Say hello to Kontolino: Smalltalk and Seaside hard at work for Small Businesses

I am happy to announce today the opening of Kontolino!

Kontolino! is a web based accounting system for small and medium businesses under German tax regulation (So it is completely in German, sorry folks!). It is implemented in VA Smalltalk and Seaside and uses DB2 as its storage Backend. We’re using Glorp for the O/R mapping.

Kontolino! has a long history, although it is a young product. We’ve been using the accounting system for our own business for quite a while now, and some day we thought this could be a nice system to use for other small businesses. We always focussed on features and functions we needed for our business and implemented them in a way that we felt made our lives easier when dealing with all sorts of tax regulations and reports that need to be sent to various places. Some features are a bit different from the way they are in other accounting systems, but that is by design, and we think this helps get along with a complex topic as easy as possible.

And that is where the journey with Seaside and all the nice things started that you’ve read here on my blog (and sure will read about more in the future). We had to learn a lot about things we always had been glad somebody was taking care of in previous projects. Be it apache configuration, database administration or lots of little nuts and bolts that keep the internet together.

So please feel free to visit our new site. Give it a try and give us feedback. We need feedback. Lots of it. Don’t think we know anything about a bug, no matter how obvious it is: changes are we don’t.

You can even test drive Kontolino! for free for a full 2 months before you pay anything. If you register for a free test drive, you won’t be charged before you actually buy a Kontolino! package, so it’s completely risk-free!

We’re full of plans for the next few months. First, we need to cut off some of the rough edges and polish a few knobs. But there’s lots to come later this year and in early 2014.