How to file expense sheets I send to my employer

[Derek Atkins]

allamistakeo18 at mac.com writes:

> Hi Derek, 
>
> On 26 Mar 2014, at 18:00, Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> wrote:
>
>> Be VERY VERY careful using the Receivable account type.  It was not
>> designed for manual data entry -- it was designed for use with the
>> business features and for all transactions to be created by posting
>> Invoices and Payments through the Business menu functions.  You can
>> literally shoot yourself in the foot quite easily when you use the
>> register directly.
>
> Can you elaborate on this? What could go wrong? What would you call
> “literally shooting myself in the foot?”

One major example comes to mind immediately. If you use Receivable (or
Payable) account types and enter transactions by hand you can
effectively lock a transaction in a way that you cannot unlock it.  This
means you cannot modify or delete it later.  The only way to correct
this is to go to a backup file from before you entered (or locked) the
transaction.  And locking a transaction this way is pretty easy.

Honestly, when I wrote that code I wanted to make the whole register
read-only, but I couldn't find a good way to do that, and there were
times when I *did* want to allow you to delete transactions out of A/R
or A/P (in particular the auto-payment-forward transactions).

> Thomas 

-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
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available