Home-Business Applications?

[Bill Gribble]

On Thu, 2001-11-01 at 10:08, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Before I start delving into this project on my own, has anyone else
> actually looking into this, or is anyone else actually working on
> these features?  Has anyone else actually looked at those two other
> programs?  Or is there some (easy) way to combine all three together
> that I haven't thought of?

Those features are all on the top of the Linux Developers Group
wishlist.  Unfortunately, we are all working on a point of sale system
that already implements its own invoicing model, and I can't justify the
work to move that functionality into Gnucash right now.  I'm hoping to
have some developer time to allocate to it next year.  

For a quick hacky sort of A/P and A/R you can just improve the current
payables report somewhat.  Since there's no customer database, you have
to run the reports based on the transaction Description, but that might
be enough. 

The biggest question I have is what role the engine will play in all
these features.  It seems like a lot of work to support these types of
features in the XML backend, and most people using the business features
will be using the postgres backend.  If you aren't going to support XML,
you can just start communicating directly with Postgres, which makes
some things much easier. 

If you decide to do that, we have a tool that might make things easier. 
It's a gnc-module that allows you to write database-aware applications
in Glade without writing any code.  It's still not ready to go but it's
getting closer. 

If it's all the same to you, I'd be interested in
following/participating in any design discussions on the list so keep it
here. 

Thanks
b.g.