Contributing to this discussion:
We originally looked into reselling OpenTAPS here in Mozambique at the end of
2006, but at that time came up against three significant issues:
a. OpenTAPS Financials at that time was still fairly rough (I believe it has
progressed a lot since then)
b. The Mozambican accounting system has some significant differences,
especially the chart of of accounts, from Anglo Saxon models, which meant that
a lot of the automated stuff didn't really fit.
c. Our target market (small businesses) found the UI too complicated.
So we ended up writing our own application on top of OFBiz Accounting. We
completely redid the UI (using a rich client framework) and some of the
business logic, but I must point out that we found the core data model and
services to be absolutely rock solid. We did not find a single bug in them.
In particularly the absolutely crucial service of postGlAccount, which updates
account balances depending on class, and updates GlAccountHistory, works fine.
The only change we made to it was to support explicit choosing of special
accounting months (which may not be applicable in all jurisdictions).
The General Ledger module is now ready (we are also using it for our own
accounting), and we are now working on the integration bit, with our existing
Commercial Management app. So if you are thinking of building on top of the
ofbiz/applications/accounting module, in my opinion it is solid. I do have
the following recomendations:
a. DO buy Volume I of the Data Model book, as mentioned on OFBiz home page -
it is well worth it
b. Respect the data model - when you learn how it is meant to work, you should
not need to make a lot of changes to it. If you do, beware that you are not
getting something mixed up.
c. Get the core reports working as soon as possible, and pay a qualified,
experienced management accountant to act as an analyst and verify them
regularly - this is the only way to be sure you can trust your application.
We are very much focussed on the domestic market at the moment, but if anyone
was interested we could discuss the possibilities to localize it for another
market. At the level of General Ledger accounting there are really only two
challenges involved here:
a. Localizing UI and messages: easy since both OFBiz and the UI framework we
use support this
b. Localizing Chart of Acccounts: again not too difficult as it is basically
entity data loading in OFBiz standard XML format. However there are a few
special cases in the UI for certain groups of accounts (eg. Clients) but these
could be parametrized fairly easily.
cameron
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