// the find
bigcapitalhq/bigcapital
💵 Independent financial accounting with intelligent reporting, alternative to Quickbooks, Xero, Wave.
Bigcapital is a self-hostable, multi-tenant accounting platform written in TypeScript — covering invoicing, bills, inventory, bank feeds, and financial statements on a proper double-entry ledger. It targets small and medium businesses that want an on-premise alternative to QuickBooks or Xero, and ships with a headless API so you can use it as an accounting engine behind your own product.
The double-entry foundation is real, not cosmetic. The migration history shows proper journal entry tables, FIFO inventory cost lot tracking, and a separate ledger for account transactions — this is not a fake accounting simulation bolted onto a spreadsheet model. Plaid bank feed integration for automatic transaction import is rare in self-hosted open source accounting tools and alone puts it ahead of most alternatives. The multi-tenant architecture uses isolated per-tenant databases, which means you can actually build a SaaS on top of it without worrying about data bleed between organizations. Active development — the repo had commits yesterday — and a working Docker Compose setup mean you can be running it within an hour.
It uses MariaDB, not PostgreSQL. This isn't fatal but it closes off a lot: window functions for period-over-period reports are clunkier, JSON support is worse, and the ecosystem tooling (pgvector, logical replication, better explain plans) isn't available. The test suite covers three e2e scenarios — authentication, items, and onboarding — which is dangerously thin for software that writes journal entries with real money attached; a bad debit/credit split is not the kind of bug you want to discover in production. The AGPL license means anyone deploying this commercially needs to open-source their surrounding code or negotiate a commercial license, which is a non-starter for a lot of companies. The 'intelligent reporting' in the description is marketing — there's no ML visible anywhere in the codebase; it's standard financial reports, which are good, but not what that phrase implies.