[GNC] Accounting Modules

David Cousens davidcousens at bigpond.com
Tue Nov 27 20:32:27 EST 2018


Steve,

> You might be able to built an abstract engine upon which other (local) 
> configurators could build specific rules for their areas. Trying to do 
> something to handle all cases out of the box is a recipe for early death 
> by a thousand cuts.

To some extent that was the point I was trying to make. Having a sufficiently flexible engine to allow sufficient local
customization and rule specification is definitely a non-trivial programming exercise, perhaps  at the same level of
complexity as GnuCash itself. I suspect you would need to have access to something like Python as a scripting language
to produce callable locale specific code to implement the necessary degree of flexibility. 

To design such an engine requires a lot of scoping out the variations you would have to deal with and the industrial
relations regimes are likely to be far more variable than basic accountancy which has a fairly solid common core which
is increasingly covered by the IFRS international standards. E.g. even though the US has not officially adopted the the
IFRS standards, the FASB standards are generally very similar and there is a considerable effort in the US by the FASB
to bring them into closer agreement, with a view to becoming compliant in the future. Most counties who have adopted the
IFRS usually do so by adopting them with ammendment where necessary to fit in with other local legal frameworks and
business/corporation legislation and regulation where there is a conflict. 

Some aspects of the GnuCash design might be useful though, but only a small core of people (not including me) who are
still active in the development seem to have a really good grasp on that. If such a FOSS system already existed
somewhere it might be better to simply work on generating output that could be easily imported into GnuCash (e.g.
Dolibarr ERP/CRM https://www.dolibarr.org/#features or Compiere ) but in most cases they already have their own
accounting module so there is not likely to be an interest in their development team for exporting to GnuCash.

David Cousens



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