2) Do we need document management capabilities in the software? I would vote "yes" for the second, though it may be some time before we have it. There are a few corner cases where not storing the document as the document itself could be problematic.
Unrelated to the original question, but I actually have a use for more document handling. In my case I need to get some signed agreements from each customer, which for various reasons have a bearing on their tax status and hence need to be easily retrieved per customer. Accounting system would be a great place to store them. Usually they are returned electronically, but it will be no great issue to scan them in if not.
It would also be useful to be able to store that info relationally so that it can be searched for. I guess it would be nice to either have a strong facility to add custom fields per invoice and per customer which the system implementor can maintain, or perhaps make it much easier to integrate with an external CRM such as Sugar/Tiger, etc.
I noticed there was a Sugar plugin to sync Quickbooks with Sugar and present views of the accounts data in Sugar. Perhaps it would be a stronger route at this point to work on a Sugar plugin rather than (initially) trying to add more than fairly simple CRM abilities to LSMB? Someone on the list mentioned that there were working on something a good few months back - are they prepared to post what they did? Some kind of basic sync to Sugar sounds quite decent...
Ed W