Can anyone recommend an open source accounting/erp solution? Ideally I'm looking for something web-based that can handle both standard and non-profit accounting. But there's not a lot out there, so I'd like to hear about anything that people use and like.
EDIT: I'm not looking for something to turn me into an accountant. This is for a real business with professional staff that needs to move beyond Quickbooks and wants something open and extensible.
Open Bravo is the best one I know of. Would need to know a bit more about your requirements to give you any suggestions beyond that.
No accounting software is going to make you an accountant. It won't even make you a bookkeeper. If you don't know exactly what you're doing, you should accept that you'll need to use something compatible with your professional help.
If you're doing nonprofit work, your professional accountant may be a volunteer and that makes it even more important to make it easy for him.
GnuCash is a pretty flexible open-source package for those who really do have simple enough needs that they can take care of it themselves. It requires some experience with real world double-entry bookkeeping. If you have very simple needs, it will help with basic payroll, invoicing, check printing, accounts receivable maintenance and the like. If your tax planning or -- even worse -- payments get into trouble, it's your own responsibility; there's nobody else to take responsibility.
I don't know if GnuCash does web-based data entry yet. That would be a nice feature, but there are some security issues with it.
SQL Ledger is one I looked at when moving to Linux. It's web-based and GPL but it turned out to be overkill for what I needed.
However, it's very powerful so you might want to look at it.
I have created a web-based erp application and IMHO there is no open-source erp/accounting solutions that are good enough. They all are difficult to use; made by developers without any input from business users/designers/usability experts. Most of them do not have many real life implementations and development progress is often slow. GUI is slow, ugly and just plain hurtful to use. As a result of few implementations they are also lacking features and buggy.
Where are you based? Accounting applications needs to be adapted to your country. If you are in UK, Australia or NZ I definitively recommend Xero. LessAccounting is another decent alternative. Both of these are relatively cheap and you do not need to worry about hosting it yourself. Otherwise NetSuite is good, but somewhat costly. Have you consider the online version from QuickBooks?
It may help is to center your search around MRP (materials resource planning) instead of ERP. MRP is a subset of ERP, and often ERP is merely the addition of "bugs and whistles." If you don't thoroughly understand MRP functions, ERP certainly won't be useful to you.
Supposing you set the focus on MRP: That's still a vast field, and there are a few opening constraints that must be determined, or you can waste a lot of time. Things like:
But the other half of the answer is that robust MRP probably doesn't exist in open source yet. This is a strange, sad deficit in OSS -- may it soon be remedied. I wouldn't let my pessimism keep you from trying out OpenBravo. I don't know but that it works well, with limited goals; and perhaps it's a fit for your operation.
If, after reading this, you think it's the accounting you're after and not the ERP -- that a full-fledged accounting app is what will cover the need -- then I think you're in a much less difficult position generally. Just drop the ERP label and press on.