SQL-Ledger is an open source ERP and accounting system. It gives you all the functionality you need for quotations, order management, invoices, payrolls and much more. The program is written in Perl, runs on an Apache webserver, uses a PostgreSQL database and is highly configurable.
SQL-Ledger is developed by DWS Systems Inc.. The
master branch contains the original version from DWS. It has version tags, so
you can download a specific version back to 2.6.0 from October 1, 2005.
The full branch, which is checked out by default, provides some additions:
- real Unicode support
- extended keyboard shortcuts (docs)
- spreadsheet downloads
- recently used objects
- improved document management with drag and drop and deduplication
- dark mode
- markdown for bold, italic and links in templates
- database snapshots
- encrypted backups
- JSON API (introduction)
- support for ISO 20022 camt.054 files
- Docker files for containerized test environment
- WLprinter
- minimalistic documentation
- Swiss charts of accounts in German, French and Italian
- several security patches
To install the program on Debian, you can use the Ansible Role for SQL-Ledger. If you are on a different distribution, either follow the instructions from DWS, or open an issue on GitHub.
If GnuPG is installed on your server, you can
use it to encrypt backups. Uncomment the $gpg variable in
sql-ledger.conf, create a directory /var/www/gnupg and change its
owner to www-data:www-data on Debian or apache:apache on Fedora
based distributions.
In difference to the original SQL-Ledger, the version in the full branch
internally works with Unicode characters.
This requires that your database, your templates and translations are
all encoded in UTF-8.
With
cd docker
docker-compose -p sql-ledger up -d
you can start a simple test environment (without LaTeX support) on
Debian Bookworm. SQL-Ledger will run at
localhost/sql-ledger. At
localhost:8080 and
localhost:8085 you find the database
management tools Adminer and
pgAdmin. You'll have to connect them to the
PostgreSQL database that runs on service db with username and
password sql-ledger.
If you want to try the program on AlmaLinux 9, use the second compose file
cd docker
docker-compose -f docker-compose-alma.yml -p sql-ledger up -d
WLprinter, included in the full branch, is a Java program
that is executed on the client PC and allows to print directly from SQL-Ledger
to your local printers. It is available for printing if you add a printer with
command wlprinter at System--Workstations. The client program is started
from Batch--WLprinter. You will have to add a Java security exception for
your SQL-Ledger server.
The documentation is very minimalistic and doesn't contain much more than the function names of the different modules. If you have Mojolicious and Mojolicious::Plugin::PODViewer installed, you can start a perldoc server from your SQL-Ledger base directory with
perl -I. -Mojo -E'plugin "PODViewer"; a->start' daemon
and browse to localhost:3000/perldoc/sql-ledger.
As mentioned above, what you find here is more or less a copy of the code from
DWS. 'copy' means that the code flows from DWS to here and rarely in the other
direction. 'more or less' means that the differences between the full and the
master branch should always be as small that it is possible to include
updates without problems. 2 merge conflics are not a problem, but 100 conflics
are.
It follows that if you want the DWS code to change, you have to speak with them. If on the other hand you want this repo to change, don't care about the moon calendar and create an issue.
It was mentioned too that the full branch contains some additions, like
Unicode support and documentation. So it's probably more correct to call it a
superset of the DWS code.