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Re: Feedback

Hey, Keith,

Some ideas/comments:

Keith Edmunds wrote:

I'm not sure how well this will be received, but anyway...

I very much support the idea of LSMB, and I welcome the fork. Currently,
the only Windows application we use is QuickBooks, and I would very much
like to move to all Open Source applications; however, at the moment, I
can't find an accounting package that we can use. LSMB is the closest, I
think but lacks some features that we need. This is not criticism, just
feedback, and I am well aware that if the features are important enough to
us then we can code them ourselves or pay someone else to code them. That
said, if we don't enumerate the features we think are needed, we can't
expect them ever to appear. The first two stop us using LSMB today:

Showstopper: the ability to manually enter tax amounts on AP invoices.
Because of rounding errors, the tax amount on an AP invoice frequently
differs from the LSMB calculated amount. It might only be pence, but in
the UK at least we have a legislative responsibility to keep accurate
accounts. All that's needed is a text box where the tax is shown, the
ability to change it, and a check that net+gross=total when posting.
Can you use the "tax included" checkbox for these, and add a line with the appropriate tax directly? I know this would be a major hassle, but perhaps it can at least track what you need to track sufficiently. 
Necessary: the ability to have unallocated credit on a customer's
account. Sometimes, for whatever reason, a customer over pays or pays
twice, and at the moment that seems to be hard to track in LSMB. At the
moment we can tracking outstanding invoices, but customers' balances seem
hard to find (or maybe not there).
This you can do now. Use the Cash -> Receipt screen, and after selecting the invoice and updating, change the total received to the amount the customer actually paid. The balance will show up on a new, open AR transaction, and you'll see it the next time you visit the cash->receipt screen for this customer. Then you can apply it to future invoices. 


Nice to have: the ability to generate a credit note for a
customer. "Nice to have" because we could generate one manually and
journal it into LSMB, but it would be nice if the interface supported it.

I believe this feature is in development for 1.3.

Nice to have: the option to set budgets and to report income/expenditure
against budget. "Nice to have" because we can do this manually with a
spreadsheet and enter the details manually from LSMB reports.
I don't know of any current plans for implementing this, but agree it would be nice to have... 
QuickBooks has all of the above, and is, I suspect, one of the main
competitors to LSMB. There may be other QuickBooks features that are
important to other prospective users of LSMB, but I suspect at least the
first three above will be desired by most.

I will continue to monitor and test LSMB, and I hope we can migrate to it
in the future.

I hope that helps!

Cheers,

--
John Locke
"Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems"
published by Charles River Media, June 2004
http://www.freelock.com