r20616-20630 (GncOwner)

[Geert Janssens]

On donderdag 12 mei 2011, John Ralls wrote:
> Geert,
> 
> Where are you trying to get to with these changes?
> 
> Regards,
> John Ralls

My larger goal is to get better integration of the business functions in the 
GnuCash UI and logic. In my experience it just takes way too many clicks and 
context switches to efficiently work with the business objects. So I'm looking 
for ways to improve this.

These recent commits are a first step in that direction. They add overview 
pages for business objects such as vendors or customers, just like there is an 
overview page for accounts. The idea is that each of these overview pages get 
their own toolbar buttons tailored to the type of object that is listed. For 
now there's only add/edit vendor/customer/employee when such a page is open, 
but I plan to add buttons for at least new invoice/bill/job. In my opinion 
that would be a first important improvement to a business workflow where 
invoices/bills are entered in batch. For bills, you could open the Vendor's 
overview page, and start entering invoices with the click of a (toolbar) 
button.
Another useful future enhancement I'm thinking of is adding some kind of a 
balance column, which shows the amount each customer is still due or you still 
owe each vendor, similar to the account's balance columns.

The whole concept still needs additional polish and refinement obviously. For 
example, I'm still evaluating which columns would make sense to be visible by 
default, which filter options to provide,...

There is an enhancement request I wrote last year that is mostly related to 
this:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635003

Geert