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I wanted to make a general post on TurboCash and took a look at the General Discussion forums available to find a suitable one. However, the forum "Ask other users" didn't cut it, so I decided to post here as a "Hot Tip".

What's the hot tip you ask? It is this: TurboCash is a superb product! It's a diamond, and I would recommend it to any and all business friends of mine. Having recently been thrown into the world of running a business, I spent a couple of months Googling everything for accounting, and of course, found a lot.

I have had previous experience with PeachTree and Quickbooks, so I excluded them from my comparison, as I did most commercial packages for obvious reasons: cost of ownership. Essentially, I wanted to see how far the open source movement had progressed in the accounting world.

So in a nutshell: My search took me mostly on the ERP path as eventually I am going to need to scale up to that. However, let's begin with packages I found for the SME level of enterprise:

GnuCash - easy to install but very limited usability. Gave up real quick on this one.

Free Accounting - an MSDE based package which I just could not get to work as expected, despite lots of attempts.

Tally - not a free accounting system but cheap and one which is wildly popular in India. I wanted to see how it stacked up and whether it deserves the attention (and market share) that it is getting. Sadly, after all these years of development, this program turned out to be highly of the DOS era, completely modal - none of the functionality you expect in a Windows world. Gave up real quick on this, except for noting the fact that Tally handles multiple companies and aggregation of reports for them. This TurboCash does not do and could be a useful area for future development.

Now at the ERP level:

The search invariably took me to the following candidates:

xTuple PostBooks, OpenERP, TinyERP, Compiere, and Adempiere.

The first three, though they have "all-in-one" install packages, just did not work. Just like Free Accounting in the non-ERP category.

Compiere and Adempiere are essentially the same (the latter being a fork of the former). I spent about a month setting up Adempiere - requires Postgresql, all kinds of support including Java, JBOSS, etc - but I eventually got it to work. Horribly complex stuff, but gave me a good insight as to what ERP will eventually require of me.

And then there was TurboCash. As you correctly said Philip in one of your articles, Turbo Cash is positioned a notch below ERP and severally notches above the personal finance and accounting packages like Quickbooks and PeachTree. Exactly what the doctor ordered at this stage of my business.

And what a relief after my ERP experience. Installing TurboCash was a breeze (as one would expect for a stand alone product), but what functionality for a stand alone product! And a free one at that - just amazing. I won't say any more on individual features, except to say that the product as a whole is superb.

South Africa is known for its diamonds and, appropriately, in the open source world I find TurboCASH is another diamond from South Africa.

Congratulations Philip, you've really got something going there, and as a new but highly satisfied user, I could only wish for MORE POWER TO YOU.

Thanks for the kind words. Its not me that you should be thanking, but the contributors from all over the world that all add towards making this happen.

We have been getting an increase of Indian users lately, so someone other than yourself is also picking up on this. With the voluemns and variety of business in India, TurboCASH is an ideal solution. I am l;ooking forward to seeing the foirst translations that will be comming soon. Even though most Indians use English, I think they would love to see screens in their native languages.

I do appreciate it when users make the effort to compare us. Its is is very hard for the uninitiated to grasp the concept that FREE can actually be BETTER, its almost a contradiction in terms.

Its is not a matter of taking some failed package - turning it open source and then giving it away for free. Hundreds can and do try this but fail dismally. What is required is to take a high quality core - turn it Open Source and improve on it. Now there are not more than say 5 packages in the whole world that can possibly fit this basic proposition. Those that could possiby be starters are so tied up in the cluthces of public comapneis that the revenues that they generate cousl never allow them to be released.

When developers try to "Cross over" - say convert a personal finance package or a POS system to a full GL, the also hit rocky grounds. To qualify, the package must staqrt out wihtthe intention of beieng a double entry - batch driven system. Anythign else start out on the worng architecture.

The ERP packages are interesting but they are really restricted to users whose main requirenment is custiomisation. In that respect they are almost development environments. Most users in our markets simply want to do their accounts - they don't want to become programmers or database analysts. They are actually as far away from us as say COMS managers or document managers. They are not SME accounting packages.

I think hat makes TurboCASH unique is that it addresses a simple task - The General Ledger - and it does is a massive horizontal manner, working in any language and any tax regime. It is the ability to compile and manage one piece of code and still apply it directly into multiple markets that makes our cost of distribution so cheap. The Setup and installation script is almost as big as the core project itself!

Thank you Philip for your reply, and thank you for the cover story linking to this post as well! It was a nice surprise to see the "Top of the world" story but that is a nice way to put it - the Himalayas are pretty darn high!

I'm still plowing through my company accounts and like you said, one of the great things I appreciate about TurboCash is its excellent batch processing capabilities. Gives me all the flexibility in the world to make sure the entries get in right, especially with the batch undo support. It is very true when you say free can be better than a paid for product - it's absolutely true in the case of TurboCASH. And as I continue discovering more and more virtues, you can bet that I'll be championing TurboCASH in Bhutan.

Cheers!