PBooks™ Open Source Accounting

I’m again reviewing my finances from last year, 2007, and I’m trying to figure out the best way to manage customer payments and bank deposits.

Here’s some of my thoughts:
* When I issue an invoice, the amount is match to the revenue source and the customer’s account (a sub-accounts receivable). I used to group all invoices into a single A/R account.
* When they pay, I match the deposit to the bank the funds are being deposited in with the customer’s account (which used to be the single A/R).

That works in concept, but its fairly complicated to code up, because in most real world scenarios, multiple checks come in, are combined into a single deposit, and some customers pay multiple invoices with a single check. In cases like that, the HTML form to support it becomes overly complicated.

There are also some special situations:
* There are times when payments are made from customers without a corresponding invoice.
* There are times when deposits are made from parties other than customers (like a transfer).

What to do?

Yesterday I took a look at the history of milestones past, and it appears that the progress has been steady. Based on the experience of the last six months, I’d like to plan on making a minor release once every month until a stable release has been achieved. Because the testing process sometimes holds up a release, I’m going to ease up on the restriction that the tests must be run until all of them pass. While that I like the idea of testing thoroughly and frequently, the software is still in too volatile a state for the test results to be indicative of real problems.

Here’s a rough schedule for the next 6 months:

PBooks 0.10
Pending release… released!

PBooks 0.11 - End of May

PBooks 0.12 - End of June

PBooks 0.13 - End of July

PBooks 0.14 - End of August

PBooks 0.15 - End of September

If you would like to install PBooks on Windows please see the new instructions we posted today:

http://www.pbooks.org/wiki/PBooks_Installation_using_XAMPP_and_Windows