chart of accounts

Tue Nov 9 18:33:49 EST 2004

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, John Sowden wrote:

> Thanks for those words of encouragement.  Your position years ago is where I
> am exactly today!  The reason that I have not migrated to mysql is: in
> addition to learning sql and the mysql commands, setup etc., it seems that I
> must learn a new language, like "C" in order to write an application that
> will allow me to use the mysql database.

Er no, not at all! At one time this was certainly true of heavyweight UNIX
database systems like Sybase and Oracle, where you often had to write a
client program yourself to get what you wanted out of the database server
- or instead pay a lot of money for a commercial front-end. But MySQL has
a command line client called simply 'mysql' which allows you to do everything
with the databases & tables. There are also quite a few GUI frontends for
Windows, Linux and various UNIXes and there are web-based frontends like
phpMyAdmin which can be used from any browser. This is in addition to
interfaces for C, PHP, Perl, etc. And it's all free.

>  The programs that I write for my
> company are not data entry/report generation only.  They are accounting,
> billing, alarm processing, service call processing, etc.  These require
> programming to control the process, not just bringing raw data onto the
> screen.

I actually use MySQL a lot through ordinary shell scripts - you can
construct a SQL query in, say, a bash shell script and pipe it into the
mysql client and capture the resultant output. I don't yet do this for
financial purposes but I do for remote system monitoring and logging
scripts, which dump events straight into MySQL databases.

Although MySQL itself lacks the full-featured integral programming language
FoxPro has, the combination of a shell script written in bash or, if you want
floating point arithmetic facilities to several decimal places (important
for finance applications) the Korn shell, and SQL queries put to a MySQL
server will give you the same functionality. It's not very difficult to
convert a FoxPro program into a shell/SQL script equivalent and I did
convert some fairly big FoxPro applications I'd written in the 80's & 90's
to run on Linux with MySQL.

Incidentally, if you want to stay with FoxPro and run it under Linux, FoxPro
for DOS versions 1.02 and 2.5 both run well under the DOS emulator dosemu
and you can also run Visual FoxPro 2.6 under wine (a Windows emulator for
Linux - see http://openfox.org for a Howto on doing this).

Hope this helps,

cheers,

Andy

> On Monday 08 November 2004 22:17, andy thomas wrote:
> > On Sun, 31 Oct 2004, Neil Williams wrote:
> > > On Sunday 31 October 2004 8:28 am, John Sowden wrote:
> > > > each line might look like:
> > > > 613.0    Rent
> > >
> > > But these are arbitrary numbers that you have invented, GnuCash can only
> > > support these if you enter them by hand for each account.
> > >
> > > > no balances, etc.  I see they are working on a trial balance which is
> > > > like a chart of accounts with debit or credit balance amounts.
> > >
> > > If it's only for a paper copy, why are the balances a problem? Change the
> > > report options to a set of dates that are very old. Or just tippex the
> > > balances out. (UK paper correction fluid, tippex).
> > >
> > > > What I am going to do with it is:
> > > > Have a paper copy to refer to when the program is not running, and
> > > > One my  Suse 8.0 machine is my good accounts list; I want to copy them
> > > > to my Suse 8.2 machine (not networked).
> > >
> > > But it presumably has a floppy drive or a USB port or some other method
> > > of transferring the GnuCash file - then you'd get the full data set, not
> > > just the account names.
> > >
> > > > I don't know  perl of xml.  I do know foxpro/dos, and I am patiently
> > > > waiting for an easy version of it to appear in the linux world.
> > >
> > > This FoxPro?
> > > http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/
> > > 1992 (June) Microsoft merged with Fox Software in a $173M operation
> > > http://www.foxprohistory.org/foxprotimeline.htm
> > > (me thinks that was less of a merge and more of a takeover - even in
> > > 1992, Microsoft was quite a bit larger than Fox, but hey, that came from
> > > a FoxPro site so they are allowed to see things with rose tinted
> > > spectacles.)
> > >
> > > As a long time microsoft product, you are likely to have to wait a VERY
> > > long time before it is released on GNU/Linux! We could all be dead by the
> > > time that happens.
> > >
> > > :-)
> > >
> > > Learn MySQL instead.
> >
> > Yeah, I really liked FoxPro back in the 1990's - it was a hell of a lot
> > faster than dBase3, dbase4, etc but shared the same xBase command language
> > and database file formats. FoxPro was the only reason I still kept a DOS PC
> > running after I switched to Linux in 1992 as there was no UNIX/Linux
> > alternative. But I installed msql in about 1998, took the trouble to learn
> > SQL (dead easy really) and then moved on to MySQL and have never looked
> > back since. And there's a utility - dbf2mysql - that will convert your
> > FoxPro databases to msql/MySQL.
> >
> > cheers,
> >
> > Andy
> >
> > > > On Sunday 31 October 2004 01:21, Neil Williams wrote:
> > > > > On Sunday 31 October 2004 7:26 am, John Sowden wrote:
> > > > > > How do I save the complete chart of acounts (including
> > > > > > sub-accounts) to a file, so I can print it and save it externally
> > > > > > to gnucash?
> > > > >
> > > > > Do you mean just the list of accounts (including sub-accounts) but
> > > > > without any transactions? (You aren't trying to print the entire
> > > > > GnuCash file?)
> > > > >
> > > > > What's wrong with the Account Summary report? You can change the
> > > > > report depth to include all sub-accounts.
> > > > >
> > > > > What are you trying to do with it after you save it?
> > > > >
> > > > > If you work on a backup copy of your GnuCash XML data file and you
> > > > > know a little Perl or XSL, you can extract all the information you
> > > > > need. Just don't expect to be able to modify the data in the real
> > > > > file.
> > >
> > > --
> > >
> > > Neil Williams
> > > =============
> > > http://www.codehelp.co.uk/
> > > http://www.dclug.org.uk/
> > > http://www.isbn.org.uk/
> > > http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/
> > >
> > > http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
> >
> > -------------------------------------------
> > Andy Thomas,
> > netstat -a llp
> >
> > Tel: +44 (0)7815 060872
> > Fax: +44 (0)20 8372 2582
> > http://www.netstat-a.net
> >
> > ...applying the glue that holds it together
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnucash-user mailing list
> > gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
>
> --
> John Sowden
> American Sentry Systems. Inc.
> 1221 Andersen Drive
> San Rafael, CA  94901
>
> U.L. Listed Central Station Alarm Service
> Serving the San Francisco Bay Area Since 1967
>
> mail at americansentry.net
> http://www.americansentry.net
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
>

-------------------------------------------
Andy Thomas,
netstat -a llp

Tel: +44 (0)7815 060872
Fax: +44 (0)20 8372 2582
http://www.netstat-a.net

...applying the glue that holds it together