Building a financial app with Django

Question

Hi guys, I'm building an app for a small business so I've to work with currencies, decimal numbers, etc... My goal is to create something like pulseapp.com.

I've searched for opensource projects to look and the only thing I had found was django-cashflow. This app uses python-money.

I've read some of the code and the ways it's coded seems a bit weird to me and it's not fully complete.

Is the app worth to take a deep look?

Does anyone know about another similar app?

Is the task difficult or a begginer like me could find a way to code it himself?

Answer 1

If you're dealing with currencies, you might look to satchmo's codebase. http://www.satchmoproject.com/ They're the current front-runner in Django e-commerce. I'm sure they have money modules.

Answer 2

I've written a framework to help speed up the development of customised commerce aspects of django sites: Rollyourown shopping.

It lets your write your models yourself, and uses a declarative syntax to define a summary class, which handles calculating totals, caching and formatting values etc. It's pretty fast for my use cases, and very flexible: I've used it for online stores, billing for consulting-services and auction sites :-)

The current version works fine, but I'll be releasing a '1.0' version later this month as I decide on the final (stable) API details (names etc) and maybe some external reviews.

Answer 3

I started to use python-money in an application a couple years ago, but had to abandon it due to some problem. I apologize for forgetting the exact problem, but I do remember for our use case it didn't make sense anyway... we just needed decimal fields.

I'd also be wary of django-cashflow not having any activity for 2 years, although the project is small enough it should be easy enough to fix any problems yourself.

For existing Django accounting apps I would suggest enhancing, or at least looking at, minibooks. NOTE: the license is AGPL v3 which could make it unusable for your environment.

Another road to travel would be to investigate porting OpenERP (also GPL IIRC) from Python/GTK to Django. Tryton might also be a starting point, it's GPL3 and IIRC a fork of OpenERP.

Answer 4

If you are going for the other direction (other than Django)I would really recommend tryton and keep the hell away of openerp. Tryton is really open source. openerp is just like compiere, openbenbravo and many others: "Was truly open source" than, came the money!!

We made the change a while ago. I took a lot of work. Spare yourself this trouble. Go Tryton!