Trying Tryton

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Tryton is a Python 3 application distributed under the GPLv3 license. Its home page mentions that it is based on PostgreSQL, but there is support for MySQL and SQLite as well. Tryton, it is said, is "a three-tier high-level general purpose application platform" that is "the core base of a complete business solution providing modularity, scalability and security". The "core base" part of that claim is relevant: Tryton may well be a solid base for the creation of a small-business accounting system, but it is not, out of the box, such a system itself.

Running Tryton

The Tryton documentation is not especially friendly to the first-time user. The installation instructions suggest going with what one's distribution provides. One can see why; following the links for a source installation leads to a lengthy directory listing with dozens of independent tarballs. There is a Mercurial repository out there, but one has to search for it and there is no documentation on how to build or install from a copy of the repository.

Your editor opted for the Fedora Tryton packages — of which there are 54 to choose from. Tryton is broken up into a lot of modules, so there is naturally a package for each. Nobody has documented this, but getting the Fedora packages running requires creating a PostgreSQL database and user, editing the trytond.conf configuration file to point there, adding the tryton group to ones account, and running the trytond-admin application to initialize the database. Once that is done, the tryton application will consent to run and put up a simple window.

In the process of figuring this out, it became clear that the Tryton developers have not put a huge amount of effort into error handling. The usual response when something goes wrong is a Python traceback, which tends to not be particularly helpful.

Getting the tryton application to use one's local database requires messing around with "profiles", even though the configuration file specifying the database setup was passed on the application's command line. Things have to be just right or access simply fails to work. Once that obstacle was passed, the result was a general interface describing "records" of various types. The accounting module was installed and provided its own record types. A basic chart of accounts was set up. But there was nothing resembling an interface to do even basic things like creating a bank account or entering a transaction. Your editor tried installing more modules (all of them, actually) to get more functionality, but the result was an application that wouldn't run at all — it died with a traceback due to apparently missing Tryton module dependencies. Some of the Fedora module packages simply don't work, in other words.

As it happens, the version of Tryton packaged with Fedora 27 is 4.0, which is somewhat behind the current release (4.6). It seems reasonable to believe that a more recent release might yield better results. The openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution packages 4.2 instead, but it never proved possible to get past the profile screen with those packages installed. One might plausibly claim that support for Tryton is not the highest-priority objective for some distributors, at least.

It is also alleged to be possible to install Tryton directly from the Python Package Index using pip. Your newly hopeful editor duly created a virtualenv and populated it with a set of packages, but the 4.6 tryton application would not even start. It is, it would seem, still tied to the GTK+ 2 toolkit, which is not all that well supported on current distributions, especially for a Python 3 application.

Moving on

There is little doubt that somebody with greater skills and patience could find a way to make a current Tryton release work on a current Linux distribution. The result would likely be gratifying in a number of ways; Tryton appears to have a well-designed and well-documented base that one could build a good accounting application on top of. Integration with a business's other processes (one of the key criteria in this search) would seem to be relatively straightforward. But even an easily installed, perfectly working Tryton would fall far short of what is needed here.

The point is this: it's a rare small-business owner who feels the urge to build an accounting system on top of anything. Accounting is a task that needs to be done, not an objective in its own right. Any accounting system that arrives as a box of small parts with "some assembly required" written on the outside does not meet the needs of this kind of user. For all its faults, Intuit understood that when it created QuickBooks. The developers behind the other systems reviewed so far (GnuCash and Odoo) also understand that.

Chances are, the Tryton developers understand that too, but creating an easily usable small-business accounting system would appear not to be at the top of their to-do list. There are a number of free-software business-management systems available. Many of these, your editor has long believed, are developed primarily as platforms for consultants. A system that is highly capable, but which is complex, minimally documented, and in need of a lot of setup work suits that business model well.

Such a system is also, of course, simply easier to implement and maintain. Creating an interactive accounting system that is usable by people with no inherent interest in accounting systems is a difficult task. It is, seemingly, not an itch that many developers feel the need to scratch without some sort of additional incentive. Nobody has the right to criticize developers for this, but the result is predictable: like many types of free software, free accounting systems tend to lack the user-level work needed to make them truly competitive with proprietary alternatives.

Still, it is not yet time to give up on this search; the list of candidate systems is not yet empty. Stay tuned as the quest to find a free accounting system that can displace the proprietary alternatives continues.