Open Accounting Tools

Directory

Matthew Slater:

'This article starts from the specific problem of accounting, and widens out to whole-platform approaches.

For full interoperability the accounting needs to be abstracted out of the community portal into its own service, and made accessible with an API.

For me the most interesting accounting system is Ripple because it is open and has a web API allowing anyone to plugin and log transactions in arbitrary currencies. It also contains an automatic market between every possible currency pair, and distributes all records accross a blockchain.

Similarly, but much simpler is Openmoney is a pure multicurrency accounting platform with a web API so that any group or any currency can easily make use of it. While one wallet can hold many currencies, the software doesn't support buying and selling between currencies.

A new initiative this year, is Permacredits. With strong ties to the cryptocurrency community, Permacredits seeks to become a whole financial ecosystem for the ecological movement. A suite of accounting tools is in the works while legal work proceeds and partnerships built with investors who will buy Permacredits as a way of financing ecological enterprise.

Another blockchain project is Cyptonote [1], which allows communities to host their own currencies, with an important feature which allows anonymity.

Finally Open Transactions implements Ricardian contracts on your web server and provides markets and other tools.

But accounting/finance is just one service in a whole suite needed by every community. Similarly, services like BlaBla car, Kickstarter provide one function and accrue very one-dimensional spread-out communities around them. How can we provide services to existing communities in a way that strengthens those healthy place-based real-world family and economic relationships that humans evolved with?

My own attempt, Hamlets is aimed at LETS & Timebanking groups and it can be extended with any functionality that Drupal can provide.

Simlilarly, CES, Community Weaver, hOurworld, & Cylcos all support the same kind of local economic/exchange relationships.

A new French project, Wezer [2], is building on Open ERP version 8 [3] to make an extensible community platform and to emulate many essential organising tools like google docs, Loomio, Dropbox etc. as built-in integrated modular components." (http://matslats.net/solidarity-economy-software-2)