Re: Minimum required setup?

Hi Rob,

Thanks for your response. Comments below.

On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 8:40 PM, R. Ransbottom <..hidden..> wrote:

I would advise requiring more setup than less.

All the "simple" stuff should be required. Company info, basic CoA, etc.
Setting up books is about the details, those should not
be deferred. It sets the wrong tone for the naive beginner while the
more experienced will expect the setup.

When a person or organisation has already decided to go for LedgerSMB, I completely agree that this is the way to go. However, I'm wondering: if it's very hard to evaluate the software one is considering - e.g. because a full setup is required - won't people turn to products which are much easier to get up and running (even if not setting them up completely, one does get a feel for the product's UI...).

How do we balance required configuration with "acceptable effort before evaluation"?

Without good headers, reports are somewhat impaired.

A basic CoA can be about 15 accounts. Having 5 or so extra required and
a few required entities is not so burdensome; while they can give some
more early clues to the system's features and workings.

Are you suggesting that we provide a setup like that for evaluation purposes? Or is this something people should enter when setting up the company through setup.pl? (Bring their own, so to say?)

The idea of this flexibility is good but unimportant and mistimed.

Just to be sure we're on the same page: this is the current state of affairs, not something I'm introducing right now (more a case of "running into").

My sense is LSMB could use more tests over more stuff to test.

Yes, I'm running into this due to the fact that I'm implementing tests for things that don't currently have tests. But since I was changing the code, I felt that I had to implement tests for the code that was already there *and* for my changes. That's how I discovered that I couldn't test some of the functionality that was already there (as the minimum company setup didn't include prerequisites for functions I was trying to run).

So, yes, there's not "more stuff to test", but "more tests" which turns up these questions.

I agree with David that the unsetup company just doesn't run.
I'd reduce that down to one boolean flag.

Thanks for your comments!

Bye,

Erik.

http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP.

Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.