Hi Fred
It might be worth a thought to extend the functionality of the personal finance module, to actually become a small business accounting module.
I tjecked http://www.sql-ledger.com/ and it looks pretty interesting. I could be pretty neat to follow some of the same design idears so it might be possible at a later date to integrate the two of them. However, it doesn't seem quite as ambitious as http://www.gnucash.org/ and the datamodel of sql-ledger is not so big. It would also be natural to build it together with the ecomerce module.
Anyway, I need to show some results with my own project pretty soon so I will probably keep working on that, but we could fold some of that work into the model at a later date.
However, I think the biggest problem would be to aggree on what kind of data model we should implement. If we, GnuCash, and SQL-ledger could all agree on the same basic datamodel layout we would just develop different front ends to the same datamodel.
1 layer
SQL: common data model
2 layer
FINANCE API: pqsql functions to take care of transactions
FINANCE API: views to extract data
3 layer
GUI front end, perl, tcl, web, xml etc.
I can post some a very limited scripts that implement the above architecture. However, my datamodel is somewhat different than both GNUcash and sql-ledger. I seem to have read somewhere the Phillip Greenspun is actually working or have been working on collaborative datamodelling, so mayby he has some thoughts.
Anyway, getting it all tied together will be a pretty big project. We could start out doing smaller stuff and working towards a module that could be tied into openACS 4.
Looking forward to your comments.
