PBooks Free Bookkeeping Software

Its been awhile… I know! Last I checked in on PBooks was when I had decided to use Ledger instead, and try to rebuild PBooks using Ruby (but not Rails) and Git to be able to interact with a Ledger data file via the web, as well as track revisions to that data file via the web.

Yep, its been awhile.

I’ve since become a full-time Rails developer and as it turns out, one of the applications I’m working on has a comprehensive accounting package included in it.

So now my plans are to work on a Rails-powered bookkeeping system! There are some interesting, existing projects, too. The one I liked the best is aptly named “Bookkeeper” (though I think the name is too generic). I forked it awhile back, and since then the project has evolved a little, but not much. I do like it, but it is BSD licensed, and I prefer the Affero GPL for web-based applications.

I plan to make it a standard Rails 3.1 application, using stock components, using Regdel as the headquarters. I started work on Regdel to learn Sinatra and DataMapper, but since then, I’ve grown to prefer Rails and ActiveRecord.

Its been waaay too long since I've posted an update about PBooks, but I finally have some news to report: development has migrated to GitHub.

First off, some bad news - I converted the PBooks wiki from MediaWiki to Ikiwiki, and something went haywire. I've cleaned up a bunch, but there is still a bunch to do. Thanks for your patience.

The good news is that I've moved both the PBooks source code and the Nexista source code to Github - that should make access much easier as well as (hopefully) collaboration.

• PBooks @ Github
• Nexista @ Github

I've converted the PBooks wiki from a MediaWiki back-end to one based on Git: Ikiwiki!

Its actually a really sweet software application and I'm totally fired up about Git. I'm actually planning to switch the PBooks code base from Subversion to Git, too.

Thoughts, concerns, questions?

I've taken the mailing lists offline for the foreseeable future. Hopefully I'll get them back on again someday, but I'm not sure when I'll have time to do so.

PBooks now features a trial balance view while viewing the chart of accounts.

The balances of all the accounts are separated based upon whether the account is a debit or a credit. A tally is then made at the bottom of the list which shows the totals for all credit accounts and all debit accounts.

While this is a pretty simple feature, it comes in quite handy!

I'm planning to switch from Trac to SD, aka "Simple Defects".

SD is a distributed issue tracker, but that's not why I'm planning to switch (though it may help out in the future). It uses Git and Prophet, a peer-to-peer database.

SD is a new open source project, and I really like the direction its going and want to help out by using it and sharing my notes.

Also, SD has the ability to render static HTML reports of the issues it is tracking. I've increasingly come to rely upon static files as a simple and reliable way to publish information to the web. Truth be told, that's my major motivation for the switch.

It won't happen overnight. Although I've experimented with SD, I still have a lot to learn on how best to use it.