I have some questions about the income statement report.
First of all, how do the cash flow transactions (i.e. deposit or withdrawal to a cash / bank account) get connected back to their corresponding journal entries? For example, when a bill is received, it may get entered into the accounts payable account. Later on, a check gets issued, and accounts payable is credited.
The report query will find outgoing transactions, but in this example there is not corresponding expense account. The credit to the accounts payable must somehow be linked with the “journal of origin” to find out which expense it should be matched with.
While this seems a bit obscure, its actually a very important factor to retain in PBooks. At the moment, I’m thinking that there should be a method for linking several journal entries together. Because this is a fairly simple relationship, it might make sense to have a simple, two-column table that can string journal entries together.
I’m am utterly thrilled that today I sent out my company invoices entirely using PBooks! I only had to load up Quickbooks to find an address that was missing from my CRM database.
Invoice functionality still has a long way to go, but now that I’m able to use PBooks, I’ll be able to save a lot of time, time that I can dedicate to extending and improving PBooks!
I’ve been working away like crazy on PBooks lately, and I’m closing in on a release of 0.07.
I’m not relying on the trac roadmap right now, as I think the planning can get a little bit ahead of the functionality with software, so I’m using the software and reviewing the code to let my mind analyze everything. In this process, I’ve been adding a lot of source code comments and its already helping me be more productive when I need to dive into a file and get my bearings.
Its funny, because adding a lot of comments makes the file seem messy, but its much easier to understand. The more I add comments, the more comfortable I’ll get with them and I’m sure I’ll find my own style.
There isn’t anything groundbreaking in changes from 0.06, but several obscure bugs have been squashed, as well as a lot of minor but important interface improvements. The code base is also a lot more consistent.
I’ve also been updating and cleaning up the tests a lot. After the addition of a few business processes to PBooks, I realized the need to keep the tests organized and consistent, so we can keep up with testing new functionality as it unfolds.
Which reminds me, one of the remaining tasks before a 0.07 release is the addition of Purchase Orders to PBooks. So I’ll get started on that now!
Flot is a jQuery extension which uses the canvas drawing method of javascript. I’ve added their example test to the PBooks code base to try it out:
http://www.pbooks.org/demo/index.php?nid=flot-test
Cool, huh? I can’t wait to start feeding some financial data into those charts! 
UPDATE February 20, 2008: I’ve removed the flot test from the code base for now to focus on other priorities.
I’m pleased to report the release of PBooks 0.06. This release includes several bug fixes, feature improvements, and lots of code cleanups. One of the more significant improvements is the inclusion of the jQuery and tablesorter javascript libraries. We’ve integrated these to make the ledger paginate and sort like never before.
You can download the new version here on the PBooks downloads page.
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