These organisations are sponsoring the development of Parsley:
Parsley is a project to develop a free, open-source, cross-platform accounting and book-keeping system for very small, small and perhaps even medium sized enterprises, providing a free realistic and practical (though very different) alternative to Sage.
It is very much a work-in-progress, and is not yet suitable for real-life use
Sage is a UK company producing first-class Windows-based accounting software for businesses of all sizes. It holds a virtual monopoly* in this market, in the UK at least, and is consistently profitable - as monopolies tend to be!
Parsley aims to challenge Sage's monopoly*, but Sage needn't be worried any time soon: their software works, ours doesn't.
| Feature | Parsley | Sage | Rosemary | Thyme |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Works? | Not Yet | Very Well | n/a | n/a |
| OS | Any | Windows Only | n/a | n/a |
| Web-based? | Yes | No | n/a | n/a |
| Price | Free | £100 up | n/a | n/a |
| Payroll? | No | Extra | n/a | n/a |
* Well, it's by far the largest business operating in the market, but many organisations don't use it. Lots of small businesses do their accounts on Excel, or the back of an envelope, and larger ones tend to use products like Oracle Financials, customised for their operation, or their own legacy COBOL based systems which are just too ingrained to change. Probably.
If you are a Java programmer with time on your hands, or an organisation employing Java programmers with time on their hands, you could do worse than join the Parsley project on Sourceforge.net. We need all the help we can get!
Alternatively, or in addition, you cold always just:
Parsley depends on sponsors to continue its development. Without sponsorship, its developers can only work in their spare time and for free; with sponsors, they get paid for their work on the project.
If you run a small business, and/or you are an accountant or a book-keeper who provides services to small businesses, Parsley will make your life easier - even if you usually use Sage! The competition from Parsley will improve Sage.
You can sponsor a developer to work for a day or more, leaving us to decide the priorities - which, naturally, we'd prefer - or you can sponsor work to be directed on particular modules.
Parsley will support, but not compel, open-book accounting. Open-book accounting is revolutionary, and it will take courage to adopt it. Parsley will let its users decide how open they want to be, and let them protect confidential information securely
If you would like to suggest other design goals, why not join the Parsley mailing list?
But you can join the project on SourceForge.net, and get a login to the trial servers. Don't go using them for real business work yet!
We run our own Subversion repository and anonymous access is permitted. This is bleeding-edge, broken, prototype, alpha code. Try it at your own risk. It probably won't even compile, let alone run on your system; we never said it was ready. But we do believe in openness
The Boox java library, version alpha 0.3, is available on Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/boox/. It's not parsely, so much as the compost the parsely is grown on. Sort of. And it's only alpha too; it's missing a number of important features - including, specifically, the permissions/access control functionality. Which is really quite important.