Re: interested in consulting for food co-op?

[Peter Houppermans <..hidden..>]

Hmm, there's an idea..

Much of this is standard LedgerSMB. The one feature which might be
some work is the tracking of member hours in conjunction with working
status. In our co-op members who work 2 hours a month are considered
working members and don't pay a surcharge. Members can bank these
hours and deplete them if they don't work for some months. It's not a
complicated database but it just needs to work well with LedgerSMB.  
    

Worst case you should be able to simulate this with some external SQL 
reports which just aggregate up the data.

In a previous life I used to produce loads of "live" excel worksheets 
which drag in the data from a database onto a sheet, then hit it with a 
pivot table and the results usually drop out neatly and are very easy to 
datamine.  Just open them up and hit F9 and you are right up to date 
with the latest figures.
  

AFAIK the database feature in Openoffice.org should be able to help there too (has the advantage of not giving you worries about virus infections :-).  However, that approach has a few things that would make me nervous:

(1) External access to accounting data - the will need serious controls, maybe even on a subnet.
(2) Use of a potentially uncontrolled tool - you'll need to make sure your spreadsheet is reviewed/audited if you want the data assured and your business depends on it
(3) risk of write-back - I would make very sure you're in read-only mode.

It may be safer to batch an extract from your data and process that, stops the risk of direct interaction and database access.  Just my two cents, and I acknowledge that better people than me will have to hack code for that :-)

/// P ///