Re: GAAP (was Re: Patch for serious bug in LedgerSMB 1.2.16)

On 17 Feb 2009, at 10:30, Ed W wrote:

...

Yeah - I would also like to be able to tweak small, surely non-legal implications aspects of an invoice, eg adding some notes fields, or setting a serial number against a line item where it was forgotten when the invoice was created.

I have seen that some other systems use a two part aspect to creating invoices - they are initially setup, presumably by the shop floor and then there is a second step where they become accounting invoices and this is presumably done so that it can be signed off by some other party. I guess you just call it a "proforma" in the meantime.

The devs seem to be quite resistant to this kind of workflow, and yet it seems to me that the majority of users on the list want to be able to edit completed invoices. We might print out a stack of invoices late at night and then check them in the morning before posting. If we find an error, of course we want to change it!!

In my (our?) kind of sole-trader context, the GAAP transaction reversals (if I understand them right) just look ugly and inelegant. If I look at a summary of a month's invoices I don't want to see loads of extra +£50 -£50 entries just because I corrected a typo in the item notes.

I am grateful for your suggestion of a two stage-commit, whereby I can enter invoices on the system on one day and then mark them as "permanent" the next (after I have put them in the mail). What I don't want to have to do is complicated reversals merely to correct a price on an invoice that I only entered 20 minutes ago and which is still sitting in the printer's out tray! I just want to "edit" then "post" (and without this +£50 - £50 +£51 again clutter!)

It has been suggested - perhaps in the dim & distant past - that LedgerSMB should store a PDF of the actual invoice in the database. This was suggested as one solution to a customer's address changing & reprints of old invoices no longer being accurate; legacy customer addresses may be stored (by date) in the database, but it will still be impossible to print "historically accurate" copies of old invoices if the template.tex changes.

So I would be quite happy with GAAP if we had this "buffer" of "pending permanent" invoices, which were only committed to GAAPfulness at the same time the invoice.pdf is stored in the DB.

I have noticed recently that I'm one of the most voluble users on these lists, and I realise that I'm surely LedgerSMB's most amateur user. I'm sorry I don't contribute code and I ask the devs to tell me to STFU if my opinions annoy them, but I hope that in this case they'll hear me as a "typical user". Because I don't see subscribers to the -user list asking for GAAP compliance, I see resistance to the idea.

I believe that LedgerSMB already has pro-forma invoices, but I don't think they quite fill this role, do they?

Stroller.