Developer(s) Pink Software Written in Delphi Type Accounting | Initial release April 1985 Operating system | |
Stable release 5.0.0.969 / 16 August 2016; 7 months ago (2016-08-16) | ||
TurboCASH is a free software 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 in July 2003.
The biggest TurboCASH communities are found in South Africa, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium, United States, Canada and Australia. It has been translated or partially translated into 23 languages including Afrikaans, Croatian, Dutch, Greek, Indonesian and Spanish. According to the company, TurboCASH has a 'community of over 100,000'.
It is aimed at the small to medium-sized business market, this places it between being a home finances package and being an ERP 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, CRE Loaded and Zen Cart. Being originally developed in Delphi, it only runs natively on Windows, although the developers have released a version for Linux that runs under Wine. A version that runs under CrossOver, 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have criticised this choice, suggesting rather to use a more modern SQL database, as they claim that Paradox/BDE is out of date and slow.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 5.0 is based on the Firebird 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 TurboCASH. There is a sub-project in place to remove these, as well as a sub project to implement the system in the Lazarus/Free Pascal environment.
TurboCASH claims to be open source and yet none of the recent source code is published anywhere. The current TurboCASH release is version 5 dated December 2014. On the SourceForge link, that the TurboCASH web site directs you to for the source code, the only source code is dated 2008 (version 3) and some other utilities related to version 4 dated 2009.