I’ve setup some new PBooks forums, hopefully they’ll work better than bbPress (but no offense to bbPress - who knows, maybe I’ll switch back to that in the future).
The address is:
Archive for December, 2007
I’ve added jQuery and the terrific tablesorter to PBooks, so at least the ledger is now more user-friendly. On javascript enabled browsers, users can page through the transaction records much faster, as well as sort the rows by the column headers.
I hope to add more user interface enhancements like this soon, including “flot”, a charting and graphing system written in javascript and also uses jQuery. As always, feel free to let us know if there are any additional features added to PBooks.
Argh! We’ve got another problem with the PBooks Live Demo network. The bridge between the network router and the vpn routers is having problems, and I’m about 6 hours away visiting with relatives for the holidays.
In the meantime, please use the static demo, which is very outdated but still a decent representation:
UPDATE: Live demo site is back up.
Congratulations to the team at NetSuite, the ERP, CRM and e-commerce software company which went public recently. I just read a little bit about them and it appears that they are targeting companies with between 100 and 1000 employees, whereas Quickbooks targets 100 employees or less.
Where does PBooks fit in? Well the database should be scalable to support companies of that size, however since I have very little experience with the accounting systems of larger companies, basic things like the user interface might not make sense when you dramatically ramp up the number of accounts, transactions, and so on. Its interesting to think about - even at my small company, the number of transactions is fairly significant, and its pretty easy to get lost in the sea of data if you’re not paying attention.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of “dogfooding”, see here.
It makes a big difference in the start of a project to have a ready use case, and thanks to my own personal use of PBooks, I just added a terrific new feature. Well, I think its terrific. 
The feature is similar to the matching process, which is used to match transactions to additional accounts. For example, if you have a CSV file containing credit card transactions, in bookkeeping terms, those only represent half the journal entry. You can import those transactions into the ledger, and the matching page will show ledger transactions without a corresponding entry.
On the flip side, the posting page will display only the journal entries which need to have entries posted to the ledger.
If your more of a business process user as opposed to a accounting / bookkeeping user, this might not sound too exciting, but I think its pretty cool. I was able to implement this feature fairly easily thanks to the relatively new journal entry status field, which is a tiny int so it shouldn’t have too much of an increase on the database size.
Also, in my personal use of pbooks, I’ve ironed out several bugs which were hiding from general view. Since most of the bookkeeping work I’m doing is prior, I haven’t worked too much with the new business process models, but I will next week when my company sends out invoices, as well as whenever we receive a payment and / or make a deposit.
I just spent a few hours working on PBooks and I took these notes:
* Would it be helpful when viewing the ledger to have the start default to the start of the accounting period? It would help me.
* Creating invoices through PBooks is the way to go so that you don’t have to split payments based on revenue source - i.e. some invoices include hosting and professional services.
* Absolutely need a way to isolate entries which need to be posted to the ledger
* Found myself going back and forth between the journal and the ledger, having to fix entries and then repost to the ledger. Not fun.
I mostly spent the time entering data from bank statements and double checking the running balance. I also made several split transactions based on deposits, which reminds me, I want to share with prospective pbooks users how helpful photocopies of deposits are. When I was entering the bank transactions, I would look at a deposit and wonder, “Huh, I wonder what that was?” Several times the photocopy I made of the deposit was incredibly useful, reminding me that the deposit was made up of four or five items.
Everything ran OK, I hit and fixed a couple of small bugs, but in the end I’m quite pleased with how the software is performing.
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