It's been rumoured that Garrett Banuk said:
>
> Hello,
> I doing my college MQP now, its a large project we have to do in order to
> graduate. I was looking around for ideas and saw gnucash and thought this
> might be an interesting project to help out the linux community. I was
> wondering if anyone had ideas on some major improvements to gnucash? I was
> thinking of enhancing the small business aspect of it, maybe adding support
> to create an e-commerce site? E-commerce is the latest buzzword that people
> are looking for, and with so many people setting up their small businesses
> online, it would be good to add an extension for this to gnucash to help
> run their business. Gnucash could be the all in one way of controlling
> their finances. It could be an option so that gnucash doesn't become
> bloatware, but tell me what you think.
Here's a 'business feature' that's not as sexy as ecommerce, but I think
is a whole lot more approachable & doable:
accounts receivable
ok, whazat?
you create an 'ordinary' account called 'a/r'.
say joe borrows $20 on monday.
you mark this as a transfer from your bank acct to the a/r account.
say joe pays you back on friday.
you mark this as a transfer to your bank acct from the a/r account.
The balance of a/r is back to zero.
No big deal.
But here's the features that no 'ordinary' account has:
the ability to compute & display:
'how old (how many days) is joes debt?'
'how old is the average debt?'
'what's teh average a/r balance for the last month?'
or
say joe & bob both borrowed money. One of them paid me back. How do I
find out who still owes me money? (short of reading the whole thing by
hand, which would be nasty if there are hundreds of debts recorded).
this project is still hard but infinitely easier than ecommerce ...
--linas
p.s. there is a list of unfinsihed/unstarted projects at
http://linas.org/linux/gnucash/projects.html
