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