1. SQL-Ledger Wishlist
I've been using
SQL-Ledger to manage my business accounting for almost two years now. It seems to work pretty well.
1.1. Wishlist
There are a few things I wish it would do, mostly in order of preference:
-
Tests. Tests. Tests. I've seen some unexpected things happen during particular versions. If there were unit and system tests, I'd feel much more comfortable doing upgrades.
-
Proposal generator. Select a few parts and services, add some text notes to the bottom, click "Print" or "E-mail" or "Save". (A "Save as New" would be nice for re-using them too.) Could also automatically calculate profit.
-
JavaScript date selector. Every place there's a field to enter a date, I'd like for there to be an icon next to it that pops up a little calendar window that lets me select the date. It aggravates me having to think of date. Nice feature for people who leave JavaScript enabled; no harm done to those who don't.
-
Click on headings of listings to reverse the order. Already sorts, just doesn't toggle ascending/descending.
-
More drop-down menus for things in addition to text boxes. I have to have a half dozen tabs open when I'm editing invoices, because I constantly have to look up service and part numbers. I only have a dozen or so of each. I understand that once you have, say, 100 entries a drop-down box becomes unworkable. A solution to that problem when would be a pop-up window that lets you search for the item you want; non-JavaScript people can continue entering the same old way.
-
Batch and periodic invoicing. The "Post as New" button was added to help with recurring entries, which is fine when they're relatively few. But if I needed to bill 100 people every month for, say, dial-up, it would be unworkable. It would also be nice if it could be configured to generate a list for managing customers with subscriptions when those subscriptions were about to expire.
-
LDAP integration for customer and vendor tables. Actually, this is an item for myself, as I started researching it, discovered it was possible, and never got around to implementing it. With OpenLDAP 2.1, you can build a backend called sql-back that let's you expose SQL tables through LDAP. It takes writing some queries custom to the SQL application and building some tables or views to map between the schema. If I did this, I could reduce the duplication between having my customers' contact info in my LDAP addressbook and SQL-Ledger.
