Archive for June, 2007

Conversations about PBooks

Published
by
Albert
on June 6, 2007
in PBooks, PBooks Community and Pbooks Development
. 2 Comments

PBooks has garnered some interest lately, and I just had a nice teleconference with someone involved with the FrontAccounting yesterday. We discussed the overlaps in the two projects, and how we might be able to collaborate.

In addition to that, I’m in an ongoing conversation with a company in Alabama about PBooks and open source accounting. They do a lot of work with open source tools, like an open source shopping cart. Along those lines, they are also well versed with inventory systems, which is great because I’m unfamiliar with that. My experience has been with services businesses.

And just yesterday I received an email from a PhD student studying in Hoboken, NJ (I used to live in Jersey City - woo hoo!), looking for an ACID compliant database for accounting. I replied with this email:

The PBooks database model is ACID compliant, and while we haven’t opened up the PBooks code yet, we plan to, and the model is already available online.

The model is an export from phpmyadmin, and uses the InnoDB storage engine for ACID compliance.

http://www.pbooks.org/pbooks-data-model/

Some of the ideas are extended from XBRL.

GnuCash 2.1.3 Released

Published
by
Albert
on June 2, 2007
in Accounting Software, Bookkeeping Notes and Open Source Software
. 0 Comments

Congrats to the GnuCash team who announced today that GnuCash 2.1.3 has been released!

The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.1.3 aka “at last!”, the fourth of several unstable 2.1.x releases of the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.2.0. With this new release series, GnuCash is available on Microsoft Windows for the first time, and it also runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris and Mac OSX. This release is intended for developers and testers who want to help tracking down all those bugs that are still in there.

GnuCash Homepage

PBooks vs. Quickbooks




Published
by
rae
on June 1, 2007
in PBooks Community
. 0 Comments

The origins of PBooks is an interesting story. My boss took an accounting class in college, in the class he got a great grasp of how accounting works, but when he went to apply his knowledge to a program like Quickbooks, it did him no good. The program was confusing and didn’t jive with all the info in his brain, so he did what any intelligent, tech savvy and extremely motivated person would do. He made his own program.

PBooks is the result of that endeavor. He has worked on it over the course of many years, and it has undergone many transformations. Even so, because PBooks is an open-source program it means the documentation on it is limited, and much like he became frustrated with Quickbooks, you may become frustrated with PBooks.

The best thing to help relieve that frustration and confusion is to make use of this blog. Make this the primary resource for your questions and comments. As a community we can make this free software more accessible and understandable for each other.

Learning PBooks

Published
by
rae
on June 1, 2007
in PBooks Community
. 0 Comments

Every time I approach PBooks it makes a little bit more sense than the time before. Getting the hang of double-entry accounting takes a little bit of time, but once you understand the why of it, it makes a lot of sense. As I understand it the double-entry records what you take from one account and add to another. So if you have a checking account with a $1000 in it, and a Credit card balance of $1500 (which is really -$1500) these are two different accounts. If you make a $100 payment on the Credit Card, your checking account becomes $900 and your Credit Card becomes -$1400. The double-entry accounting allows you to keep track of all your accounts and debts. It’s a damn handy system, really let’s you know where you are in regards to your financial standing.

The more I learn about accounting, the smarter it seems to keep meticulous track of all accounts debt and income.

Two New Accounting Books




Published
by
Albert
on June 1, 2007
in Bookkeeping Notes
. 0 Comments

Two new accounting books arrived from Amazon today. They were affordable and got good reviews so I figured what the heck. Here’s what I bought if you want to read along: