To better explain the benefits of open source accounting software Outserve has written a white paper. The white is available to download from our website here.

The white paper is also available on the document websites edocr and scribd which can be embedded as below.

Hot on the heels of Compiere’s recent new release the ever popular Openbravo has released version 2.4 promising improvements in the user interface. Openbravo is already a very pretty web based product but any improvements to usability of the web interface can only benefit users and help adoption. Keyboard operations and shortcuts have been introduced so now the product can be used mouseless if preferred.

All of the new features are listed at the Openbravo wiki here and overall it looks a good solid release, as ever increasing functionality with new reports and items such as purchase requests, which to to be fair you should expect in any ERP product.

A couple of new features caught my eye, the first was multi-accounting schemas – the ability to have more that one chart of accounts so you can report on the same data for multiple international requirements, currencies or management purposes will be very useful to many organisations.

The second noteworthy feature is the Heartbeat. This function, which will be on by default, will send a signal back to Openbravo with key information regarding installation and usage. Initially this sounds very un-open source but usage data like this is of great use to the whole Openbravo community and also the Heartbeat can be turned off. It should also be mentioned that nearly all modern software has functions similar to this heartbeat but usually there is no information provided to the user about the communication and no option to turn it off.

Another great aspect of Openbravo and open source software in general is listing all the bug fixes on the wiki.