Oikara

Where the name comes from

For the Greeks, oikos was the whole household: the family, the goods, the land and the accounts. It was the basic economic unit of life. From oikos and nomos, the rule, came oikonomia: the management of the house. That is where the word economy comes from, directly. Xenophon wrote an entire treatise on it, the Oeconomicus, about how to run an estate well.

In the New Testament, the oikonomos is the steward: the one who manages what is not his own and must one day give an account.

It is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful. (1 Corinthians 4:2)

The problem

Venezuelan accounting has rules of its own. Private companies work under VEN-NIF; public bodies under ONCOP. There is inflation adjustment, exchange rates that change by the day, and invoices received out on the street, far from any desk. Most systems either don’t know these rules or patch around them.

How I solved it

Oikara is a complete accounting system that handles several companies at once. I organized it the way an accountant works:

• Records: general journal, chart of accounts and fixed assets.
• Tax: purchases and sales, customers and suppliers, and a capture inbox. Someone photographs an invoice from the mobile app out on the street, and back at the office it is reviewed and approved for entry.
• Books: general ledger, trial balance and worksheet.
• Financial statements: financial position, income, changes in equity, cash flows and inflation adjustment.
• Treasury: collections, payments and bank reconciliation.
• Operations: orders, production, purchasing and inventory.

How it’s built

It is a desktop application with a Rust core and a hexagonal architecture. The accounting rules live apart from the interface and the database, guarded by hundreds of tests. The company’s data stays on its own machine, with encrypted external backups.

What comes next

Splitting the work by teams with specific roles: point of sale by register, and separate modules for sales, production and inventory.