On Thursday 13 October 2005 23:29, Ralph Stoker wrote: > Also, what in your estimation was the NZ in-compatibility with Quasar?
I've spent a day or two fiddling around with Quasar and came to the following conclusions:- 1) It is far too comprehensive and complex for the normal Kiwi 'One Man plus a few Dogs' sized business. It's a full multi-profit-centre and multi-department system intended for multi-million dollar businesses with lots of staff. 2) The menuing UI is, imho, an _absolute_ dog. Doubtless it would come right with a lot of practice, but my first impression is one of total horror. It is, however, possible to re-jig the top-level UI by editing the XML files which define the positioning of the UI menu elements. 3) Canada has several different gst taxes, there are several different Province and Federal rates, each of which seems to be accounted for on the invoices. Some are calculated on the other tax rate being included, some are not. Thus there are several fields in each transaction which are meaningless in the NZ context. 4) The sales and purchase transactions appear to be posted live into the main ledger. i.e. There is no notion of posting batches of tranactions to sub-ledgers. Anyway I didn't find anything, neither was it obvious how the transactions are numbered. Very strange, they must do it somehow. 5) Although it is free software licenced under the GPL, there doesn't seem to be any community of users or developers. I have the distinct feeling that Linux-Canada who wrote it do not really grok the Free Software Movement's ideals or methods of doing things, and released Quasar in the wan hope of getting more development people and testing on board for free. 6) There are several pdf files of documentation, but it all seems rather muddled and obtuse to me. 7) There is a very comprehensive context sensitive help system, but the texts therein would probably need to be 'adjusted' for NZ users, i.e. I did not look at all the help screens in detail, but that applied to be the case for the few I looked at. I'd like to spend more time getting my head around it fully but I would need to see a form of commercial support for me before I expended much more time and effort with it. There is the GNU-Enterprise system. I'd want to examine that too before I made any recomendation. My apologies if I have hijacked the thread. -- CS
