PBooks Free Bookkeeping Software

Its been waaay too long since I've posted an update about PBooks, but I finally have some news to report.

First off, some bad news - I converted the PBooks wiki from MediaWiki to Ikiwiki, and something went haywire. I've cleaned up a bunch, but there is still a bunch to do. Thanks for your patience.

The good news is that I've moved both the PBooks source code and the Nexista source code to Github - that should make access much easier as well as (hopefully) collaboration.

• PBooks @ Github
• Nexista @ Github

I've converted the PBooks wiki from a MediaWiki back-end to one based on Git: Ikiwiki!

Its actually a really sweet software application and I'm totally fired up about Git. I'm actually planning to switch the PBooks code base from Subversion to Git, too.

Thoughts, concerns, questions?

I've taken the mailing lists offline for the foreseeable future. Hopefully I'll get them back on again someday, but I'm not sure when I'll have time to do so.

PBooks now features a trial balance view while viewing the chart of accounts.

The balances of all the accounts are separated based upon whether the account is a debit or a credit. A tally is then made at the bottom of the list which shows the totals for all credit accounts and all debit accounts.

While this is a pretty simple feature, it comes in quite handy!

I'm planning to switch from Trac to SD, aka "Simple Defects".

SD is a distributed issue tracker, but that's not why I'm planning to switch (though it may help out in the future). It uses Git and Prophet, a peer-to-peer database.

SD is a new open source project, and I really like the direction its going and want to help out by using it and sharing my notes.

Also, SD has the ability to render static HTML reports of the issues it is tracking. I've increasingly come to rely upon static files as a simple and reliable way to publish information to the web. Truth be told, that's my major motivation for the switch.

It won't happen overnight. Although I've experimented with SD, I still have a lot to learn on how best to use it.

PBooks has the foundation to support invoices, customer payments, and deposits, but I haven't yet devised an elegant way to tie them all together.

Here's some more thoughts on the matter:

• When I create an invoice in PBooks, a journal entry is made with entries in the revenue accounts as well as the customer account.
• When the customer makes a payment, I mark the invoice as paid. I'd like PBooks to automatically create a journal entry with entries in the customer account and a "funds to deposit" account, or the bank account the payment is placed into. PBooks does not do this yet, and when it does, I'd like it to be flexible as to whether the journal entry includes the "funds to deposit" account, or a bank account, and which bank account.
• When a bank statement is imported into PBooks, I'd like PBooks to seamlessly connect the deposit entry with transaction in the bank statement. The issue here is that customer payments are often combined into a single bank transaction.

I'm quite confident that given the time, I'll be able to implement all this into PBooks.