One of the things that surprises me is that – with Google providing cloud competitors for Microsoft’s other products, they don’t provide a database, or what is the same thing only tailored, a simple small business accounting package. OK putting Microsoft in there is a bit of a non-sequitur but I wonder if anyone knows of a simple, free bookkeeping package – which would be a hit with ‘distributed’ businesses like the business I run. Saasu looks the goods, but turns out to only be free for 15 transactions a month. I want a bit more than that. Any thoughts.
Club Troppo
Fearlessly dispensing political, legal and economic analysis (and some whimsy) since 2002
See AppEngine
http://code.google.com/appengine/
Gallery of apps:
http://appgallery.appspot.com/
“GQL” (not quite SQL):
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/gqlqueryclass.html
Sorry – forgot the full (NOT simple) Enterprise package, with many different customizations, that has a gorgeous data model and could be hosted:
http://ofbiz.apache.org/
Think of it as Apache’s SAP
Apart from Google AppEngine there’s SimpleDB from Amazon (really just a key-value store) and user-focused sites like DabbleDB.
For small business accounting there are lots of services. Two ones I looked at recently are FreshBooks and Xero.
Finally you can have your own installation of software. There are lots of these — OfBiz, SQL-Ledger, GNU ERP, FiveDash etc.