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I sent you an email.

I would be interested in taking a closer look at your project and seeing if it would make sense for us to work together.

Dave

Janusz,

I agree that this is not the best way to integrate systems, but until front accounting has the ability to create custom fields and custom workflows in a similar fashion as vtiger, we don't see any other way of getting the type of integration we need.

We also would like a detailed account of all the database tables and fields that have data inserted into or updated when a direct invoice is submitted.
It will help us better integrate other systems with front accounting.

Thanks,
Dave

Janusz, thanks for the great work you do with front accounting.
Sorry it was hard to get a hold of me earlier on the pos stuff. I must have missed your email.
I will organize my thoughts better over the next week on the pos, custom fields and workflows and then get back to you on what I have come up with.

I have some resources, financial and programming, that I would like to put to good use and I would like to get your thoughts on where we could help make these things happen in front accounting.

Coolers, I wish you the best of luck on your search for someone to pay you to program your dream system. I would suggest you look for support in other forums because we are loyal to front accounting and the solid business plan and fantastic team behind it.

coooolers,

Just wanted you to know that you would have our support if the project were to accomplish the following:

Integrate vtiger and frontaccounting  WITHOUT changing the core code of either vtiger or frontaccounting.

The reason this is important to us, is we would like to have the ability to take advantage of the awesome updates that both Front Accounting and Vtiger come out with in the future.

It doesn't make sense for us to try to compete against FA or vtiger with another ERP system that is a fork of both.

I think Front Accounting should specialize in what it does best, Accounting. and vtiger should specialize in CRM.
That way you get the best overall system when these two are integrated together.

I have several posts in the Front Accounting and Vtiger forum about this, but let me just summarize what needs to be programmed for vtiger and front accouting to be integrated nicely and still keep the power of being able to use vtiger and front accounting updates:

Front Accounting needs the following things:

1. Ability to add Custom Fields to the various modules, like vtiger already has now.

2. Ability to add Custom Workflows to work off of the modules, like vtiger already has now.

Vtiger needs the following things:

1. Ability to add a Task that Updates specified Fields to a specified new value  when a workflow is performed. (Right now you have to program this into your custom workflow and it can be difficult to manage.)

2. Ability to trigger a workflow when a field value is changed.  (Right now a workflow can only be triggered when the Save button is hit.)

If those things are added to vtiger, then the rest of the integration is easy because it just requires writing custom workflows for both systems that would keep the database tables in both systems in sync.

We have already done a lot of this with our own system.

We currently have vtiger and Frontaccounting working together by programming our own workarounds. That is why we already know exactly what is still needed in both systems to make the integration perfect.

We already have programming done to make a single Login for Frontaccounting and Vtiger.
It was as simple as doing some minor changes to the database config file in each system and then making our own simple login form.

We already have vtiger running multiple companies.  All that took was adding one simple table to the vtiger database and the changes we made to the database config file.

Anyways, my point is simple.  If the things that I have mentioned above are put in place, then you get the best of all the worlds.   The best CRM system and the best Accounting system fully integrated with the ability to keep supporting both vtiger and frontaccounting without trying to compete against them.   Better to cooperate and combine resources rather than to spread yourself thin.

One other last point about our system that is worth noting.
Not only does doing it our way make it possible to integrate FA and Vtiger, but we are able to integrate any system easily with FrontAccouting and Vtiger.
We currently have our website (based on Joomla/Virtuemart) integrated with Vtiger and we have our Mass Mailing System (PHP List) integrated and we have our custom POS system integrated and we have integrated other shopping cart systems like osCommerce, Magento, and Zen Cart.

So we are very anxious to have the features that I have mentioned in this post  be added to Vtiger and Front Accounting, because it would make it so we could make our integrations we already have, much more seamless and much easier to manage.
It would also make it easier for us to share our integrations with the community so others could do what we have already done and more.

Thanks for being upfront on this.
Unfortunately I don't have a lot of php skills, but a do have a little money.
How much money do you think it would take to get a POS system in place?
Maybe I and others who want this functionality can solve the money problem for you if you let us know what you think it will take.
Thanks,
Dave

I have been thinking more about the POS options. I wasn't sure where the best place would be to place these thoughts in the WIKI so I will do one more post here with my thoughts.

There are two different approaches that I think could work here fairly easily.

Idea #1:

Modify the "Direct Invoice" feature to do the following additional things:

a. Calculate Change from an "Amount Tendered" field if the payment method is "Cash"

b. Give the Option to "Print Receipt" for the customer after the sale.

c. Have a credit card # field and Expiration Date fields for typing or using a card swiper to fill in the credit card # and exp. date for processing credit cards through a payment gateway. (Authorize.net)

d. That also means that there would need to be a place to add payment processor info. just like a variety of ecommerce shopping carts have.  (Paypal, Authorize.net, etc.)

Idea #2:

Don't have a POS system in Front Accounting, but make it very quick to do a "Direct Invoice" to multiple Sales Orders in Front Accounting.
That would allow people to use other POS systems and all they would have to do is get all their sales data into the Front Accounting database as "Sales Orders"   
This could be done fairly easily through an "Import Orders" function. I think there are already import features being worked on for importing orders from websites.

**The key would be to get all your orders from your POS system into Front Accounting as Sales Orders and then be able to do a "Mass Direct Invoice" on all those sales orders to do all the debits and credits for those sales without having to spend a ton of time doing delivery and invoicing and payments on all those sales orders one at a time.**

Maybe under the "Invoice against Sales Delivery" there could be an option called "Mass Direct Invoice Sales Orders" or something like that which would take you to a screen that shows you a list of your sales orders with a check box by each sales order that you could select and then hit a button called "Process Orders" or something like that which would then do everything that a Direct Invoice would do on those orders your selected.

Anyways, I really like this idea, because it makes it so people can use specialized POS systems for their individual needs and then quickly get their sales data into Front Accounting where with a few clicks of a button all their accounting can be done on those sales orders that have already been delivered and paid for at the point of sale.
A feature like this might also be appreciated by those who are importing their sales data from their websites.

Well, hopefully my thoughts made sense.  I am up for helping on either idea, both with time and money if someone is up for getting either one of these ideas in place.   Let me know your thoughts and if you have other ideas.

I find it interesting that this post on the POS feature has over 900 views on the forum while most of the others have around 100 or so.
Obviously this tells me that this should be a big priority for the developers to think about putting in the next release.
I think the "Direct Invoice" page could easily be turned into a pos interface if it had the ability to calculate change due to cash paying customers, had a way to process credit cards through authorize.net, and could generate a receipt for the customer.
I think this would be a huge step forward for FA and it is obvious by the popularity of this thread in the wish list area that I am not alone in my desire to have this functionality.

I agree with pete. Although hameed means well. Many of his suggestions will cause more problems than they solve.
If you ever have a question about how something should be calculated or how a report should be formatted, then I suggest you just do it the same way as quickbooks.
Every accountant is familiar with quickbooks and you will be best to pattern after them when it comes to standardized accounting principles and reports.

This wouldn't work for us because we have sell the same products in several states and in each state we have to charge a different sales tax amount.
I think with just a few changes to the direct invoice page you could make that into a nice POS interface.

WOW, you guys are awesome and keeping on top of the forums.
Every question or comment I have posted, has been immediately replied to.
Thanks so much for all the time and effort you are putting into this project.

So far everything has been working good ever since I deleted the .htaccess file

I set my php.ini  settings to off for both register_globals and magic_quotes.

So far so good.  Thanks for your help.

Dave