Getting there, slowly but surely. There’s really nothing like the real world to test a software application! 
Its been a while since I used PBooks on a day-to-day basis, and its great to start up with it again. I’ve learned a lot since my last foray into managing my books on my own, and I can see where PBooks needs some help.
I ran into a few small bugs today, and resolving them and the data corruption they caused wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The problem was rooted in the use case where transaction data is imported from CSV text (which reminds me there is still a small bug that causes a problem if the CSV text has a comma in the transaction memo!). Once transaction data is imported, it must be matched to another account to balance out the accounting equation. This process is made easier by the journal entry form getting pre-populated with data from the transaction. If its a simple transaction involving only two accounts, all the user has to do is select the other account and click submit. If there is more than two accounts involved, that’s still pretty easy, but the user will have to click a few more times. Anyway the problem was that the original transaction had to be deleted when the journal entry was made, and then reposted back to the account ledger. That was not only inefficient, but it also caused the transactions to get out of order with respect to the original bank statement, while not causing real issues, just making it very difficult to trace running balances.
The fix was to retain the original transaction, and simply link it up with the new journal entry that was created from it. If this doesn’t make sense, check out the pbooks data model for reference.
This experience with live data has reinforced my confidence in the core model, and working it as thoroughly as possible before opening up the source code and letting others monkey around with it. Maybe this is a stretch to the “what color should we paint the bike shed?” question that plagues open source project from time to time, but I hope to have the core bookkeeping model and supporting functions working so well that when people twist and turn and fold and manipulate it beyond belief - it still works really well.
So even though I’m the guinea pig here using PBooks to manage our books, I’m still planning to build some serious test cases to cover as many bases as I can dream up. This will ensure in an efficient manner that the working functionality is preserved as new features and changes are made to the code base. In the meantime, take a moment to check out some of the basic tests I’ve put together on the PBooks live demo. (I know one of the tests fails!)
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