As I start work on the next milestone, I'm going to review some of the other open source accounting programs out there, like FrontAccounting, SQL Ledger, and GnuCash. Karl Schmidt also just introduced me to Phreebooks, which initially looked a lot like FrontAccounting, but is actually a totally different application.
I just remembered that FibuSQL also had support for accounting periods, so I should review that one too.
During the past few milestones, I've been working away on PBooks, and making a lot of important, though subtle progress. Today I'm working on accounting periods and I thought I'd share my ideas and ask for your thoughts.
- Accounting periods can be set by the user: arbitrarily, monthly, quarterly, yearly.
- Once an accounting period is defined, it can then be reconciled.
- Once an accounting period is reconciled, it can be locked from further editing (this is an important topic, but I'm just focusing on accounting periods for now).
- Each accounting period will have a beginning balance and an ending balance for each account, which will be carried over from the previous and to the next period, respectively.
I haven't worked out the data model for the accounting periods just yet, but like everything else in PBooks I'm going to do my best to keep it simple.
Thanks always for your interest!