Thanks! Will take a look at that one.

As admin said, GnuCash is aimed at financial book-keeping thus having relatively comprehensive share trading function without the normal prerequisite of some basic inventory..

Dwayne, look at FrontAccounting which is an across-platform ERP that is free and open-source. It is a 20-tonne pile-driver to crack your rather small nut but it has everything you need. GnuCash is too idiosyncratic; I don't how the developers can claim that it is aimed at small businesses without inventory. Many one-person businesses are both service and goods oriented. Gnu Cash is really aimed at share traders.

I currently use an old version of TurboCASH (3.7) for my "home user" accounting. Its buggy and the new version wasn't compatible with my old computer, so I wanted to replace it with GnuCash. Unfortunately I do have some small inventory items that I sell online or use in my contracting work. Even something as simple as a phone cable involves inventory for rolls of cable and plugs that become part of a "bill of materials" item that I can simply invoice for at the predefined price with a built-in safety check that prevents me from selling below cost. Turnover is not enough to stop me giving up on that function, but it would be good to see open-source software with such features.

With online trading through web auction sites now becoming more common as a home business, I think its time to start work on an inventory module. While I mostly invoice for labour (so GnuCash would be almost perfect) I cannot afford to update a spreadsheet each time I have to supply some small part to connect a customer's internet. I also can't afford to buy commercial software since I'm just a home user!

There is already an investment portfolio manager -- not so different to inventory but oriented to far bigger businesses than me. I suspect that if you take a modular approach you could start with an API that would allow other developers to produce addons such as inventory. I wouldn't expect a system to be as comprehensive as TurboCASH but hopefully easier for non-accountants to connect the module to the inventory and cost of sales accounts.

Heres some features that I have on my current inventory system:

• inventory items can be set as buy, sell, both buy/sell (ie for resale), bill of materials, and non-stock buy or sell (eg labour).
• inventory items directly populate purchase and sales documents with a default price eg invoices with a choice of preset sales prices or purchase orders with the latest buy cost.
• invoices are populated with SKU or id., product description, default price, and default rate of GST.
• individual inventory items need to be set with accounts for Sales, Cost Of Sales, and Inventory, but this should perhaps be automatic for each category of product...
• labour or office supplies etc have to be created as a non-stock product, perhaps should be allowed to invoice items as accounts instead of creating non-stock inventory items.
• inventory updates can be done in a per-item screen or on a table listing all products
• the product listing table can be rearranged for updating latest/average costs, retail/wholesale/contract sell prices, quantities onhand and reorder points, descriptions and barcodes.
• other records in the inventory are an extended description (ie hidden from invoicing), a disabled tickbox to hide obsolete items when invoicing, and the unit size (eg each, per hour, length, weight etc)
• SKU can be changed but this would affect all sales/purchase documents from previous years so a warning pops up.
• sales prices can be set as either GST exclusive or inclusive.
• invoicing out-of-stock inventory can be done as a back-order, and invoicing pops up a warning when inventory onhand falls below the reorder level.

We recommend against writing directly to a SQL database because all of the logic that makes sure everything balances is in the C code; however, it's implemented as shared libraries so if you extract the headers to somewhere convenient you can use the API directly. The core API is also exposed via Scheme and Python.
There is also a general-purpose CSV importer and an import library that you could use to write a custom importer.

That said, you'd be better off using software intended for the purpose. There are several FOSS ERP programs available; use one of them.

I understand that you don't want to incorporate inventory management but is there a way to import batch transactions that are generated from outside the software. Can I write the balanced GL transactions directly into the Mysql tables? Is there an API for that?

I agree it is not simple to implement an inventory module. But a nap elementary one would help small business a lot.

Sorry, But your just plain wrong about inventory, without a fully integrated inventory system this program is little more then a nice little toy, it is not for business AT ALL.

I have done that using 1 account+1 currency per good and it worked fine.
(With lots of automation via jGnucashLib since this gets VERY verbose.)

Sorry for resurrecting this idea.

The one and only reason I continue to use QuickBooks v5, dating back to 1997, is because it has basic inventory management. You may wish to categorise QuickBooks as ERP rather than "accounting", yet I continue to use it, and not GnuCash, because it has basic inventory management. Furthermore, I can presume millions (MILLIONS !!) of other users are in the same position. So, please consider what the user community requests, rather than what fits nicely into a category called "accounting" software. No other open source "accounting" software such as QuickBooks exist, so stop wasting time and seize the opportunity to become the solution of choice for many (Millions ??) of others currently forced to use a propriety solution such as QuickBooks.

Sorry for being so forceful and direct, yet I share the same viewpoint as others that GnuCash is a really good program but falls short of what users want because of ideology.

Great idea indeed! with inventory GNU Cash will be irresistable!!!

Please, edit the title so that it doesn´t say ´mini´, we want complete solution, not just mini inventory. INVENTORY is one of the few things GnuCash misses to be a COMPLETE accounting solution.

I disagree that a starting inventory system is too complex. For a starter, just record purchases of items and quantities, and use the averaging system of determining cost of items. If you have received an order from a customer, you can just keep the order in a folder until the SKUs come in. Then just sell them and update the quantity, Cost of Sale, and Inventory.

Wow, inventory always sounds easy but just is not... However much I would like this I reckon the focus should stay on accounts - so much to do man!

ERP is too complex for a small and medium scale businesses like retail and franchise businesses which maintains moderate but many types of items. I don't believe GnuCash is just limited to Personal Finance Manager tool for it already include a Business Menu where you can create invoice, billing and voucher for employees. So, I do highly believe that adding inventory module will make it a complete and powerful package...

Tnx!

Sorry I would tend to disagree... Adding such modules will make GnuCash more of an ERP software which means it will be less of a Personal Finance Manager as described by its developers.

If you really want such Please try using ERP Softwares like the one I use Dolibarr

This is why peachtree still wins me.
If mini inventory feature isn't included, then at best gnucash is suitable for service oriented industry where no stock is involved.
Yes, one could write up an invoice based on the items sold, but then the selling price will have to be looked up at an excel file, too many to and fros between gnucash and another program.

I do agree that mini inventory is a PITA, you can't stop at only 1 part of the inventory system.

Every bit of great work starts small.

My partner (professional accountant) looked at GnuCash and said she would not use because it does not have inventory per se. However I (professional programmer) had second thoughts: what if we will declare each product as a commodity and have subtree of accounts where each separate account represent separate SKU? So I have got my PHP scripts which I use to run online shop to add/modify DB records as needed automatically and in effect I now have mini-inventory system.

So in effect GnuCash has all necessary elements to keep track of inventory. We just need a way which can associate inventory subaccounts with records in invoice and this should be relatively simple.

Yes! it may require a lot of work but this would make GnuCash a very powerful and complete accounting software.

Implementing a inventory system is a giant amount of work here. I'm rather inclined to decline this feature proposal, because it requires a whole lot of additional other features.