Welcome to GNUKhata

GNUKhata logo

The concept of our logo is based on an ancient Indian abacus, a
computational device where the sums and the differences are balanced
with two contrasting colours of beads. You can take them as
assets/liabilities, profits /losses, expenses/income, or as you like
when you go into your accounting operations.

What is GNUKhata

GNUKhata is a Free Accounting and Inventory Software which can be deployed by both profit making and non-profit making organisations.

The advantages of GNUKhata are

  • It is lightweight and scales up with large volumes of data
  • It is robust and can be used on a wide variety of data categories
  • It is modular, thus facilitating addition of extensions for different tasks
  • The user interface is designed to be intuitive and friendly even for beginners
  • The reports are in the form of spreadsheets in ODS format
  • the soon to be released web application will run through a web browser. for details refer web based GNUKhata page
  • Deployers will find the implementation easy to achieve.
  • GNUKhata is a free software, sometimes referred to as free and open source software or FOSS

Motivations leading to the GNUKhata project

Many individuals and organisations are joining an accelerating trend of switching over to free software. This mass migration to free software is happening largely because people have realised that proprietary softwares deny users their freedom.

Proprietary norms place restrictions on the tasks that users can perform with the software. This means customising or modifying the software is not permitted. Besides this, the user of a proprietary software can't make copies for use on other computers and has to pay for licenses on every single machine on which the software is used.

In addition to such restrictions, a large number of organisations have suffered the problems of vendor lock-in and problems of closed standards getting outdated which puts valuable documents out of reach. Free Software Licenses like GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) solve this problem by granting permission to freely use, copy and redistribute exact or modified copies of the software. For more information about free software and its important features, visit Free Software Foundation at ("http://www.fsf.org")

GNUKhata is released by Comet Media Foundation under the GNU General Public License version 3. However users can apply any later versions of the license at their choice. For details on GNU General Public License version 3 visit ("http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html") GPLv3

Despite the keenness of many to shake off the grip of proprietary software, a major problem faced by most organisations is that there is no really convenient and comprehensive free accounting software. As a result such organisations have no choice but to use a proprietary software, based on a proprietary operating system (OS) for a very important part of their work, that is managing inventory and accounts.

Krishnakant Mane, a free software hacker realised this need and backed by an excellent team of programmers and domain experts, started a project. This effort was supported by Comet Media Foundation which provided the project a home base. Like many organisations, Comet too felt the need for a free software accounting and inventory system and it provided startup funds and the testing ground for the rapidly developing software at its nascent stages. Visit Comet at ("http://www.cometmedia.org") to know more about it.

NIXI funds GNUKhata

National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) Funded GNUKhata from april 2009 till November 2009. Looking at the potential of GNUKhata, NIXI decided to fund the project upto its first stable version. Visit ("http://www.nixi.in") to know more about the organisation.

The Spoken Tutorials project under NMEICT extends support for GNUKhata

The project running at IIT Mumbai found GNUKhata very crutial in ICT based education in the commerce field. The problem seen in commerce colleges is that most of them provide brand based education instead of concept based education. The spoken tutorials project http://www.spoken-tutorial.org? realised that promoting GNUKhata as a FOSS based solution for commerce education is very important for making a free alternative available to proprietory accounting software in commerce colleges. Currently members of GNUKhata team are developing tutorials which can be used in commerce education based on GNUKhata. This initiative is funded by the spoken tutorial project at IIT Mumbai. All the spoken tutorials will be created in the free and open ogg format and recorded on GNU/Linux desktops.

Downloading and testing GNUKhata

GNUKhata is stable and ready for going live! Thanks to the contributions from many free software supporters including domain experts (accountants), volantary and payed developers and advisers, GNUKhata is finally ready for real-time production use.

We are currently altering some modules of the software based on user feedback and some expert advice from professional accountants. While we are making miner changes to a few small modules, GNUKhata is now stable enough to be used on production, or at least on pre-deployment runs. The accounting and book keeping modules are now perfectly functional with no known bugs while all the miner changes are being made to the inventory side of the software. Even these changes are not for the "show stopper" kind of bugs.

For instructions on downloading the software, Please visit download GNUKhata page.

Getting started

Note that GNUKhata uses postgresql as its database server. To download postgresql for your platform or to read more about it, visit ("http://www.postgresql.org")

We are currently working on making GNUKhata work with any RDBMS such as MySQL, SQLight and Postgresql which is the default. For this we are shifting the code to an object relational model which works with any sql based database.

Most GNU/Linux distros facilitate installing postgresql directly through their respective user interfaces. For example, you can use the add-remove option in the applications menu of Ubuntu, or do apt-get install postgresql-8.3 as the root user on Debian.

On Fedora you can use the yum install command as the root user. In addition, you need to install the python-twisted and python-psycopg2 libraries for GNUKhata to work properly.

The source code for GNUKhata can be downloaded from our SVN server at http://gnukhata.gnulinux.in/svn/ People who wish to test the stable modules of GNUKhata can issue the following command from their terminal. svn co http://gnukhata.gnulinux.in/svn/trunk and the people interested in the latest developments on unstable feature can do svn co http://gnukhata.gnulinux.in/svn/gnukhata_alpha. In addition to the source code, we also have created debian (and ubuntu ) based deb packages.

Details for downloading the server and client deb packages are available on download GNUKhata page.

You can also read the GNUKhata Manual on-line for installation and detailed usage.

Coming on board

To become part of our widespread group of collaborators, join our mailing list at http://lists.cis-india.org/mailman/listinfo/gnukhata-users

People interested in development can join http://lists.cis-india.org/mailman/listinfo/gnukhata-devel You can also join live discussions with the developers and other users on IRC at #gnukhata on irc.freenode.net.

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