Recently I’ve been working on 125 Accounts, a simple accounts package written in Python.
The main goal is to have an extremely simple system for generating business documents, tracking who owes me money and how much I owe to other people, and estimating my tax liability. For the first two years of self-employment I used a spreadsheet and LibreOffice documents, but as my business grows I want to spend less time on administration and that means automating as much as possible.
I’ve tried to use other accounts systems in the past but they all suffer from the complexity involved in supporting every possible type of business and country. All that is necessary if you’re a large company, registered for VAT or have lots of capital assets, but I run a micro-business with no fixed assets and minimal expenditure. I don’t really want to read a 200+ page book just to create a few invoices.
The side goal is also to use this as another small project where I can improve my Python skills, as I don’t want to be entirely reliant on PHP for work — not that I expect the bottom to fall out of the market any time soon.