Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Invoicing and Payments

Very excited to hear about your work since this is exactly the direction that several of us in the community have been leaning towards. The fact that you have used the latest versions of the code and have exploited the cr, list builder and ad_form is even better news since less work needs to be done to integrate.

I for one would be very interested in working with you on this in the future.

In particular - referring to your stated limitations:

· We didn’t write any documentation, apart the comments buried in the data model and the code.

This is something that we can sort out as a community. We should discuss the possibility of setting up a collaborative documentation drive. For example we could set up an area on openacs.org specifically for ERP package doc development. However we do it, I can certainly provide some resources for helping to document this project and I am sure others will also.

· The system is not internationalized, but I decided to use the English language both for the code and for the comments, so as to ease an eventual future internationalization.

I can provide translation resources into a couple of languages and would certainly be able to help with the I18N work (with Malte's guidance).

· The system is right now a unique big package and will probably be repackaged in the future.

Discussion and sgreement required but I am sure that we can make the necessary decisions quite quicly once the development code is familiar to us all. One thought that immediately springs to mind is the possibility of structuring some of the functionality as callback procs so that integration with other modules such as events and ecommerce will be seamless and elegant (i.e. raising invoices from other packages etc.).

· We wrote all the queries inline, without using the canonical xql files.

No problem here at all. I will happily provide resources to help xqlify the sql as I did with an earlier version of contacts!! 😊

· The system lacks a ‘Production Management’ module

We can work on a requirements spec as a group.

· The system lacks an ‘Asset Management’ module

Ditto.

Another area that we must consider is ensuring that the data model is flexible enough to be configured to serve different countries with different accounting standards (for example whilst we don't have fiscal poilice who are bristling with guns in the UK(!) - we do have some quite arcane accounting conventions which must be complied with by computerised accounting systems)😊

I have been putting together some info for another community member who is designing an underlying data model to support accounting ledgers. Whilst your work probably already meets the requirement, maybe a brief scan of some of the UK conventions that I have summarised would give an early indication of what kind of thing might need to be expanded (if anything).

Claudio, thank you very much for posting this. This is very exciting indeed and I for one would like very much to help to generate momentum behind an effort to integrate your work.

Kind Regards
Richard