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.
Phil Daintree (the developer of WEB-ERP posted a comment to my previous Open Source Accounting Apps post. His comment is reproduced below…
I developed web-erp, open-accounting is a development of web-erp with multi-language support. Interested in your assessment of my system. Creating the order means there is no other entries to be made to create the invoice. It is a two or three click exercise once the items to be invoiced have been selected on the order. The system appears geared around physical inventory, although I would encourage you to explore “dummy” items which allow for service entries like time to be invoiced.
It is in use by at least one Australian company and handles Australian GST even allowing for some of the oddities with food etc.
In response to his feedback, I went back and had another look at the system. Bear in mind that I’m evaluting Web-ERP (and the other systems as well) from the perspective of a service based business.
Web-ERP certainly seems to be able to meet all of the tax invoice requirements, for Australian GST. Of course, given that it was developed in NZ, and our GST is virtually identical to yours that shouldn’t really surprise me I guess.
Having spent a little bit more time with it, the invoicing process isn’t quite as unfriendly as it first seems, but it is still fairly cumbersome for a service based business. In the situation I’m looking at you’d raise the invoice after the job has been completed, or immediately prior to commencing the job. In either instance its fairly cumbersome to have to enter the job as an order, then turn it into an invoice. I’ll run through the ordering/invoicing process to give you an idea where my concerns lie…
1) Selection of a customer, and searching/selection of products are both very flexible and very good within the constraints of a web application.
2) At the point where the order has been created in full there is a button “Enter Delivery Details and Confirm Order”. In a primarily service based business, you’ll rarely need delivery details, so it’d be nice to be able to Confirm the order there and then. Ideally, it would be nice to confirm the order and process it in full as an invoice there and then.
3) The top portion of the delivery details screen makes a good double check to ensure that what you’ve entered in previous stages is correct, but the delivery details are pretty unnecessary for a service based business. In the demo system some of the customers don’t have delivery addresses configured, which makes the usage of this screen a little more tedious because the validation requires entry of delivery details.
4) For a service based business, the next screen is unnecessary, because we’d always want to “Confirm Order Delivery Quantities and Produce Invoice”.
5) Confirming quantities and handling back orders, is again something that a service based business rarely needs to worry about, but at least at this point we can click on “Process Invoice” without any further entry and we’re done.
From my point of view, Web-ERP is a very well developed system, which a lot of useful features. However, in some respects the features that would make it useful to a lot of people (i.e. order entry, back orders, etc) are unnecessary in the environment that I’m looking at, and seem to get in the way a little. That’s not to say its not a good system, just when matched against my requirements, its not an ideal fit. The same can be said for virtually all of the systems I looked at in my earlier post. They’re all fairly good systems in their own right, but none was an ideal fit to my requirements.
I’m currently looking for a simple web based accounting application. The system should be suitable for a small primarily service based business. Some inventry control might be helpful, but primarily I need a way to bill for services. Essential requirements are…
- Invoicing
- Debtors
- Cash Book
- Open Source
- Ease of use for people unfamiliar with accounting concepts.
Additionaly I’d also like the following features…
- Australian GST Compliance - Production of a legal tax invoice, and reports that give me the numbers I need to my BAS (Business Activity Statement)
- Web based for easy remote access.
- Can email Invoices and Remittances
- Scheduled Invoicing Features
I’m reasonably flexible on the optional stuff, provided the source for the system is good, and reasonably hackable then I’d be prepared to invest some time in adding the optional features. With those features in mind, this is what I found…
Continue reading ‘Open Source Accounting Apps’
MobileVB from AppForge looks like it could be an excellent development environment for working with PDA type devices.
MobileVB is a cross-platform product enabling you to easily create smart mobile applications that run on multiple platforms including:
* Palm OS
* Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 and Pocket PC 2000 / 2002
* Nokia Series 60 Platform for Symbian OS
* Nokia Series 80 Platform for Symbian OS
* Sony Ericsson UIQ Smartphones
MobileVB includes the UltraLite Database with Synchronization Development Environment (UltraLite DB with MobiLink). This integration enables AppForge developers to use mobile relational databases and synchronize them to corporate data.
I’ve been trying to find out how those barcodes that they stick on weighed stuff in the supermarkets work. You know the ones where you buy 500g of sliced ham, so they grab the ham, weigh it and wrap it up for you, then the scales print out a label that has both the weight, and a product code encoded into a barcode.
This offers one possibility. I don’t know whether or not this is the barcode format that the weigh scales produce though.
The EAN standard reserves prefixes 20-29 for barcodes produced in store, so its probably pretty close. Will have to raid the freezer tonight and see.
Some useful information about Point of Sale (POS) hardware device standards here.
A development team designing and implementing a POS application for a retailer faces a myriad number of decisions. (POS may be Point-of-Sale or Point-of-Service, depending upon a company’s marketing team.) One of the more vexing issues is the selection of and programming to the physical POS devices, including a POS printer, a bar-code scanner, and a credit/debit card reader.
Why has this been difficult? Because of the significant disparity in features, functionality, and programmatic interfaces from vendor to vendor, and sometimes even within devices from a vendor. Therefore, the application team has historically chosen and implemented interface logic for some mandatory set of devices for initial deployment, then added to this set as time allows or additional customers require.
If our suppliers were able to supply OPOS drivers for the POS hardware we’re using it’d make life a lot easier for us.
