Re: Discussion item post-1.3: Variance Accounting

[Luke <..hidden..>]

On Sat, 9 Jul 2011, Chris Travers wrote:

> 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.

I think nested departments should be standard, apart from anything else.
Armaghan has done some work on that i believe--you might be able to absorb 
it.

Nested projects too, probably, although I don't have an immediate 
application for those.

> 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?

1 & 2.

I have non profit potential clients, who would find it very useful to have 
budgeting.  Specifically, they need to track the difference between what a 
ministry (department) has spent during the year, and what they are 
authorized to spend for that year.  I could send you privately some of the 
kind of reports they like to generate from Quickbooks.

> 3)  How important do you find these features to be?

More than file attachments, and you know how much I want those.  It's not 
that it would be so useful to me in particular (as file attachments 
definitely are), but in "selling" the software, I think it is quite 
important in general, and to have a base for further work.

Regards,

Luke