Free open source CRM with accouting

[nightmare4471]

Hi Readers,

I am looking for a free open source online CRM (customer relationship management) that includes accounting (payroll/balance sheet management). Any information regarding this would be really appreciated.

Thank you

 

[Krash]

I don't think such a thing exists, Nightmare.

I've never seen the words "free" and, in particular "Payroll" (but accounting in general) in the same sentence.

CRM, sure, I can give you some good suggestions depending on your sales process - but not accounting.

 

[nightmare4471]

Thank you for the quick response Krash.

Basically I am looking for a CMS (for free) that could be integrated with my application and that too on a 50-50% revenue sharing basis. Adding on the functionality of accounting would be great.

Any help on the aforementioned is highly appreciated.

Thank you

 

[Krash]

Sorry Nightmare, you want a CMS? (Content management system?) or was that a mis-type?

If you meant CRM then how does your sales process and lead generation work? Are you an "active" process, whereby you approach companies cold, or are you more passive and wait for them to hit a certain point in their buying cycle before you approach them?

What does your application do?

When you say "50/50 share" does that mean that you will share the costs with someone else? Or are you looking to implement more of a "profit sharing" process?

What kind of accounting functionality do you need? Print invoice? Email? Paypal, credit card, bacs? Inventory?

Sorry for the questions but I need a fair bit of detail to give you some considered suggestions.

 

[nightmare4471]

Yupp..you caught it correct...

In spite I am looking for a CRM (customer relationship management). Please see that we are an online web based billing application and would require to integrate the CRM with our online application to make it even better than what it is. I will be happy to share revenue with the open source CRM and a basic accounting (profit loss report/balance sheet) would be appreciated.

I am totally agreed and tried to provide answers to your queries.

Thank you for the constant approach.

Thank you

 

[Krash]

I would suggest you look at "Sugar CRM" or "vTiger" if it's something you want to be able to roll-out to people who then would want to host it independently. Both of those also already have a healthy subscriber base.

I don't know of any CRM that can also do accounts, save for what I myself offer (NetSuite) but we already do what you are seeking to offer as a native implementation and that then comes under the guise of "Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)".

Similarly, I don't know of any online accounting package (freeagent and xero are the ones I'm most familiar with) that don't already do billing and invoicing, either, so you may have to add that functionality to your offering to make this worthwhile for you.

Have I understood your requirements correctly?

 

[nightmare4471]

Thank you for the suggestion.

Further, I tried sugar and vTiger and found them to be useful however they do charge on a paid plan basis. I hope you would understand that I am looking for a CRM that is for free and that I could implement with my billing application. (revenue sharing model)

 

[Krash]

You can download a free version of sugar, same as you can for vTiger (but of course you have to host them).

I don't know of anyone that would go the shared revenue model at this stage, sorry.

 

[KM-Tiger]

A couple of things you could look at:

OpenERP and LedgerSMB (Google will find them), but beware both are non-trivial to deal with.

I don't think you will find anything with payroll also built in. The Open Source projects tend to be international collaborations, and the specifics of UK payroll just don't get a look in.

If you want a free payroll service www.payroo.com, works very well indeed.

 

[OpenSure]

As we understand it there are UK governmental restrictions on what software can provide tax office accepted payroll services. Essentially it amounts to a bond, acting as a paywall which protects current proprietary software and restricts entry to the market. Probably makes it easier for HMRC to deal with a small group of specialist businesses rather than encourage competition from every upstart hopeful....

Accounting software like FrontAccounting and other ERP packages mentioned will offer the essential tools. CRM like vTiger is the most open source and maybe best placed to mould to suit your needs without license constraint. Many of the so called OSS CRM packages are not that Open and have drawn a lot of complaint from the OSI and users.

Very little will be free, online and open source, every business needs to get revenue from somewhere. Your best bet would be to host the software yourself along with your application all on your own server(s) and collect 100% of the revenue.

 

[KM-Tiger]

As we understand it there are UK governmental restrictions on what software can provide tax office accepted payroll services. Essentially it amounts to a bond, acting as a paywall which protects current proprietary software and restricts entry to the market. Probably makes it easier for HMRC to deal with a small group of specialist businesses rather than encourage competition from every upstart hopeful....

Do you have any reference for that?

I can see that submissions would need to be to some standard, but surely that should be an open standard, with which anyone could comply.

Otherwise HMRC are conspiring with a cartel at the expense of taxpayers, and that to me is deeply and fundamentally wrong.

 

[OpenSure]

No one will touch Payroll software that is not accredited and the actual cost of gaining accreditation is not easily found.

One dev we spoke to some time ago mentioned around £50K per year to fund the process. That's a fair hill to climb when starting as a project whose software no one can use practically until it is accredited and the rate of return in the current market with dominant companies is unpredictable.

Here's the current list: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ebu/acclist.htm

However it looks like things are changing a bit at the moment:

http://www.payroll-help.com/2011/07/payroll-sofware-recognition-31115/

In fact that kind of government connection to commercial proprietary products is quite common. UK Government in some areas insists on MS format documents in particular and varying version for some simple tasks. Someone in Whitehall probably has a great macro they wrote for Word in Office 2000 and another for Excel 2003 ;-)

Just means that local authorities, schools, charities and other bodies have to maintain the ability to read and write these old proprietary standards. Instead as is happening in other countries accepting the international standards of ODF (open document format) that MS and nearly all other products support.

Getting saddle-sore, must get off this horse now...