On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 11:51:10AM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
On 2004-11-03 08:35:02 +0000 Chris Green chris@areti.co.uk wrote:
On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 08:21:53AM +0000, tom potts wrote:
www.gnucash.org
The fundamental problem with GnuCash (and many other similar packages) is that they make things so difficult for the small business user. Or at least they don't seem to be designed to work well for small businesses. GnuCash in particular seems not to be able to help at all with VAT and VAT returns.
Pardon me for being ignorant, not being VAT registered yet, but can you create a VAT account and split the invoices between them? I'm very suspicious of "automatic" VAT calculations, as there always seems to be some exception or other oddity that gets the numbers wrong and it's usually awkward to check.
But (as I said, in another message maybe) my program automatically calculates the VAT and then allows you to change it if necessary. In practice this works well, nearly all my entries have standard rate VAT on the whole amount and the automatic calculation works correctly. I then manually fix the odd ones like purchases from outside the EC. The automatic system copes with 0% rate on books and knows that bank charges and such are exempt.
Creating a VAT account and splitting the invoices would be very counterintuitive for entry I should think and would require two entry lines for every item you buy.
My (self written) accounts package has a single 'ledger' (if you like to call it that) where *all* transactions are entered. [...]
I have one too. I call the transaction entry/display a journal right now, as it started off as a copy of a book, but I'm not sure whether
Ah, yes, maybe a 'journal' is a better name for the transaction entry table than a 'ledger'.
that's still the right name for it. I do reconciliation the same way you describe. My account codes are two-character ones for now, but it's all drop-down lists to the user, through a web front-end. My accountant seems happy with its output.
I agree that SQL-Ledger is overkill for nearly all small businesses. Also, it wasn't fun perl to work with last time I looked and I'd rather not let messy code track my business accounts unless I have time to treat it as a black box and run many tests.