Accounting Systems

[eluser]kevinprince[/eluser]
So, this evening I was trying to cut the development time of a mediumish CRM system I'm building for a sport organization. Which in future will be open sourced and I cant believe how badly done or overtly complex people are making simple accounting systems.

Im probably going to just write it myself, however has anyone got any ideas on decent simple ledger apps which use PHP and MYSQL?

If not has anyone done any basic accounts systems and would like to share any advice on creating one, as while im not clueless (business student turned programmer), It would be great to get ideas.

[eluser]obiron2[/eluser]
Hi,

No knowlege of any systems written but a couple of bits of advice.

1) make sure your database system supports transaction rollback so that you never post half of a journal.

2) make sure your controller ALWAYS balances the journal by dumping a balancing entry to a default suspense account. Finding and correcting imbalances is a nightmare.

3) as well as making the journal entries, try to make a transactions postings log for you to debug what has happened, otherwise debugging historical activity can be horrid.

4) dont forget your VAT book postings

5) If you are working with stock, make absolutely sure that you fully understand average cost / FIFO / standard costs, stock writedowns etc... If unit cost is not correctly reflected then it becomes a logistical nightmare.

[eluser]worchyld[/eluser]
Accounting systems sound easy to build, but they aren't because of tax codes, different VAT codes for different items, etc.

I personally wouldn't touch an accounting system with a barge pole unless I had advice and a statement of requirements personally signed by the company's accountant on what is meant to be recorded, when and how.

[eluser]kevinprince[/eluser]
I doubt I'm going to include a full blown financial accounting solution in the system. This solution is targeted at small to medium sizes martial arts clubs with a few hundred members maximum and who are unlikely to have to deal with VAT, because of this the kinda accounting functions were looking at are more management accounts, eg sales ledger, income & expense reports, and profit and loss.

I actually had two accounting systems demo'd to me at a trade show today, and it kinda re-enforced to me that there stupidly complex for what I'm looking at. One which was $500+ aimed at sart ups looked like it was from the 80's and totally lacked any usability for a non techincal person.

Keep feedback coming please!

[eluser]Derek Allard[/eluser]
bambooinvoice?

[eluser]Phil Sturgeon[/eluser]
[quote author="Derek Allard" date="1193529880"]bambooinvoice?[/quote]

As wonderful as your baboo app is, it is not an accounting system. Nicholas wanted us to work together on making an addon for bamboo, but apparently you were not interested? Seems like he's not the only person chasing a lightweight accounting system in CI.

Also, I have recently been using GnuCash which is wonderful in many ways, flawed in others. The way it works is wonderful and takes advantage of a method called "Double Accounting" and the multiple accounts system is perfect.

Instead of one single "money went from here to here" you have it twice, once for each. This can be done to check that all tables are properly balanced or something like that, either way this system is very efficient and well planned. Its a shame that it looks like a Windows 95 reject and bugs out every 3rd mouse-click. Use it for planning, not for day-to-day company accounting.

[eluser]Derek Allard[/eluser]
Ah yes, I mistook what you meant by "accounting system". Its true that I don't want to add expense tracking into Bamboo at this point. Sorry for thread-jacking.

[eluser]esra[/eluser]
Do a search on sourceforge for ERP. You should get a large number of hits. Web-ERP is an old one written as procedural code, but there were several object-oriented forks over the years. If nothing else, the database queries and validation approaches will provide a lot of ideas.

Handling differences in tax rates, tax classes, and other locale-specific requirements would be more manageable if you built the application from the ground up to support locales. You could use something like the decorator design pattern in views to adorn accounting forms with locale-specific view fragments.

[eluser]obiron2[/eluser]
I tend to agree, I wouldn't look at writing any sort of 'light' accounting system, they have a nasty habit of growing and become impossible to maintain. If you are not completely at ease with accounting systems I would limit the functionality to being able to enter journals. Build a form for maintaining account numbers and a form for submitting debit and credit entries against account numbers with a description of what the journal was for. validate that the debits match the credits and record the values and description in a journal file and then provide some reports that let them view entries against an account number or journal number, probably with some date selection.

If they need to maintain sales ledgers, day books and VAT records, let them do it manually outside your system, with your system simply providing the supporting data.

[eluser]kevinprince[/eluser]
Thanks for all the great feedback you have all given, I'm looking at two options right now. The first is using frontacconts and there API, or the second doing the original plan and just keeping it to a simple ledger. I will keep you upto date!