[GNC] Integration between Freshbooks and Gnucash?

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 5/16/2022 4:48 PM, Jim DeLaHunt wrote:
> Hello, GnuCash users?
>
> I use a service called Freshbooks [1] to track the time I spend 
> working in my sole proprietorship business, and to generate invoices 
> to clients billing that time, and to accept payments. In the meantime 
> I do my bookkeeping in GnuCash. Are there other GnuCash users who also 
> use Freshbooks?


This is a GENERAL issue, feeds between components of a full business 
"system". Which components make up such a system of course depend on the 
sort of business, which is why there are commercial "business systems" 
specialized by types of business (the needs are VERY different).

Thus we are seeing lots of "complaints" about gnucash not doing this or 
that. If you think of full business system, gnucash would be the 
accounting component, what where I worked would be called "general 
ledger". All business systems would have THAT component but might or 
might not have:

(just some examples)

Inventory   and Point of Sales (business buys and sells products) --- 
note that THESE might be doing things like sales tax)

Billable hours (business "sells" professional service --- usually not 
just tracking.invoicing customers but often also employees if their 
compensation depends on this)

Payroll and HR -- employee data

Customer database and/or Supplier database

........

These components would communicate to each other, send "feeds" of 
"transactions" to each other, either one at a time as happens or batched 
(where I worked, batched). Note that where I worked was a VERY big 
business, all this system design.implementation was "in house". More 
normally, with small up to pretty large businesses the "business system" 
would be bought form/maintained by a vendor specializing in this.

One of the BIG decisions when putting pieces together is where are the 
best places for the division of labor. So I will ask Jim, have you 
carefully considered that "right place" because this can have a huge 
affect on the amount of "duplicate work". I don't know more about 
FreshBooks besides it being able to do hours invoicing and accounting 
but you want the main accounting to be in gnucash. But in deciding the 
dividing point, maybe you want more of the accounting in FreshBooks and 
less in gnucash. In other words, move SUMMARY data from FreshBooks to 
gnucash, not each transaction. Jim, in the old days one of the 
simplifications of bookkeeping was "cashbook accounting" where the 
majority of transactions were entered directly into a journal-less 
mini-ledger and then once every so often (daily, weekly, quarterly, 
etc.) a normal transaction transferring the TOTALS (of this mini 
-ledger) to the main books. Meanwhile any transactions that didn't 
qualify for the "cashbook" were entered normally into the main books. So 
if in the period, the number of transactions entered into the cashbook 
was C and the number entered directly into the main books was M, the 
number of transactions entered into the main books would be M+1 instead 
of M+C << when this method was used, it was because C was ten times to a 
hundred times larger than M >>

Could something like this help your work flow?

Michael D Novack