Vendor Bill - Invoice Entries

[DaveC49]

Hi Michael,

Point taken. I was really commenting specifically on the in package
capability of Gnucash to meet fellow_travellers's needs. It might be useful
to have a list of external software that does provide additional capability
to extend Gnucash somewhere on the wiki page.

One of the disadvantages of an external software approach is in the lack of
ability to readily exchange data between the various components. I am
thinking specifically of customer/vendor information, product listsetc.. 
While this can be done with data import/export, there is always the problem
of ensuring the data import/export is upto date in both packages. 

I do remember seeing someone mentioning a POS plugin under development
sometime ago but haven't seen any more on it. As you have pointed out a POS
system is largely useless without an integrated inventory system.  The
current plugins wiki page doesn't list anything like this though.  

The plugin capability of Gnucash would be one way of supporting integrated
inventory, payroll, POS systems in an integrated fashion but each of these
is likely to require a team of developers to support and maintain
compatability as Gnucash and each of the packages develops. I think this is
one reason such plugins haven't been developed yet. 

I have tried developing a fairly simple mod for Gnucash and I found finding
my way around the code base required a considerable effort and investment in
time to work out where to insert the relatively simple code needed. Still
working on that, but it does make me really appreciate the efforts the
current developers put in.

If Gnucash does shift towards SQL database backends in the future, separate
packages could have the required data integration through the use of a
common shared database minimising the need to interact at the code level.

David Cousens



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David Cousens
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