If you’re a small business owner, you probably don’t need all the bells and whistles of a full-fledged customer relationship management (CRM) application, but you still do need a solid platform from which to automate common business tasks such as managing materials and generating invoices, ideally at little cost. Linux and KDE make a great free platform, and Kraft makes a great application for businesses like handicrafters and web designers.

German developer Klaas Freitag says Kraft is aimed at small companies, driven by a boss and maybe a few people. He started working on the software in 2005 after having worked on similar applications for many years. He says, “The KDE platform under C++ is the most effective platform to build native GUI applications I have ever worked with, and KDE has a strong, friendly, open, and helpful community that’s fun to work in.”

Freitag recently moved Kraft to KDE 4. “Migrating from KDE 3 to KDE 4 is hard work because a lot of APIs and concepts have changed,” he says, “which requires rewrites of code. On the other hand one gets so much functionality for free. KDE 4 is a very up-to-date, stable, and fast platform, so all the work pays off.”

The migration was a big task, so Freitag hasn’t yet begun to think about additional program enhancements, but “I will start to think about that soon. Kraft is a member of the KDE Financial Apps working group, which met in Frankfurt last month. I plan to come up with a roadmap based on some of our discussions. I’d like to make releases two or three times a year roughly.”

Kraft is not a solo effort. “We really lack good, task-oriented documentation that helps people solve problems like ‘How do I write an invoice?’, so writers are welcome. Coders of course as well, because we still have a long way to go to implement everything that might be useful for this kind of software. Last but not least we like users who test and give feedback about bugs.” You can reach the project through its SourceForge page.