TurboCASH

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TurboCASH
Developed by	Pink Software
Latest release	3.754 / March 15, 2007
OS	Windows
Genre	Accounting
License	GPL
Website	www.turbocash.net

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, USA, Canada and Australia. It has been translated or partially translated into 23 lanuguages including Afrikaans, Croatian, Dutch, Greek, Indonesian and Spanish. Its current user base is over 60,000.^{[citation needed]}

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 on Windows, although the developers are considering a Linux version. [1]

[edit] Criticism

TurboCASH uses Paradox/BDE, and 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have criticised this choice, suggesting rather to use a more modern SQL database, as they claim that Paradox/BDE is out of date and slow.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. [2]. TurboCASH version 4.0 is based on the Firebird database.[3]

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.