Published April 29th, 2004 by Jim O'Halloran
Another look at NETaccounts
I’ve also had feedback from a developer of NETaccounts on my Open Source Accounting Apps post.
It seems that a couple of the issues I raised (invoice header details, and auto numbering of invoices) with NETaccounts will be resolved shortly, which is excellent news. The invoice header information is configurable as the system currently stands, altough if you don’t know its there it’s not obvious where the feature is to be found. However once I knew it was there, finding it wasn’t a drama. Once you’ve found the feature in question, its quite configurable. Apparently this also causes a few support calls, so they’ll probably look at addressing it somehow.
I also made the statement that Web-ERP was the only system I looked at which supports customer statements…
We also do provide Customer Statements (labeled Contact Statement in our system) - Jim states that WEB-ERP is the only system that he tried that supported this feature.
I was wrong! The naming of the feature confused me for a moment, but given the naming convention used elswhere the name “Contact Statement” is logical. I was looking for something called a “Customer Statement”, but I’m used to a system which seperates Customers from Suppliers. If your system uses a combined customer/supplier file and calls the result “Contacts” as NETaccounts does, then “Contact Statement” makes sense.
If I had one criticism of NETaccounts statement facility though, it would be that I can’t run statements for all of my customers in one batch. At the end of a month I’d like to be able to produce statements for all of the customers who I’d dealt with during the month in one operation.
Jim also mentions incompatibilities with Firefox - I develop, test and use the product on Firefox for Windows. Jim - if you read this, can you let me know which bits don’t work and I’ll follow them up…
Once I hit problems with FireFox I didn’t test too far with that browser. One area which did cause me problems though… In FireFox click on the “View or Edit Invoices” image in the left hand pane, then try to click on either of the “Add”, or “Apply Payment” links nothing happens. The popup menus in the left navigation pane also don’t seem to work correctly on FireFox. I’m using FireFox 0.8 on Windows.
Overall though, NETaccounts is a very polished looking system, with a lot of help text and documentation available. Of the systems I’ve reviwed, it seems to be one of the best in that regard.