Archive for the 'Accounting Software' Category

NetSuite Goes Public

Published
by
Albert
on December 21, 2007
in Accounting Software, Bookkeeping Notes, Open Source Software and PBooks News
. 0 Comments

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.

Dogfooding

Published
by
Albert
on December 20, 2007
in Accounting Software, Bookkeeping Notes, Invoices, PBooks, PBooks Data Model, PBooks Testing and Pbooks Development
. 0 Comments

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.

Milestone 0.05 and an External Code Review




Published
by
Albert
on November 4, 2007
in Accounting Software, Open Source Software and Pbooks Development
. 0 Comments

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!

Super Administration

Published
by
Albert
on September 30, 2007
in Accounting Software, Bookkeeping Notes, PBooks and Pbooks Development
. 0 Comments

Limited privileges are key to a well setup accounting system. Some people will have data entry capabilities, others will have audit and approval capabilities. Currently Pbooks is not setup with divisions of privilege, but it is most definitely designed to provide this type of functionality. One of the tasks I’ve listed in the trac is to setup some basic ids for functions which will likely be isolated to different users or groups.

That task is currently slated for “the future”, and PBooks will need something in the meantime to separate more complex administration tasks from the standard bookkeeping tasks. Right now I’m leaning towards writing a command line administrator script, similar to the trac-admin script which is used to setup user permissions. Just an idea I wanted to jot down….

UPDATE: Actually I have been working on this task a little bit the past few days (mid-October 2007). First I was stumped by the lack of php5-readline in the debian repositories, but I’ve since worked that out. I’m moving this task up in priority because having such a tool will most definitely assist in development, testing, and debugging. Chances are the initial consumers of PBooks will be most likely technically capable, they might even appreciate such a resource. I hope so!

Invoices




Published
by
Albert
on September 27, 2007
in Accounting Software, Bookkeeping Notes, Invoices and PBooks
. 0 Comments

Here’s my current, incredibly inefficient, invoicing process:

  1. Tally up work times for each client (we use a client specific time tracker - this is easy)
  2. Create a spreadsheet for each client, sum up the rates, discounts and totals (could easily be done using our time tracking software, except for rates and discounts)
  3. Create invoices in Quickbooks using Parallels - definitely need to take this step out of the loop!
  4. Export Quickbooks invoices to PDF
  5. Mark the work tallied in step one as invoiced, noting the invoice number on each (super easy)
  6. Enter the invoices into PBooks

Each month it takes me about four hours, when it could be done in about 1 hour. With regards to bookkeeping and invoicing, its a good time to dedicate to bookkeeping, paperwork, and bank reconciliation. That stuff isn’t as pressing as invoices (if you don’t send invoices, you don’t get paid), but is a similar process to go through (tally, categorize, data entry, etc.) you might as well do them at the same time. I’ll do it that way next month! :-)

I did make some really nice progress on the invoice form though, here’s a quick screen shot:

PBooks Invoices Form Screenshot

Before you ask, PDF invoices are in the works too!

Donations to PBooks?

Published
by
Albert
on September 27, 2007
in Accounting Software, Bookkeeping Notes, PBooks, PBooks Community, PBooks News and Pbooks Development
. 0 Comments

Howdy - Albert here. Just wanted to mention really quick that the donation button you see to the right is not meant to be “nagware” or “guiltware”. PBooks is free and open source software, and you don’t have to contribute if you don’t want to.

We do welcome your contributions, and your contributions other that monetary donations would honestly be more helpful at this point in time. If you have a moment, please register and introduce yourself in the forums, download and test out the software, or help spread the word by linking to the blog or to the trac project.

The donate button is there only if you are feeling generous and are compelled to throw us a bone. Fear not, lack of donations will not slow down or halt pbooks development. As Kermit the frog always says, we’re “moving right along, dugga dunk dugga dunk”.

I also want to mention here that if you are interested in a new feature or integration with other systems, commercial support is available.

Thanks again for your interest!

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