Chart of accounts

James Wilde james.wilde at sunde-wilde.com
Sat Aug 27 15:20:49 EDT 2011


Hej Lincoln:

On Aug 27, 2011, at 00:54 , Lincoln A Baxter wrote:

> Hey James,...
> 
> On Fri, 2011-08-26 at 23:37 +0200, James Wilde wrote:
>> On Aug 26, 2011, at 23:24 , David Carlson wrote:
>> 
>>>> <big snip>
>> 
>>> If the goal is a complete list of accounts with no data, how about
>>> exporting the list first, opening the empty data file and creating an
>>> Account Summary Report on the empty file?  There would still be zero
>>> amounts, but they could then be more easily filtered out.
>> 
>> I've seen this suggestion twice.  Excuse me, but doesn't it strike anybody that this is a very clumsy workaround for something that should be a click on a menu choice?  You give a chart of accounts to every newcomer to the accounting department so they will quickly learn about the structure of the accounting system.  You give it to every person who has to allocate expenses when (s)he approves invoices for payment.  But you don't necessarily want any of these people to see the balances on the accounts, so the account report is not an alternative.
>> 
> 
> This is a little over the top. This is FREE software that is work of
> people who DONATE their time to creating and maintaining this software.
> If you really care, you will "scratch your itch", and contribute
> patches, that implement the functionality you want.

Free doesn't necessarily mean bad.  Open Office is free, Libre Office is free, but both are highly professional products, produced by volunteers, just like GC, but they are of a standard to compete with the products of Microsoft, with all its marketing clout.

The developers who have given us GC have given us a superb half-packet.  It is without doubt the best accounting package on the market for getting data into, in the form in which you want it.  It seems a shame, therefore, that they haven't given us the other half, and let us get the data out in a half-way decent form.  Not only that, but the only product that seems to be able to handle report generation is some obscure package called eguile or something.  I used to program in RPG a hundred years ago, and I've dabbled in other languages, but nothing comes close to the report programs I've seen and tried to understand for obscurity.

I'm not talking fine formatting here, for the annual report or the tax return.  I'm just talking about the kind of print-out you take almost daily if you work in an accounting office, where you can tick off items, and do the hundred and one other things people do with accounting data, like transferring it to a spread sheet for analysis.  Except that the values in reports are in text format with a compulsory currency code as part of the value field, instead of in a separate field, and it takes a lot of hassle to just get the data in a form in which you can start working with it.

I've checked out a good few packages on accounting, free and not free, for my Mac, and even for a Windows instance under a virtual machine, and I always come back to GC, as none of them even comes close to GC for input.  So why is it so damn hard to get the information out of GC?

Think about it, Lincoln.  The suggestion for a chart of accounts is to export data to a bogus company and output a trial balance!  Ledger?  Forget it if you don't want html.  Html for a printed report???  Changing the default font has absolutely no effect on my Mac.  Don't know what it would do, if anything, in GCs native OS, linux, but maybe I'll have to try that.

> 
> Alternatively, you are not technically competent to do that, you could
> write a spec, file it as an enhancement request, and then offer to pay
> someone to implement it.  If enough other people want the capability,
> perhaps those people could pool what they are willing to pay to make it
> happen.  When the amount is large enough, a developer will change his
> priorities to collect "the ransom."

Don't have that kind of money.
> 
> This is how free software works.

This is not how free software works.  Free software is free, and maybe you can make a donation.  And then there's shareware where the donation is more or less compulsory.
> 
> All that said, this does not strike me as a very important feature, and
> it probably strikes most others the same way.

Ask any accountant or accounting person.  I think they'll tell you that a chart of accounts and a good ledger printout are amongst their highest priorities in an accounting package.  Most of them are probably less bothered with getting the data in, and can content themselves with the pay products.

Sorry, but I don't think this qualifies for a smiley, but no personal offence intended.  I think it's just such a shame that such a potentially good product should suffer because of the poor configuration ability - for non-technical people - of the reporting function.  And it pisses me off when the best solution offered is a crappy workaround.

//James


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