Re: New Development Snapshot Available for LedgerSMB

[Nigel Titley <..hidden..>]

On Mon, 2011-08-08 at 07:58 -0700, Chris Travers wrote:
> Hi Nigel;
> 
> It would help me if I understood specifically what your reporting
> requirements were.  I would be happy to look over them.

I've made a comment on your VAT thread further on down the line which
details what we have to report (it's in common with what anyone in the
EU has to report... basically separate sales figures for local, EU (VAT
free) and export sales). If your volumes of sales to other EU countries,
VAT free, are low, then this is just about OK to handle by hand.
However, this year our turnover is going to be around about £1M of which
a good 25% is VAT free sales. LedgerSMB is creaking in this area (as
well as other areas like issuing invoices).

> Anyway my plans on the patch are:
> 
> 1)  Officially maintained add-on for 1.3
> 2)  A more generic system of defaults per customer for 1.4, and
> merging it in there.

This suits us fine. I really want to move to 1.3 as soon as possible.

> Hope this helps.

It does indeed. And, as before, we'll put our money where our mouth is
if necessary, for the good of the LedgerSMB community.

> Typically, people usually use income accounts for categories of
> revenue.  How these are categorized is largely up to the individual
> setting up the books.  I don't see anything *wrong* with your setup,
> but I also don't think it is typical.  And it would only work for
> AR/AP transactions, it would not work so well if you were trying to
> sell items that were tracked in inventory.  In other words it may be a
> reasonable way for your business to solve a problem but that doesn't
> mean it is a generally applicable solution.

We *are* selling items that are tracked as inventory. And we get serious
inventory drift. Is this likely to be the reason?

> I make this distinction not as a way of saying there is a better way
> of doing things.  If it works well for your business, that's all you
> need.  The goal long-run is not to force a single workflow on all
> customers but to support every customer with their own solutions to
> the extent possible.  Also current limitations of the software may
> make that difficult in some cases.  So I don't think you are using the
> software *wrong.*  I don't have enough information to say if there is
> a better way.

My problem is that I'm an engineer first and an accountant second. I
tend to do things in the way that seems sensible to me as an engineer. I
may be wrong in this case, which is why I asked for guidance from the
list. The fact that I/we aren't getting a lot tends to imply that
LedgerSMB isn't being used by anyone doing heavy intra-community
trading. Now the reason for this may just be that such people have
"real" accountants working for them who use "real" systems like Sage. Or
it *may* be that LedgerSMB doesn't have the necessary facilities and so
people have looked at it and decided it can't be used easily in such
environments. I happen to be a stubborn cuss and I like open source and
so I've stuck with LedgerSMB (even writing a bridge between it and
Oscommerce) but others may have just decided that it didn't handle VAT
well enough for them. I just don't know.

> 
> So the goal here is to ensure you and every user of the software is
> *able* to support your own business processes, not necessarily a
> matter of exposing everything everyone possible wants to the interface
> for every user.  If we go that route, the software will become a mess
> for everybody.

I absolutely agree and I wouldn't be asking for this if I didn't think
it is an incredibly useful facility for anyone doing intra-community
trading in the EU.

> I am going to open a new discussion on the users list about EU VAT
> stuff.  That might get us all more feedback :-)

Many thanks, I've already commented on it.

All the best

Nigel