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

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

On editing invoices:

There are two ways this will be addressed in the future.  Until then,
reposting invoices is supported on a best-effort and secondary basis
only, and we strongly discourage reposting invoices.  We support it
only as an interrim measure for people who have a valid business
reason to do so.  In general, when people ask about this feature, the
first thing to do is ask why you need it and if there is a
GAAP-compliant way of doing it.  Workflow is a separate issue from
accounting logic.  Just because you can't repost an invoice properly
without running into questions which dont have accepted answers (for
example, regarding COGS calculations), doesn't mean we can't provide
an equivalent workflow which does do things in a GAAP-compliant way.
We just don't have that capability yet.

Once an invoice, or any financial transaction, is posted to the books,
essential information regarding that invoice really should be
read-only.  If there is an error, we need a "Reverse and post as new"
button which allows one to automatically reverse the invoice and then
post a new one in a single click.  Unfortunately I am not quite sure
how we want to handle invoice numbers in this case.   (Maybe
[invnumber]-V for the reversal and [invnumber]-N for the new one?
Unfortunately there may also be local rules about this sort of thing.)

The second area we are working on is actually very different.  This is
extending the batch/voucher/draft system in 1.3 to handle invoices.
In this area, an invoice would be editable only until it is reviewed
and approved.

There is a fundamentally separate issue in some of these requests too
which will be handled in a different way:  The ability to add (not
modify!) internal notes to an invoice.  This will be handled by:

1)  Moving the notes into a separate table, so you can have many notes
to an invoice
2)  Adding a separate interface to handle these notes.

I am not sure whether the notes rewrite for invoices will occur by
1.3.  However, I expect to have the draft/voucher system handling
invoices properly by the end of next weekend.

Hope this helps,
Chris Travers