On 11/08/10 11:26, Tom Steinberg wrote:
Thanks for all these suggestions - I'd like to focus on one particular
issue - automation and automatic checking to prevent common problems
and mistakes:
* If someone doesn't invoice for a month, I'd like to be able to
select "Projected payment delayed by 1 month" and have it a) change
the forecast b) keep a version history.
I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for here-- the example is
someone who normally invoices monthly but doesn't on this month?
Forecasting is a bit outside the scope of the accounting package,
though. I typically export the history-to-current to excel, then use
excel to make forecasts.
* If people are paying tax under PAYE, I'd like to just be able to say
"This person has a gross salary of X" and have the system tell me how
much tax we need to save each month, regardless of how the tax system
changes under our feet.
Sage will do this if you have the payroll module, I believe. Quickbooks
won't, I believe, but I'm not 100% sure about it. It's really between
you and your payroll provider, and how often/whether you update or not.
* I'd like the system to nag me, by saying "You projected this payment
would have been made by date Y. Has it been made? If not, when do you
expect it?"
Sage and Quickbooks should sort of do this-- typically,though, it's a
matter of running an overdue payments report-- I've never seen it turn
up on a dashboard.
* I'd like the system to understand VAT, and say "You just got paid
£100 for X. Would it be correct to assume that 17.5% of this is VAT?"
This should be pretty standard.
* And of course I'd like it to produce lovely reports for all of these things.
Lovely reports (depending on your definition of lovely) should be fairly
standard. At least clunky reports.
Am I, perhaps, asking for moon on a stick? Or do things like Sage and
Intuit just do this?
In my experience it's sort of 50/50. I have a personal task running to
look at the current OpenERP implementation (which has an accounting
package plus a load of other modules), to see if automagicalisation of
some things are doable.
The tricky part is that Sage and Quickbooks do what the accountants
expect it to do, and they're really easy to use, but they keep their
data in tricky proprietary formats. Clearly, one could write a pgsql
query to pull out the alerts and at least alert you to check on
invoices, but it's a bit of a head-wrapper to get on with.
I tried SQL Ledger in the past and it was a bit of a nightmare to work
with-- unintuitive and a (to me) grumpy, unhelpful developer.
I've heard pretty good things about Xeno as well. Even that your data
may be transferrable when/if you leave.
I've typically just done the "what does the accountant want/expect"
route, though, as they often have specific needs.
Hope this helps,
Glen
--
Glen Mehn
[email protected]
skype: glenmehn | blog: http://glen.mehn.net/mba
UK: +44(0)7942 675 755 | US: +1 415 704 4737
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