Great pieces!
Jarkko, you are right, assets need to be amortized. I think the subject has got much clearer after your explanation.
Ben, the idea of the logger is great. However, the entry of costs is going to be very application specific in order to allow for a great degree of "self services":
- Invoices can be posted by providers over the web
- Travel costs are logged by the employees themselves
- Payroll costs are distributed to projects according to the timesheet of the person.
...
So, we will need several different types of "loggers" and particular emphasis on permissions and security. This is why we are going for specific modules, apart from the fact that the code is already 70% there from previous projects.
<blockquote> dead simple
</blockquote>
(Financial) accounting is the contrary of "dead simple", because the accountant has to take a lot of decisions knowing the law (classify costs and everything else in 300+ "Chart of Accounts").
Actually, we need to make things "dead simple". The folks working in translation agencies (our main target market) are not very technically not very sophisticated, so the system needs to work out-of-the-box. Maybe there is some synergy between your business-starter-kit and P/O. Have a look at http://www.project-open.com/product/modules/finance and check the "Travel Costs Package" for example. A simplified version of it being used productively at Competitiveness.com during the last 3 years from everybody in the company.
<blockquote> re-build sql-ledger as openacs packages
</blockquote>
That sounds very, very interesting. I see our P/O functionality basicly as a "front-end" for something like SQL-Ledger, and an integration with it on the same server could solve several problems for us. Torben, did you already start actually working on it? Are you on Skype (my ID is frankxbergmann)?
Bests,
Frank
mailto:frank_dot_bergmann_at_project_dash_open_dot_com
http://www.project-open.com/
http://www.project-open.org/