Yarding

Yard accounting for shipyards and ship-recycling yards. One HTML file. Works offline. Public domain.

Yarding keeps the books for a yard that buys vessels, dismantles them, sells the scrap and pays for the work: sales, purchases, expenses, payments, a real double-entry ledger, customer and vendor statements, profit per ship, and the usual reports. It runs entirely in the browser, on a phone or a computer, with no server and no account. Your books stay on the device unless you choose to connect a cloud store.

Status: v0, the first public release. It runs, it has a test suite, and it has been used in anger, but it is early. Read KNOWN_ISSUES.md (short, and honest) before you rely on it, and take a backup (Settings) before you enter real data. Accounting software should never be trusted on faith: check its figures against your own.

(The screenshots use the app's sample data: HYC Yards Ltd, HYC Metals and so on.)

Try it in one minute

1. Download this repository (or just index.html).
2. Open index.html in Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari.
3. Enter your yard's name, then your own name, and scan the QR code with an authenticator app (see Signing in).
4. Add a customer, record a sale, open Reports.

That is all. There is nothing to install and nothing to run. To use it on a phone, put index.html somewhere you can open it (a USB cable, a shared drive, or GitHub Pages) and open it in the phone's browser.

What it does

Day to day

• Sales, purchases (vendor bills) and expenses, with lines, units, tax, notes and due dates.
• Payments (including split payments), customer and vendor advances, and credit notes.
• Parties (customers and vendors) with statements, ageing, comments and running balances. A party is identified by phone number, so the same buyer typed three ways is still one buyer.
• Ships (vessels or lots) with their own purchase cost, sales and profit.
• Items with units, and printable invoices, receipts and statements with a custom template option.

Books

• A real double-entry ledger behind every screen: trial balance, balance sheet, profit and loss, cash flow, ageing, and a general ledger with manual journals.
• Cash and bank accounts, transfers between them, and bank reconciliation.
• Opening balances, and closing the books up to a date so finished periods cannot change.
• Chart of accounts follows ordinary double-entry practice and the vocabulary of the IFRS for SMEs standard.

Safety

• Every change or deletion is written to an amendment log with who, when, what changed and why.
• Multi-step operations (imports, merges, restores) happen all at once or not at all, with a snapshot taken first.
• Live backup folder (Chrome and Edge on a computer), automatic snapshots, a rollback journal for interrupted writes, JSON backups with a checksum, and an integrity check.
• Two browser windows on the same books cannot overwrite each other.

Getting data in and out

• Excel and CSV import and export that work offline. Download a blank template (or a workbook with your data), fill it in anywhere, and import it back. Imports are previewed, checked for duplicates and similar names, confirmed, applied as one step, and can be undone.
• A "similar names" screen finds spelling variants ("Wangtong", "Wangton") and merges them without losing history.

People

• Sign-in with an authenticator app, one-time backup codes and, where the browser allows, a hardware security key. The administrator sets up first and adds workers, and chooses which sections each worker can open.

Built for phones

• Designed mobile-first: bottom sheets with fixed Close and Back, a working back button, large touch targets, and no dependence on the internet.

Signing in

There is no password. The first person to open the app is the administrator and sets up an authenticator: scan a QR code (or type the key) into any TOTP app, confirm a code, and save the ten backup codes. After that everyone signs in by typing the six-digit code from their own authenticator, and the app works out who they are. The administrator adds workers under Settings, People & sign-in.

Any TOTP app works. Open-source choices include Aegis, Ente Auth, 2FAS, FreeOTP+ and KeePassXC. Security keys (WebAuthn) are an optional extra and need the page to be served over https:// (or localhost) with a real site name.

Be clear about what sign-in is. It controls who can use the app. It does not encrypt the data stored in the browser. Anyone with access to the device's browser storage can read it. See SECURITY.md.

Where your data lives

In the browser's own database (IndexedDB) on the device you use, plus a small copy of the sign-in accounts in local storage. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you connect a cloud store. If you clear the browser's storage you lose the books, so use the backup tools: a JSON backup you keep elsewhere, and on a computer the live backup folder.

Optional cloud sync

Yarding can sync to any PostgREST-compatible store (a Supabase project or your own). Settings has the setup script. For staff on their own phones, server/yard-gate.js is a small proxy that keeps the database key on one machine and gives staff a pass instead. Read SECURITY.md first: the provided database policies are open to anyone holding the key.

Development

npm install
npm run test:all     # syntax check, 618-check app suite, gate tests

Requires Node 20 or newer. The test suite runs the real file in jsdom with an in-memory IndexedDB. jsdom does not do layout, so it cannot catch clipped text, hidden buttons or touch problems. Check those in a real browser at 320, 360 and 390 pixels wide: python3 tools/browser/uiaudit.py $PWD/index.html does most of it (needs Playwright), and a person still needs to look. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

index.html            the whole application (HTML, CSS and JavaScript)
tests/smoketest.js    the application test suite
server/               the optional yard gate (proxy) and its tests
tools/check.js        syntax and sanity checks for index.html
tools/browser/        real-browser layout audit (Playwright): every screen and pop-up at phone widths
docs/                 architecture, adapting, deploying, AI prompts, screenshots
KNOWN_ISSUES.md      bugs and rough edges we already know about

Start with docs/ARCHITECTURE.md: it is the map of the code and the list of hard-won lessons.

Using it for a business that is not a shipyard

This repository is about shipyard accounting, and that stays its purpose. But the engine (ledger, parties, items, invoices, payments, reports, safety) is general, and a shipyard is only one set of labels, accounts and a "ship" concept on top of it. If you want a version for a workshop, a contractor, a trading company or something else, fork it and follow docs/ADAPTING.md. If you would rather have an AI coding assistant do the work, docs/AI_PROMPTS.md has ready-to-paste prompts.

How it is built

Short version: the user's data must never be lost or silently changed, it must work offline on a phone, every change is recorded, and we say plainly what has and has not been verified. The longer version is in docs/DESIGN-PHILOSOPHY.md. Please read it before sending a large change.

Browser support

Developed and tested in Chromium (desktop, and phone emulation with touch) and in jsdom. Firefox and Safari should work for the core app but have not been tested, and Safari on iPhone is where the phone-layout fixes are least verified. The live backup folder needs a Chromium desktop browser. Security keys need https://.

What it is not

It is not payroll, stock control, multi-currency, multi-company or tax-filing software, and it is not a substitute for an accountant. It comes with no warranty.

Licence

Everything in this repository that is original to Yarding is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal. See LICENSE. You can copy, change, publish and sell it without asking. The About text keeps the author's credit line (Hamid Yasir & Co.). One third-party library (the QR code generator) is embedded in index.html under its own MIT licence; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. CC0 does not grant patent or trademark rights.