between them, track vendors, purchase orders, and invoices. You also engage in efficient contact, inventory, and cash management, and track orders and relationships of both customers and vendors with your business.

Pricing

LedgerSMB is free to download.

11. TurboCASH

Best Free Accounting Software with Cloud-Based Collaboration Options

Presenting you with easy access to IFRS and GAAP-certified reports, available in 25 different languages with over 2 million downloads, TurboCASH is another software you can count on for your double-entry accounting.

This accounting software is optimized for the United States of America, Australia, Indonesia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. It serves as a single-user desktop application where you enter journals and documents, expand to include multiple users, and create general ledgers, cash books, stock, debtors, creditors, and invoicing accounts.

You enjoy collaboration capabilities through cloud data sharing options and help you avoid mistakes by importing your bank statements and spreadsheets directly into TurboCASH.

Pricing

TurboCASH is available to you for free. It also offers premium plans such as the TurboCASH 5 business class and TurboCASH 5 multi-user plans. You have the option of choosing either a monthly or yearly subscription for both of its premium plans.

12. GNUKhata

Best Open Source Accounting Software with Easy Migration Option

GNUKhata presents you with VAT compliant Invoices, debit/credit notes, and automated accounting entries for invoices. It was founded and developed by Digital Freedom Foundation and is currently supported by Accion Labs Pvt. Ltd.

You have access to sale and purchase registers for GST return, easy customizations, and bill payment tracking options.

GNUKhata allows you to easily migrate from other accounting software and exports your reports in auditor-friendly spreadsheets. It does not require any installation as it functions as a web application.

Pricing

The accounting software is free to use and download.

13. FrontAccounting

Best Free Accounting Software Dedicated for ERP Process Management with Multiple Calendar Options

Specializing in accounting systems for small companies, FrontAccounting provides you with web-based software with which you manage and organize your whole ERP chain. You manage purchase orders, goods receivable notes, supplier invoices, payments, inventory, fixed assets, and sales orders, among a lot of others.

FrontAccounting is optimized for both sales and accounting management. It comes with multi-currency support, saves your currency rates, and provides you with advanced GST/VAT handling and reporting options. Jalali and Islamic calendars are also supported. You have options to email and print documents simultaneously and format PDFs.

Pricing

FrontAccounting is free to download and use.

Why You Need to Consider Paid Accounting Software Options

The idea of having access to useful accounting software for free remains as pleasing as ever. However, at what cost?

1. Lack of Comprehensive Features and Options

These free accounting software usually do not provide you with the most comprehensive list of options and features to choose from. They are usually optimized for very basic use by small businesses and for personal purposes.

Organizations, for example, seldom see sufficient solutions through free applications. This is more so evident in our review. The top three recommended free and open source accounting software offer you free and paid services.

Their free accounting services come with very limited features which are still competitive or even serve you better compared to the other entirely free accounting software on the list.

The top accounting software then additionally provides you with comprehensive and reliable features and services you do not get from other software through their paid plans.

Some of these features include book locking, unlimited user options, client texting, bulk transaction editing, third-party integrations, and easy migrations to and from other applications. Making use of a paid accounting software definitely pays dividends to you in the long run. As a growing business, these free and mostly limited applications do not serve your entire purpose.

2. Data Security Concerns

Data security is an important element when using the internet and these accounting applications, especially when it comes to finances.

Accounting software connects directly to your bank accounts and pools data from them. You do not expect free accounting software to provide you with the same level of security a paid software does. Lacking security is dangerous and paying for accounting software means offering your data more protection.

3. Lack of a Functional Customer Service

Customer service is also another aspect you get to enjoy from paid accounting software. A lot of the free accounting software offers help through their community of users and developers.

Paid accounting software, on the other hand, offers more dedicated and technical solutions to your problem. It helps you get your accounting operations back up and running as soon as possible.

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