The Frappe Books desktop app is retired. What now?

What happened to the Frappe Books desktop app?

Frappe Books was a free, open-source desktop accounting app for small businesses, built with Electron. Frappe has retired the desktop app in favour of a new version that runs in the browser. An installed copy keeps working, but it is no longer the version Frappe is building.

That leaves people who chose Frappe Books because it ran offline, on their own machine, with their data in a single file, with a decision to make.

Your options

1. Move to the new browser version of Frappe Books. This follows Frappe's plans, and is the choice if you are happy working in a browser.
2. Stay on Frappe Books v0.36.0 as it is installed. Nothing changes today, but the retired desktop app is no longer the version Frappe develops.
3. Switch to Latte Books. It is a port of Frappe Books v0.36.0 to Rust that keeps the desktop app going. It opens your company file without an export or import, and starts about 9× faster in a fraction of the memory.

What stays the same in Latte Books

Latte Books follows Frappe Books v0.36.0 as closely as possible: the same documents, rules and reports, with the ledger checked against Frappe Books and 70 of its bugs fixed. That includes:

• Quotes, sales and purchase invoices, payments, returns and journal entries
• Inventory with stock, shipments and receipts, and a point of sale with pricing rules, coupons and loyalty points
• General Ledger, Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, Trial Balance and the other reports
• India GST with GSTR-1 and GSTR-2, and Switzerland
• Your company in one file on your computer, and Frappe Books' 18 community translations

What is different

• Printing. Print templates are rendered to PDF by Typst instead of a browser engine. Latte Books comes with Typst versions of Frappe Books' designs. A custom HTML template in your file is kept, and can be converted to a Typst copy as a starting point.
• ERPNext sync is not ported.
• Right-to-left layout for Arabic and Persian is not available yet.
• Exchange rates are not fetched from the internet. Set the rate on a foreign-currency invoice yourself.
• A GPU is required, since the app is drawn on the GPU without a browser inside.

Every difference is listed, with the reason, in the project's list of deviations from Frappe Books.

How to move your company file

1. Make sure the file was last opened in Frappe Books v0.36.0. If you use an older version, open the file once in v0.36.0 first.
2. Make a copy of your .books.db file. Latte Books is in beta, so start with the copy.
3. Download Latte Books for Windows, macOS or Linux and install it.
4. Open the copy of your company file in Latte Books and check your recent invoices and reports.

If something looks wrong, Frappe Books can still open the same file, and you can open an issue so it gets fixed.

Who makes Latte Books?

Latte Books is made by BloomSynth and released under AGPL-3.0, like Frappe Books. It is built on Frappe Books by Frappe Technologies and its contributors, including the volunteers who translated it, and it is not affiliated with Frappe Technologies. The code is on GitHub.