[SLUG] finance under linux

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Elizabeth Dodd <edodd at medemail.com.au> writes:

> I was experimenting with gnucash to see if i could do office billing with it 
> for a medical practice. my education is in very practical things, not 
> accounting, and as usual when experimenting with software i didn't read any 
> documentation (what's new?). it took me many tries to add a customer and many 
> more to make an invoice. that's why i think it isn't intuitive.

Hmm..  Could you provide more information about this?  I'm a bit
too close to the UI, so I know how everything is supposed to work.
However I tried to make the flow work "naturally".  Could you perhaps
explain what was going through your head?  What did you try?  What
did you expect to happen?  How did what actually happened confuse you?

I'm trying to understand what you did (and why) so I can improve the
UI to help users along when they do something I didn't expect ;)

Perhaps what we really need is a druid to "configure a company".

> after the event i realised that i was missing many things - that it was 
> pointless trying to add customers without the concept of accounts receivable 
> in use.

Well, you can create a customer before you create an AR account, but
yea, you need an AR account before you can post any invoices.

> checking now, the customer is requested as a company, but i wanted to be able 
> to bill individuals, and they would fall into groups (families) and they need 
> to be able to change groups (eg leave home and be billed under their own 
> name)

Yes, this is true..  Customers (and Vendors) are considered
"companies", and the UI is designed with that in mind.  There is now a
tooltip that will inform you that you should set the company name and
contact name the same to get the invoice system to treat it as an
individual.

Also, gnucahs does not have the concept of "families"... There is no
way to group a bunch of customers together into a single bill.  One
way you COULD do it is to use the patient's name as the "company name"
and the family name as the "contact name".  It's a kludge, but it's
probably the closest you'll get..

The business features were written for me to use with my consulting
company... I tried to generalize it, but you know how it goes. :)

> I am a small part of a group building medical software (gnumed) and we will 
> eventually be needing gnucash for the other part of our daily work. 

Ok...  Not sure what this means, but ok.. :)

> Liz

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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