Bigcapital

Bigcapital is a fast-growing open-source financial accounting platform with over 3,500 GitHub stars, written in TypeScript and built around a Node.js backend with a React frontend. It targets the niche of small and mid-sized businesses that want a real double-entry accounting system without per-seat SaaS pricing or vendor lock-in. The platform has been actively developed since 2020 and ships regular point releases with feature additions and integration improvements.

Common Use Cases

Independent accountants and bookkeepers self-host Bigcapital to manage multiple client companies on a single instance, taking advantage of the multi-tenant architecture to keep client data fully isolated while billing each from a single platform. Small businesses replace QuickBooks, Xero, or Wave subscriptions to eliminate per-user fees and keep transaction data — vendor invoices, bank transactions, customer records — on infrastructure they control. Freelancers and contractors use Bigcapital for invoicing and expense tracking with multi-currency support, particularly when working with international clients across different tax regimes. Startups deploy Bigcapital as their accounting backbone, integrating with Stripe for payment processing, Plaid for bank feeds, and the REST API for custom dashboards in BI tools like Metabase or Grafana. Enterprises with regulatory or data-sovereignty requirements run Bigcapital on private VPS infrastructure to satisfy audit and compliance constraints that public SaaS accounting platforms cannot meet.

Key Features

• Complete double-entry general ledger with configurable chart of accounts
• Multi-currency invoicing, bills, and reports with configurable exchange rate sources
• Customer and vendor records with credit limits, payment terms, and aging reports
• Inventory tracking with cost methods, warehouses, and stock adjustments
• Recurring transactions and customizable templates for invoices and bills
• Profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow, and tax summary reports
• Multi-tenant architecture with isolated per-company databases
• Stripe integration for payment processing on customer invoices
• Plaid integration for automatic bank transaction syncing
• Gotenberg-powered PDF generation for invoices, bills, and reports
• Comprehensive REST API and OpenAPI schema for integrations

Multi-tenant Architecture

Bigcapital is designed multi-tenant from the ground up: each company managed in the system gets its own dedicated MySQL database with the prefix `bigcapital_tenant_`, while a shared system database tracks users, organizations, and platform-level configuration. This design provides strict data separation between companies while keeping operational management simple. The architecture is particularly suited to bookkeepers and accountants managing multiple clients, as well as franchise or holding-company structures where multiple businesses need isolated accounting under a single deployment. The bundled MySQL user has elevated privileges to create and manage tenant databases at runtime as new companies are added through the UI.

Why deploy Bigcapital on Hostinger VPS

Deploying Bigcapital on a Hostinger VPS gives accountants, freelancers, and small businesses a private financial platform under their own domain with no per-user fees, no third-party access to client transaction data, and no SaaS lock-in. The dedicated CPU and RAM keep the React UI responsive and reports fast even with thousands of transactions per company, while persistent volume storage protects financial records, customer data, and audit history across container updates and rebuilds. Self-hosting also keeps sensitive financial data — bank balances, customer lists, vendor invoices — out of cloud provider hands, important for both client confidentiality and regulatory compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, or industry-specific requirements. Full root access lets you wire up Stripe and Plaid integrations, configure SMTP for signup and notification emails, integrate with backup pipelines, and tune MySQL for the size of your client roster without negotiating with a SaaS vendor.