[PLUG] Open S0urce accounting

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Fri Apr 8 21:46:46 UTC 2011


On Fri, 8 Apr 2011, Patrick J. Timlick wrote:

> I repeat the helpful answer from Rich to my similar question asked about a
> year ago (below).  For my business, I'm using gnucash with some success,
> it is fast and reliable, but invoicing is awkward and I haven't gotten
> bank transaction downloads to work. (How well does LedgerSMB work for
> those tasks Rich?).

Patrick,

   I don't use LedgerSMB. I considered it but the features are so far behind
Ledger123 for my needs that I've gone with the latter. And, I never did get
GNUcash to build successfully on Slackware, although others have (on their
machines, not mine).

   Invoice creation in L123 mostly works as I want. It's great when the
invoice amount is fixed: create a sales order and generate an invoice from
that. When using the time card facility (and when working on a retainer and
need to provide details) it's still a work in progress.

   As L123 works now, I can generate a time card report that shows the date,
amount of time, description of that time, and amount with a total amount at
the bottom. However, when that displayed time card report generates a sales
order and used to produce an invoice, those details are dropped in favor of
the default time card contents of date, service code (which in my case is
almost always the same so it's not informative), time, and amount. I can
probably look at the perl code and change the embedded SQL (if that's where
the problem is) or modify the LaTeX variables. I've not looked.

   The statement capability is OK for most folks, but does not work on a
retainer basis. I want to show the retainer payments and time/expense
charges for the duration of the project, with each month's details added.
Or, at least on a month-to-month basis. I'm trying to nudge the key
developers to providing this for us service businesses. Folks with product
businesses (manufacturing/assembly, distribution, retail) love L123 and
that's where the development focus has been.

> I gave up on LedgerSMB, when I needed to create the chart of accounts for
> my company.  Seemed like there should have been an example I could tweak,
> but I didn't find it.

   L123 has that from SL.

Rich



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