A couple of doubts <<offline>>

Conscious User conscioususer at aol.com
Thu Dec 17 14:16:22 EST 2009


> But did you see the rest of what I wrote? The problem is that you see 
> "transaction generators" as properly being a PART of an accounting 
> system when they really should be external to it. The lack in this case 
> is that GnuCash doesn't have any provision to take in transactions 
> generated for it by some external system, you have to enter these by 
> hand. Would make it unsuited to be the "general ledger" system of a 
> large business (large in volume of transactions) where instead of being 
> hand entered (within GnuCash) they would be FEEDS coming from other 
> systems such as a POS sales system (which would also be sending feeds to 
> the "inventory control" system and that sending feeds back to "general 
> ledger").
> 
> This is not to say that there aren't products out there which offer BOTH 
> things like POS and accounting.
> 
> It wouldn't be out of place to have some "free software" teams doing 
> projects like "Point of Sales" or "Inventory Control" and if a family, 
> might connect to another free project like GnuCash. But these ARE 
> different things (from simply "accounting"). Thus you would want an 
> "inventory control" system to be supplying information like "where are 
> those widgets physically located" (not just the book value per widget) 
> and "Point of Sales" keeping track of things like "which cashier", 
> "which cash register", "what were the particular items sold", etc.
> 
> ROFLOL --- an rule based "automated event calculator" is a non-trivial 
> bit of software all by itself. Not so obvious to you perhaps because you 
> might be seeing the "date" when event to occur as being simple and your 
> volume of such transactions low. But the "rule" for the event date might 
> be much more complicated. For example, for this event was that "last day 
> of the month" (actually) or does the event have to be "last BUSINESS DAY 
> of the month or "2nd Tuesday of the month except when that's a day on 
> which the stock markets are closed, in which case the preceding Monday". 
> It's not YOUR specific (limited) situation which an application 
> extension would be needed to cover to be worthwhile to undertake but 
> only if providing a solution for the general case.

You more or less hit the nail in the head. Truth is: I'm using GnuCash
for very simple needs, with very simple rules and very low volumes.
When I originally asked the questions, I was trying to automatize as
much as possible, and in the process allowing some mistakes that would
be unmaintainable for more complicated rules or larger volumes.



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