Every business on earth keeps books. The books say whether it is alive, whether it can pay its people next month, whether it can afford to try something. For most small businesses, that knowledge lives in software they rent, behind a price list they do not control, in a format they cannot take with them. Leaving means starting again.
We think that is backwards. The data belongs to the business. The rules that turn it into books — a chart of accounts, a VAT return, a year-end — belong to everyone who has to follow them.
And two things are changing at once. The work of keeping books, which used to need a person at a keyboard, is being done by machines — which is either the moment a business finally understands its own numbers, or the moment it hands them to someone else's model and stops looking. And what has to be booked is changing too: invoices that travel as structured data between administrations rather than as paper, assets that exist only on a chain, payments that settle in seconds, a tonne of carbon that will have to be accounted for as strictly as a euro. An accounting system built on the assumption of one country, one currency, one kind of asset and one person typing is not going to survive that.
So Ekwo is five commitments.
1. Books a business owns, not rents.
A company should be able to keep its own books, understand them, and act on them, with software it owns and an assistant it controls. Not a subscription that reads its data; a ledger in a database it holds the keys to, with an open API and an AI that works for it. Every installation stands on its own, with us or without us, for as long as its owner wants it to. That is the test every feature passes before it lands, and it is the whole point.
Autonomy is also knowledge. A trial balance that balances, a VAT return computed from the ledger rather than typed in, a year-end close that a small business can run itself: these are not features, they are the difference between a business that knows where it stands and one that hopes.
2. AI at the keyboard. You stay in control.
Ekwo is designed to be operated by a machine. The data sits in Postgres, the REST API and its OpenAPI description come with it, and an MCP server sits on top: an assistant built on the model you choose can read the ledger, raise an invoice, post it, match a payment, pull the VAT return — as you, under your own row level security, without the data leaving your account. The agent is a user of the books, with the same rights and the same limits as the human beside it, and it can be replaced by another one tomorrow.
The other half of that sentence matters more. Nothing in the core calls a model. A posting, a tax, a declaration box, a reconciliation rule is deterministic, reproducible and reviewable: the same inputs give the same figure, on your machine and on an auditor's, this year and in seven years when someone asks why. A model that guesses at a number nobody can reproduce is not an accounting system, whatever it costs. So the intelligence goes where it belongs — reading a document, proposing a match, explaining a variance, drafting the answer to the administration — and the arithmetic stays in code anybody can read. The machine proposes; the rules decide; a human can always ask why, and get an article of law rather than a probability.
3. Ready for the finance that is coming.
The next ten years of finance are already written into other people's regulations: structured electronic invoicing becoming the norm and then the law across the Union, filings that are read by machines before they are read by people, instant settlement, crypto-assets that a business holds and now has to report on — MiCA, and the reporting obligations that start to bite in 2026 — and, close behind, the emissions that will sit in a report next to the revenue.
An accounting core either has room for that in its shape, or it does not. Ours is built for it: amounts carry their currency and their rounding rather than assuming cents; formats live in independent libraries, organised by format and never by country, so a new one is a package and not a fork; and anything that is not double-entry bookkeeping — fixed assets, budgets, and next carbon, stocks, crypto-assets — lives in its own Postgres schema, with its own migrations and its own tests, reaching the ledger through one function and never writing an entry behind its back.
Crypto is the honest example of what this buys. A token is not a currency and not a stock: it needs its own inventory, its own cost basis, its own revaluation, and a reporting obligation nobody had two years ago. That is a module, written against a schema that was made ready for it — not a rewrite of the general ledger. The carbon module is the same bet from the other end: a tonne of CO₂ posted against the transaction that caused it, in the same books, with the same audit trail. Nobody does that inside open source accounting today. It is where the name points.
4. Free and independent data infrastructure, in every country.
Accounting is not a product. It is a set of rules that a society agreed on so that businesses could trust each other: the same chart of accounts, the same declaration, the same year-end, for everyone in a country. Those rules should not be locked inside proprietary software, one vendor per market.
Ekwo does not replace the accountant. It gives businesses and the accountants who work with them the same open ground: schemas, the rules of each country as data, and the tools to work on them.
In Ekwo a country is data: a pack of files an accountant can read, a contributor can propose, and a test can prove. Countries on three continents ship today — among them the United States, a country with no value added tax at all, which is how you find out what a format quietly assumed, and Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, on the one chart of accounts seventeen OHADA States share — and more land every week. The rest of the world is open, and it is yours to write.
The core is free software under AGPL-3.0, so that what is built on it stays open. The format libraries are MIT, so that they can go anywhere, including into the tools of people who will never use Ekwo. What we sell — the hosted edition, operated for you, with the connections a small business cannot obtain alone and the agents you configure, acting on your instructions — pays for the rest, and never gates it.
5. A network, not a vendor.
No company can know the accounting rules of the world. A network can. Ekwo is built by:
- accountants who review the pack for their country and put their name on it, so that others can trust it;
- developers who write a format library, a bank parser, a connector, or the module their clients need;
- translators who make a chart of accounts readable in their language;
- the businesses that run it, whose questions and bug reports are the roadmap.
A pack is reviewed when a named professional has read it, not when we say so. A module lives in its own schema so that the people who need it can build it without asking us. The roadmap is public. The decisions are written down, with their reasons, in this repository — including the ones we got wrong and had to take back.
Bring your expertise. If you keep books, if you write software, if you know your country's rules and are tired of seeing them re-implemented badly behind a paywall: this is the place to put that knowledge where it cannot be taken away. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md, or open an issue and say where you are from.
Ekwo is maintained by Ekwo (Karuna Co OÜ). The name is the promise: an accounting core that is open, that the business owns, that a machine can operate and a human still checks — and that leaves a lighter footprint, on the books and, in time, on the world.