TurboCASH is a free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 accounting software package, developed by a project team headed by Philip Copeman, a South African. It has been continuously developed since April 1985, and was released under the GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

 in July 2003.

The biggest TurboCASH communities are found in South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

, the Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

, the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, Belgium

Belgium

Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

, USA, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 and Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

. It has been translated or partially translated into 23 languages including Afrikaans

Afrikaans

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language, spoken natively in South Africa and Namibia. It is a daughter language of Dutch, originating in its 17th century dialects, collectively referred to as Cape Dutch .Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch; see , , , , , .Afrikaans was historically called Cape...

, Croatian

Croatian language

Croatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...

, Dutch

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

, Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

, Indonesian

Indonesian language

Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....

 and Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

. According to the company, TurboCASH has over 80,000 users.

It is aimed at the small to medium-sized business market, this places it between being a home finances package and being an ERP

Enterprise resource planning

Enterprise resource planning systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization, embracing finance/accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, customer relationship management, etc. ERP systems automate this activity with an integrated software application...

 package. Its core function is a General ledger, posting transactions into accounts and producing financial reports. Plugin technology enables developers to extend the system.

It integrates directly with osCommerce

OsCommerce

osCommerce is an e-commerce and online store-management software program. It can be used on any web server that has PHP and MySQL installed. It is available as free software under the GNU General Public License.-History:...

, CRE Loaded and Zen Cart

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is an online store management system. It is PHP-based, using a MySQL database and HTML components. Support is provided for numerous languages and currencies, and it is freely available under the GNU General Public License....

. Being originally developed in Delphi, it only runs natively on Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

, although the developers have released a version for Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 that runs under Wine

Wine (software)

Wine is a free software application that aims to allow computer programs written for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. Wine also provides a software library, known as Winelib, against which developers can compile Windows applications to help port them to Unix-like...

. A version that runs under CrossOver

Crossover

-Fiction and media:* Fictional crossover, a storyline combining characters or settings from separate fictional properties** Fictional crossovers in video games* Crossover , a 2002 documentary by Justin Lin...

, and will therefore run on Apple MacOS, is also under development.

Criticism

TurboCASH version 3 stores its data in a Paradox/BDE database. Some developers have criticised this choice, suggesting rather to use a more modern SQL database, as they claim that Paradox/BDE is out of date and slow. The TurboCASH developers, however, claim that in a network of one to five users, TurboCASH's target market, Paradox/BDE works well and has long record of stability and easy installation.

TurboCASH version 4.0 is based on the Firebird

Firebird (database server)

Firebird is an open source SQL relational database management system that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix. The database forked from Borland's open source edition of InterBase in 2000, but since Firebird 1.5 the code has been largely rewritten ....

 database and so is not subject to this criticism.

TurboCASH has also faced criticism from some open-source advocates, as commercial applications are required to compile

Compile

Compile may refer to:* Compile , a Japanese video game company founded in 1983 that specialized in shoot 'em up and computer puzzle game genres...

 TurboCASH. There is a sub-project in place to remove these, as well as a sub project to implement the system in the Lazarus

Lazarus (software)

Lazarus is a free cross-platform IDE which provides a Delphi-like development experience for Pascal and Object Pascal developers. It is developed for, and supported by, the Free Pascal compiler. Since early 2008, Lazarus has been available for Microsoft Windows, several Linux distributions,...

/Free Pascal

Free Pascal

Free Pascal Compiler is a free Pascal and Object Pascal compiler.In addition to its own Object Pascal dialect, Free Pascal supports, to varying degrees, the dialects of several other compilers, including those of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, and some historical Macintosh compilers...

environment.

External links

• TurboCASH Home Page