Discussion item post-1.3: Variance Accounting

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

Hi all;

This is particularly aimed at the consultants, developers, and so
forth in the community, as well as the more advanced users of the
software.

Once 1.3 is out the door, one of the add-ons I am thinking of writing
is a budgetting/variance accounting module for projects, departments,
etc.  I might also write a petty cash request variance module.  The
basic idea I am looking at are:

1)  Nested departments, with the whole organization being Department 0.
2)  Budgets over arbitrary periods
3)  Variance report (basically an income statement compared to the budget)

Eventually this could be expanded to include storing things like
inventory forecasts (manually calculated) and comparing against
inventory activity.  So for example sales of products at exhibitions
or fairs could be compared against forecasts.

Another possibility would be nested projects as well as variance
accounting in the production of assemblies.

I am not sure all of this would get done for 1.4, but the questions I have are:
1) Which areas are most important to current community members?
2)  For the consultants in the community, which of these would you
find most useful in your sales work?
3)  How important do you find these features to be?

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers