Problem description: Libreoffice is a wonderful office suite for most peoples office-needs. However, for people who run their own businesses, Libreoffice lacks one crucial module: accounting. There are already some open source accounting applikations like Gnucash and KMyMoney, but these are lacking in a lot of ways which makes it neccessary to use other applications as well for invoicing and handling customers and suppliers. Libreoffice is a great suite for handling a lot of things the current accounting software don't do so well. In fact, accounting is pretty much the only crucial thing lacking in Libreoffice to extend it from being a mere office suite to being a business suit. An accounting module would, in other words, make Libreoffice even better than it is today and also a step to be a serious competitor to not only Microsofts Office suite, but also all the different closed source software which are used in businesses. Wishlist of what it should do: 1. Conform to international bookkeeping standards (double-entry accounting should be preferred because of this) 2. Be fully integrated with other Libreoffice modules. For example, customers and suppliers could be handled in Base databases, invoices could use spreadsheet templates from Calc etc. 3. Be easy enough to use for new businesses. Gnucash is great here in it's optional use of typical accounting nomencalture, like debit and credit.
This is a feature/enhancement request, therefore changing the Importance field accordingly.
This is really an interesting request. I dont think TDF has the resources for this feature at this momonment.
Also, once some dev person decide to work on this feature, I would like to do the specialized accounting glossary issues, as well as zh_CN translation work, since I am an accountant.
Adding self to CC if not already on
I am a retired accountant, and also support the idea of an accounting extension for LibreOffice, but I suggest that Base be considered instead of Calc. While it would make user modifications harder, since most small business users would not be as proficient at editing tables in Base correctly as they would be at editing worksheets in Calc, but it would allow the program to grow and become a powerful system, adding CRM and ERP functions that would be difficult to manage in Calc. I'd even pay money if it could be maintained, and I will bet dollars to doughnuts that there are accountants in private practice out there who would welcome an alternative to Quickbooks and Microsofts junk.
This is pretty much guaranteed never to happen. Instead, you should be focusing on asking the real players (like gnucash) to step up their integration with office suites etc. [Much better to ask a real accounting program to become better than ask a product that has nothing to do with accounting to become yet another accounting program.]