sales tax & more

Conrad Canterford conrad@mail.watersprite.com.au
07 Jun 2002 09:47:18 +1000


On Fri, 2002-06-07 at 01:38, Kevin Benton wrote:
> BTW - When I was at my local office supply store, I saw that QuickBooks has
> a cash register function now.  Is anyone planning anything similar for
> GNUCash at this point?

QuickPOS has been available for quite a while (at least in Australia).
If you know of anyone contemplating using it, stop them NOW! There are
some major defects which in my opinion should have been fixed before it
was ever released for sale (I mean to say, I'd have accepted this as a
step along the road with free software, but to charge money for
this????).
In particular, they are using low-resolution floating point numbers for
price storage and possibly also for calculations. This means that a
price of $2.60 might actually be stored as $2.598394 (I'm making the
actual numbers up, as I'm not anywhere near the computer using the
software). This results in rounding errors - depending on the price
selected, often for as low a multiple as 2 units!

Now, to answer your original question:
Yes, I have planned something similar (but better, if for no other
reason than that I was using gnc-numerics). No, I'm not currently
working on it. Yes, I'd be able to be persuaded to recommence working on
it, but I'd want some keen people helping out. If you'd like to see
where it got to in my initial attempt, look at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnupos
I have recently acquired the code and the blessings of the original
author for a custom POS system which I will also release under the GPL,
and look to see what good ideas we can steal.

You may also wish to look at mercator and the work that LDG are doing
(grib, what's the web address again?).

Conrad.
-- 
Conrad Canterford  (conrad@mail.watersprite.com.au)
Water Sprite Pty Ltd   |  url - http://www.watersprite.com.au/
GPO Box 355,           |  - Australian Tour and Event Management (ATEM)
Canberra, ACT 2601     |  - Ticketing Division.
Mobile: +61 402 697054 |  - Catering Services Division.