1 Topic by the-moog

(3 replies, posted in FA Modifications)

Hi,

I regularly order large numbers of parts, the unit price of which include fractional pennies.

I know FA can have any level of precision for currency, but any more than two does not make sense as I can't actually receive or pay in frational pennies.

The problem comes with order lines, e.g.

I order 200 widgets at 12.33 pence each

Currently this would result in a purchase order line total of £24.00

But the supplier is expecting to get paid £24.66 for this invoice line, this shortfall ripples though the system.

I have made some small changes that introduces a new control, prefixed unit_price_.  This means that we can have a new preference unit_price_fraction (I have fixed this value in my code to because I have not worked out how to modify the preferences module)

Could this modification (done properly) get into the main code?  Do others have this problem?

I can send a patch file if anybody wants to try it out.

Cheers,
Jason.

Go to forum: FA Modifications

2 Topic by the-moog

(8 replies, posted in Report Bugs here)

I think there is a problem with the symantics of purchase tax.

The problem is that items have a tax type, this is OK, but means that you can then only purchase that item from a certain supplier as other suppliers may have a different tax arrangement as they may be in a different state or country.

If the vendors tax group setting is not the same as the items tax type setting then the tax valud on an invoice is set to zero.  It should either be the vendors or the items or ideally a choice of either.

A possible minimal change would be thus:
e.g.  If, for a given item the tax type <> the tax group, then a radio button or combo box allows selection of tax type for each item on the invoice.   The tax value is then an itemised sum of each tax type.

I have reported this in the notes of bug#155 as I think the problem is related.

Go to forum: Report Bugs here

3 Reply by the-moog

(24 replies, posted in Accounts Payable)

Sounds good,

From what you have shown me I think FA does suite our purposes; that of a simple, web based mySQL double entry accounts package.   I have taken the plunge and started entering cleanly this financial year.  We are going to have to be creative with mapping our (currently excel based) accounts to the way FA does things, but from our research so far this seems to be true for any package.

Well done with what you have achieved so far and keep up the good work.  I'm no PHP programmer, but I'd be happy to do what I can to help, if only beta test.

What is the timeline for 2.2?

I looked on the sourceforge CVS and I don't see a branch for the 2.2 development, is it available?

Go to forum: Accounts Payable

4 Reply by the-moog

(24 replies, posted in Accounts Payable)

I'm starting to understand how it should be used now.

I was thinking of payments rather than invoices, one payment against a montly account statement covers many invoices, I was expecting to be able to enter all the invoices from a statement in one go, not one at a time.

OK, I can live with that.

But, as far as I can see, the problem of tax in the line is still there, at least for me.

If I simply state that 15% of a given supplier invoice total is tax I stand a good chance of being wrong as each line item in the invoice is taxed separately so the calculation based purely on the total will be incorrect. Now to be honest I rarely order zero or reduced vat items (e.g. food and books are a classic example, but the list is huge) but I'm sure others must face the same problem?

Go to forum: Accounts Payable

5 Reply by the-moog

(24 replies, posted in Accounts Payable)

Thanks for the reponse, Joe.

I initially thought FA was useless for my purposes, then I discovered the Quick entry method on the supplier invoice which *only* appears if you set up a quick entry correctly (IMO this should not be hidden but inactive somehow). Anyway, once again FA is a possible candidate.

I've looked at GNUCash, FrontAccounting and PhreeBooks and FA seems to be the simplest and best thought out, even if its UI is a little clunky.

(phreebooks seems to be only useful if you have exactly the same setup as the author, are in the USA and are a genius at php - I am none of these)

How difficult would it be to allow the quick entry to have the following additions:
1: Allow the line memo field to be editable?
2: Allow the VAT to be calculated per line

I think what I am asking for is a seperate popup form that allow line editing, which then populates the supplier invoice GL entries.

e.g. I want to enter paid invoices for a supplier (RS components in this case) I have an account with them so one payment covers a number of invoices and is spread across multiple projects.  My payment needs to be broken down line by line for each past supplier invoice, each project (dimension), and each tax type.
If the above two changes were made, then this would be possible.

For example, one payment to RS might look like:
Account:  Books and media
Dimension: Project X
Price: £34.99
Unit: Each
QTY: 1
Memo: Invoice 12345
VAT: none
Total: £34.99
---
Account:  Stock Components
Dimension: Project Y
Price: £0.02
Unit: Each
QTY: 100
Memo: Invoice 12346
VAT: 15%
Total: £2.30

Payment (net):36.99
Accumulated VAT:0.30
Payment total:37.29

I'm a reasonablly good programmer and fancy a crack at this, but have had little experience with PHP (I'm really an electronics engineer and use C/C++, python and assembler) and would need some pointers which bits of the code to dig into.

Looking at the database, it seems I only need to create a number of  supp_invoice_items records and a single supp_trans record, is this correct?

If I were to put my faith into FA, how likely is it that later changes to the database could mess up any past entries entered manually in the way you suggest.


Thanks,
Jason

Go to forum: Accounts Payable

6 Reply by the-moog

(12 replies, posted in Installation)

This is not a problem with FA, but with your web server, the clue is in the error.

Take a look at your server error logs.  You do not say if you are using a hosted service, what webserver you are using or if you can log at a console as root?

I use apache2 on ubuntu server (running on a VirtualBox VM) so I can answer for that.

500 means that the server engine encountered an error when processing the repsonse, this could be php failing to start or a permissions problem (or probably one of 1000 other things that could be wrong)

In ubuntu, the error logs are in /var/log/apache2/.....

Take a look at error.log and access.log and try and match up the times whith you request.

A common error is that the webserver user (the userid of the process running the webserver and not yourself) does not have permissions over the folder running the script.

The script folder and its contents should be in the group www-data or (rather dangerously) group others.  And have permissions 0774.  Folders should have the x flag for user and group.  There is no need for x flag for php files as they are not being run from the console.

I've never used ISPconfig (looking at it is seems a bit heavy for a standalone server) so I can't comment on what it has done.
If you can still make sense of your apache2 configuration (in /etc/apache2/....) then you should see lines enabling php5 such these distributed amonst various files:
...
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml .php3
DirectoryIndex index.html index.cgi index.pl index.php index.xhtml index.htm
php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off
php_flag track_vars On
php_flag register_globals Off
php_value include_path .
...

Without more info I can't waffle on much more......

j.

Go to forum: Installation

7 Reply by the-moog

(24 replies, posted in Accounts Payable)

Hi,

I think am having the same problem.

I buy a lot of external services, many on monthly repeat orders.  Setting up Items, then PO's for those items, having them 'delivered' and then creating a supplier invoice every month for every service would be a real pain.

If I enter the supplier invoice directly and use GL entries, then I also get a VAT value of 0.00.

How do I create a supplier invoice that includes VAT without going through the above chain?

Also, (currently for me less of a problem) I think the symantics with VAT are wrong.  In the UK we have several VAT rates; a supplier may supply items with different VAT rates on one invoice so the VAT has to be calculated per line item and summed.

Go to forum: Accounts Payable