Barrang officially opens its doors on the 19th of February, 2009.

Barrang is starting out primarily as a Linux Consultancy mainly targeting local small businesses in south west Sydney.

My primary target market doesn’t have a lot of money, especially in this climate, so I intend to provide maximum value to my clients by using Open Source Software as much as possible and by keeping my rates as low as possible.

My long term goal is to be location independent, that means not being tied to servers located in customer premises. There’s a number of different paths that goal could take, and I will be developing them along the way as I go.

My strengths lie in my knowledge and experience in Open Source Software and networks. My weakness is in social networking and marketing. So if you would like to reach out and make contact, please do, I welcome and encourage it.

There’s no launch party, this post is the cutting of the ribbon.

I look forward to getting to know you more, working together, and making a living doing what I love.

I’ve been searching for accounting packages lately for my IT business which is officially launching tomorrow (yay me), but has sort of been running for the last few years.

My dad is an accountant, and is a wiz at MYOB. So I thought I may as well give it a go, somewhat reluctantly. I couldn’t get it to work properly in my windows VM. Text would disappear from an invoice, and the dates were in US format, even though windows was set to AU. I put it in the too hard basket, and looked at FOSS alternatives.

First stop, LedgerSMB. It was quite alien to me and took a bit to get used to, mostly because I’m not that familiar with accounting practices.

It worked well enough, and I got used to it, however, after recording on an invoice that it had been paid, I got a duplicate key error, and the invoice disappeared. I couldn’t find it in any of the reports, and digging into the backend, I couldn’t see any trace of it in the database. So I dumped it.

Next was Fivedash, which I had never heard of, but was mentioned on OpenSSG. First impressions was it’s very slick, and basic compared to LedgerSMB. But it has all the functionality I need, and has a CRM built in too.

It’s still in beta, and the community isn’t that big. But so far it’s working well, and based on what I’ve read, it can be trusted a lot more than LedgerSMB, in which I get the impression has many warts.