What is bigcapital?

Bigcapital is an open-source accounting and inventory software built for small and medium businesses. It positions itself as a self-hostable alternative to paid services like QuickBooks, Xero, and Wave, giving businesses full control over their financial data rather than depending on a subscription cloud product. At its core, Bigcapital uses double-entry accounting, the same system professional accountants use, where every transaction is recorded in two places to keep the books balanced. On top of that foundation it handles invoicing, bills, expenses, payments, and inventory. The goal is to automate routine bookkeeping tasks so that owners and managers can spend more time looking at reports and making decisions rather than entering data. There are two ways to use it. The first is through Bigcapital Cloud, a hosted version the team runs, which you can sign up for directly without any technical setup. The second is self-hosting: you download and run the software on your own server using Docker, a standard tool for packaging and running applications. The README points to a Docker guide for anyone going that route, and there is also a one-click option through Gitpod for developers who want to try it in a browser-based environment without installing anything locally. For businesses that want to connect Bigcapital to other software, it exposes an API so developers can feed transactions into the double-entry system from external sources and pull out financial reports programmatically. This is described in the README as headless accounting, meaning you drive the accounting engine from code rather than from the user interface. The project is open-source under the AGPL license and welcomes contributions. A Discord community exists for support, and the team lists a bug tracker on GitHub for reporting issues. The README is relatively concise and focused on getting started rather than providing a deep feature walkthrough.