LedgerSMB VS metasfresh

All software costs money to make and maintain. Allot of things that are 'free' like gmail are making money by mining your data, or they have limited features and want you to pay to upgrade. Then there is opensource software that is free and the code gets peer reviewed, so you can trust its not spy ware. I have seen people use gnucash its free and opensource. https://www.gnucash.org/ also more sophisticated packages are Sql-ledger https://sql-ledger.com/ and Ledgersmb https://ledgersmb.org/

I use - and develop - https://ledgersmb.org/ ; if you host it yourself (it can be done at a few dollars per month, or free, on your own laptop), it's definitely less costly than many of the commercial propositions.

LedgerSMB has fund accounting; https://ledgersmb.org as part of its accounting dimensions, it can track how funds (donations, entitlements) are being used by the fund. The software is open source and fund tracking was built inspired by the requirements for the Software Conservancy (https://sfconservancy.org/).

Before you start writing anything from scratch, please know that *many*, *many*, *many* have done so before you. There's some really good open source software that - instead of writing your own from scratch - you could adapt to suit your needs. E.g. the software that I contribute to (LedgerSMB) is on a roadmap for extensibility by businesses that need that type of flexibility (with usable default configurations).

I use open source software to do my books. First of all because I get to keep full control of my own data. But the added benefit is that I can tweak the software when I don't like how it was originally created. That's how I ended up being one of the main developers of the software that I have been using to do my books: https://ledgersmb.org/. Others use this software because they feel the community - although small - is very supportive. Some claimed they got better answers than from Intuit or Xero (for some comments from others, see the testimonials on the site or at https://alternativeto.net/software/ledgersmb/about/)

Have you tried: https://ledgersmb.org/

Try https://ledgersmb.org. We are moving to this open source platform and will self-host. You can have it hosted however. It is less complex than Odoo and yet full multi-user and full-on double-entry accounting -- including for us the all-important project accounting (which is helpful especially for client expense reimbursement).