John Hasler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > The market appears to be for a personal finance program, so I assume > that gnucash development will be focused even more in that > direction. That's fine, but I need small business accounting. Actually, small business accounting is a large subset of the features that we want to add to gnucash. I hope that you will contribute what you are able, either code or feedback. Even from a strictly market-driven perspective small business accounting makes sense: Linux has much more of a foothold in the back office/server room than on the personal desktop. The ability to do accounts payable/receivable, inventory etc would open up a very important market for anybody doing financial software for Linux. And we could get our own bookkeeper off of Peachtree. That's pretty embarassing. > I already have one: I changed all the weird labels to "debit" and > "credit" but did it via an ugly hack that should not go into CVS. > The authors seem happy with the weird labels: I assume that they > match those used in some popular Windows package. I'm on your side about the labels. They don't really make sense and it's confusing to have different names for the same thing for different accounts. If you'll notice, the General Ledger display that Dave's been working on (which you can get at by using my Find dialog) shows transactions from all types of accounts with Credit and Debit labels. I think we may see them creeping into the other account-type ledgers. > Yes. The one thing that keeps me from using gnucash in my business > is the fact that the balances of detail accounts do not appear as > entries in parent accounts. I don't think I can add this myself in > any reasonable length of time and I get the impression that the > gnucash authors consider this the wrong thing to do. Well, I'm a gnucash author (at least, I have code in CVS; nobody told me any secret handshake) and I think that sounds pretty reasonable. I think the concept of parent and child accounts is pretty weakly defined right now and could use some tightening up. For example, is there a meaningful situation where both parent and child accounts actually have transactions in them? It seems that the way things are now, the only way you end up there is through sloppy bookkeeping (i.e. just putting miscellaneous expenses in Expenses instead of Expenses:Misc). It might make sense to say that an account either has child accounts, or transactions, but not both. That would make it more sensible to have a special register display for parent accounts that shows the childrens' balances as entries. However, to contradict myself, you already get that display in the account tree widget display. Maybe it would make sense to redo that display to be more like the register, so that one could easily see both the hierarchy and the balances of children and parents. Bill Gribble -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
