PBooks™ Open Source Accounting

The initial release will use the base authentication system already released for use with Nexista. I’ve modeled the directory layout off of the one used by the symfony development framework due to its great documentation and explanation, but that’s all I used from symfony.

Data Model

Accounts

• You cannot delete an account if there are transactions in it the account (enforced by InnoDB FK constraint).
• Account deletion cannot be undone.
• Account numbers correspond to the account type
• Accounts are cached to an xml file for faster processing.

Journal and Ledger: Transactions, Entries, and Entry Amounts

• 1 Entry per transaction in the general ledger
• 2 or more entry amounts per journal entry, must balance to zero (only two are currently supported in the application, but the database can support as many as needed)
• Entry Amounts related to a journal entry are all deleted when the journal entry itself is deleted (as well as the related general ledger transaction).

Transactions
Transactions are what go in the ledger, they are single sided and they adjust the running balance for each account. A transaction can be created by importing account transactions, as well as posting the transactions from an existing journal entry. If you import a transaction, it is not yet related to any journal entries. You can create a journal entry from that transaction, and the two will then be related. After that, you will not be able to only delete the transaction, you’d have to delete the journal, which will then also delete the transaction which is related to it. When you create a journal entry from a single transaction, the journal entry form will be pre-populated with the transaction data (even so far as to limit your options based upon the criteria supplied by the transaction).

Posting a journal entry to the general ledger is easy. Each journal entry that has not yet been posted to the ledger will have a “+” sign next to it. Click that, and the entry will post.

To-Do

1. Be able to recalculate balances all at once.
2. Test balance recalculations
4. i18n
5. Test in Internet Explorer - works
6. A check to see if related entries and transactions are in sync.
7. On journal entry page - need to match credit and debit rows by more than the amount and account id, but what else is there? Need a unique id for the entry amounts table to fully support multiple credits or debits in a single journal entry.
8. Reports:
   • Cash flow - functional
   • Profit and loss - needs work
   • Balance sheet - functional
9. Test test test test test, you get the idea. Especially test the posting of credit-side transactions to the ledger, it appears that some have an incorrect affect on the account balance. Make a similar balance to make sure the transactions have a balancing act themselves, depending on the normal balance of each account.
10. Support more than one account per debit or credit in one journal entry. For example: withdrawal from bank account for $967.23 for payroll. Need to credit bank account and debit staff wages AS WELL AS taxes. Really a must have for the initial release.DONE!!! Now need to document the limits of how this works.
11. Fix pagination Good enough for now.
12. Get balance recalculation working.
13. Create journal entries from ledger transactions, populating form with transaction data for one side of the equation - DONE
14. Automatically create transactions in the general ledger whenever a journal entry is made. - CANCELLED

The code is almost ready for release. I reworked the data model a little bit and changed to InnoDB as a storage engine for MySQL (using another DB won’t be difficult because of the simplicity of the model. Most of the generalization is complete: I’ve set the db table references as configurable variables, started to localize with i18n, and have done a lot of testing.

Continue reading ‘Notes - PBooks as of v. 0.1′