I spent the majority of the weekend working on setting up account groups in PBooks. Of course I got sidetracked into making sure the solution was as flexible as possible, and then found out that the challenge of storing hierarchical data in a SQL relational database is well known, but in my humble opinion, not solved very well.
The solution I came up with uses a modified adjacency list model in the database, and using XML converts that to a nested set tree - essentially a normal XML document with nodes and all. For PBooks to work with this arrangement, I had to use curl to access the XML document over http. While I like this solution a lot, it comes with its own set of issues.
This week we’ll be testing the account groups (I’m actually converting my Quickbooks chart of accounts to PBooks this week), as well as working on the invoicing and check writing capabilities of PBooks. We’re getting very close to a public beta, so stay tuned.
If you want to examine the account groups functionality, you can do so at the PBooks Live Demo, using “demo” and “demo” as the username and password. It still needs work, but I’d love to hear what you think! 
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