Akaunting

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 874 words

Akaunting's free core is a competent invoicing and bookkeeping tool: customers, invoices, bills, expenses, bank accounts with manual reconciliation, multi-currency, multi-company, recurring documents and a short list of reports. The moment you want something that sounds like accounting proper, payroll, inventory, receipt capture, a full double-entry ledger view, you are in the app store, and the app store is priced. Read it as free invoicing with a paid ladder and it is a fair deal. Read it as a free QuickBooks and you will be annoyed within a week.

What the free core actually covers

Invoicing is the strong part. Branded PDF invoices, partial payments, credit notes, recurring schedules, reminders by email, and a customer portal where clients view and pay. Bills and expenses mirror that for the purchase side. Banking is a list of accounts with transactions you enter or import from CSV, then reconcile against a statement by hand; there is no bank feed in core. Reports cover profit and loss, income and expense summaries, and a tax summary, and the catalogue's note that reporting could be deeper is polite. Multi-company is real and useful: a freelancer with a sole-trader business and a side company keeps both in one login. All of this runs in 512 MB, which for a PHP application with MariaDB beside it is respectable.

The app store is the business model

Akaunting's company makes its money from the apps, priced per app and mostly per year, and from a hosted cloud edition. The apps that most people eventually want, payroll, inventory, CRM, receipt scanning, online payment gateways beyond the basic ones, and the double-entry app that exposes a proper chart of accounts, journals and ledgers, are the paid ones at last check. That last one is the surprise: the catalogue highlights double-entry accounting, and the engine does keep its books that way underneath, but seeing and driving it as an accountant would is an add-on rather than a core screen. A handful of community apps are free. Do the arithmetic before you commit; two or three paid apps a year can approach the price of a cloud accounting subscription, at which point self-hosting is about data custody rather than cost.

The Docker setup, and the two things it forgets

The official image is simple. Set AKAUNTING_SETUP=true for the very first run, complete the browser wizard, then remove that variable and restart, or it will try to install again.

services:
  akaunting:
    image: akaunting/akaunting:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    environment:
      - AKAUNTING_SETUP=true
      - APP_URL=https://books.example.com
      - LOCALE=en-GB
      - DB_HOST=db
      - DB_NAME=akaunting
      - DB_USERNAME=akaunting
      - DB_PASSWORD=change-me
    volumes:
      - ./storage:/var/www/html/storage
    depends_on:
      - db
    restart: unless-stopped
  db:
    image: mariadb:11
    environment:
      - MARIADB_DATABASE=akaunting
      - MARIADB_USER=akaunting
      - MARIADB_PASSWORD=change-me
      - MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD=change-me-too
    volumes:
      - ./db:/var/lib/mysql
    restart: unless-stopped

The two things a first install forgets. One, the scheduler: recurring invoices and payment reminders only fire if Laravel's php artisan schedule:run runs every minute, so add a host cron entry that execs it inside the container, then create a Healthchecks ping so you learn when it stops. Two, outbound email: set the MAIL_* settings to a transactional provider, because an invoice that never arrives is worse than no invoicing system. Back up the database and the storage directory nightly; the PDFs and attachments live in the latter.

Your accountant wants exports, not a login

Most accountants will not log into your self-hosted anything. What they want at year end is a clean export: transactions, invoices and expenses as CSV or XLSX, which Akaunting produces per module, plus the PDFs. Keep the categories tidy from month one so the export is usable, attach receipts to expenses as you go, and reconcile monthly rather than in a panic in the last week of the tax year. That routine, not the software, is what makes the books defensible.

Pick by the job, not the feature list

For invoicing alone, InvoiceShelf is smaller, prettier and entirely free. For personal money rather than a business, Firefly III is the right tool and Akaunting is the wrong one. For a business that needs stock, purchasing, HR and accounting in one system, jump straight to Dolibarr or an ERP and skip the app-store ladder. And if you are leaving a commercial package, the QuickBooks alternatives page is blunt about bank feeds, which no self-hosted option matches. The rest of the finance category is mostly budgets and ledgers.

What I'd do

For a freelancer or a company of one to five people that needs to invoice, track expenses and hand a tidy export to an accountant, I would run Akaunting in Docker with MariaDB, the scheduler cron in place and email configured, and I would buy zero apps for the first year to find out whether the core is enough. It usually is. If the wish list grows to payroll and inventory, I would price the apps against a cloud subscription honestly and, more often than not, move to Dolibarr rather than climb the ladder. Free core, eyes open, and it earns its place.